It was around 2pm when we arrived in Mount Cook village. The weather had been cloudy all day as we had been driving north. A few kilometres from the village the clouds parted and the sun was out and all the mountains were visible. We had to decide quickly where we were going to walk. We wanted to get to a nice location nearer to the sunset for some photographs. We decided that we’d stay in Ball Shelter which is on the West side of the Tasman Glacier and just east of the highest mountain in New Zealand (Mount Cook). The path to Ball Shelter follows the glacier and offers some pretty amazing views over it.
I was quite surprised to read in the New Zealand Lonely Planet the following paragraph:

“The Tasman Glacier is a predictably spectacular sweep of ice, but further down it's downright ugly. Normally as a glacier retreats it melts back up the mountain, but the Tasman is unusual because its last few kilometres are almost horizontal. In recent decades it has melted from the top down, exposing a jumble of stones, rocks and boulders and forming a lake. In other words, in its 'ablation zone' (where it melts), the Tasman is covered in a solid mass of debris, which slows down its melting rate and makes it unsightly.”

For me it was really impressive, you can clearly see how the Glacier is cutting away at the mountains and what an unstoppable force it is.