Gasterntal and Lotschepass
So, yes, that day in the Alps.
Despite their nearness, it’s years since I’ve been up an Alp. I’m not a mountain person: I’m given to wandering rather than climbing, and I wander in mountains only for their beauty and solitude. I prefer forests and shorelines because they are as rich in beauty and more so in life, but unfortunately they usually also have people.
You take what you can get.
I wanted to be in Kandersteg for dawn, and it’s two and a half hours from home. So I was up early, and arrived as the grey daylight was spreading over the mountain valleys, dripping uneasily with dew. Unfortunately I still had to get myself a pair of gloves, and it was an hour before a suitable shop opened. “You are probably our last visitor of the year,” said one of the two delightful old Swiss women who ran the place, and off I went towards the clouds.
I had a tentative plan: find my up the narrow gorge into the Gastern valley, which someone at work had told me about-a whole wide valley, almost lost from below, with a path leading from it up and out, over the Lotsche glacier and down into Lotschetal. I didn’t know if I’d do the whole route-if terrain or weather or route-finding or distance or simple caution would make me turn back, but everything turned out to be easy-hard work but not exhausting, and the route was well-marked with paint and even (pfaugh!) signposts.
Gasterntal was indeed wide and beautiful, with birch forests in its plain and pines climbing the scree-slopes, and a shallow river meandering through it, softly grey with glacier silt. But still there were signs of people: a small hotel, of all things, in the woods at its lower end, and a tiny farm tucked up nearer the valley’s end, all alive with the distinctive sound of cow-bells. Bernese cow-bells are attractively smaller and tinklier than their lugubrious Genevois counterparts, which might be termed cow-knells.
Nowhere else in Europe has such huge riven valleys as the Alps-a thousand metres of crags, plunging all but sheer to the sweeping scree-slopes in the valley bottoms; and nowhere but the Alps do you get such a dizzying sense of sheer scale across the great gulfs of air. Even that scale suddenly jumps out another order of magnitude when, by chance, you see a mere human creeping along a distant path or by the snout of a glacier. It’s good for us, once in a while to be humbled by awareness of our own scale.
We animals are much smaller than mountains.
Presently I turned aside onto the path that leads up onto the Lotsche glacier. The Lotsche glacier is stable, but if you continue along the Gasterntal you find yourself on a big glacier, many miles long. Maybe I’ll go there sometime, but not today: big glaciers are an easy place for a lone man to die.
After climbing a few hundred points through the russet-gold beauty of the autumn birch forest, I sat down in the path to cut up some of the bread and cheese and ham I’d brought to eat on the trail. Along came-drat!-another pair of walkers, young and lithe and Swiss, who were as pleasantly sociable as I was not, and stopped to talk until I drove them onwards with obtrusive silence. I overtook them a little while later, exchanged a few pleasantries, and saw them no more.
Another farm-just a hut, really, for a herdsman to watch the herds on the high pastures in summer-and then I was climbing through the sere and battered vegetation of high-altitude grassland. At last I found my rhythm and began to climb strongly, panting in time with my stride and sweating profusely in the strong sun and still sheltered air. Very soon after that, at around seven thousand feet, the thinner air began to tell and I started having to stop to pant for breath.
The snout of the Lotsche glacier lies at around seven and a half thousand feet. The glacier itself looks like nothing so much as a stone field, as the ice is almost completely covered by a thin layer of shale and grit. I guess this means the glacier is retreating, as the upper surface melts and deposits its stones faster than the ice builds up again. On warm days, such as this, water pours in runnels across its surface: Alpine glacial melting, going on right before your eyes. I gingerly walked across its half-mile width and up the moraine on the other side, where I met an unfathomably over-fit man running the other way with his T-shirt soaked in sweat, barely panting even in the thinner mountain air. He trotted on across the rocky terrain with barely a word. I went on, humbled.
Right up in the Lotschepass I found the little hut they have there, where you can buy something to eat and even bunk down for the night if you’re planning something arduous the next day. They had a dear little dog, who came and watched me ardently as I sliced into more of my bread and ham; and, more surprisingly, they had a black pig who wandered tranquilly around the barren rocky terrain, apparently looking for acorns that it would never find there.
After twenty minutes or so I bought an extra bottle of drink from the hut warden and went peacably on my way. From there it was all downhill, reprising the changes of terrain I’d followed on my way up: barren rock, weathered grass, birches, pines, and finally the partly-wooded farmland of the valley floor as I came down to the village of Ferden. As I approached the village a bus pulled out of it and I rather cursed my luck, but then another bus appeared going the other way. I never did work out what schedule it was supposed to be on, but for two francs it took me to the train station and onwards I went to civilisation.
Despite their nearness, it’s years since I’ve been up an Alp. I’m not a mountain person: I’m given to wandering rather than climbing, and I wander in mountains only for their beauty and solitude. I prefer forests and shorelines because they are as rich in beauty and more so in life, but unfortunately they usually also have people.
You take what you can get.
I wanted to be in Kandersteg for dawn, and it’s two and a half hours from home. So I was up early, and arrived as the grey daylight was spreading over the mountain valleys, dripping uneasily with dew. Unfortunately I still had to get myself a pair of gloves, and it was an hour before a suitable shop opened. “You are probably our last visitor of the year,” said one of the two delightful old Swiss women who ran the place, and off I went towards the clouds.
I had a tentative plan: find my up the narrow gorge into the Gastern valley, which someone at work had told me about-a whole wide valley, almost lost from below, with a path leading from it up and out, over the Lotsche glacier and down into Lotschetal. I didn’t know if I’d do the whole route-if terrain or weather or route-finding or distance or simple caution would make me turn back, but everything turned out to be easy-hard work but not exhausting, and the route was well-marked with paint and even (pfaugh!) signposts.
Gasterntal was indeed wide and beautiful, with birch forests in its plain and pines climbing the scree-slopes, and a shallow river meandering through it, softly grey with glacier silt. But still there were signs of people: a small hotel, of all things, in the woods at its lower end, and a tiny farm tucked up nearer the valley’s end, all alive with the distinctive sound of cow-bells. Bernese cow-bells are attractively smaller and tinklier than their lugubrious Genevois counterparts, which might be termed cow-knells.
Nowhere else in Europe has such huge riven valleys as the Alps-a thousand metres of crags, plunging all but sheer to the sweeping scree-slopes in the valley bottoms; and nowhere but the Alps do you get such a dizzying sense of sheer scale across the great gulfs of air. Even that scale suddenly jumps out another order of magnitude when, by chance, you see a mere human creeping along a distant path or by the snout of a glacier. It’s good for us, once in a while to be humbled by awareness of our own scale.
We animals are much smaller than mountains.
Presently I turned aside onto the path that leads up onto the Lotsche glacier. The Lotsche glacier is stable, but if you continue along the Gasterntal you find yourself on a big glacier, many miles long. Maybe I’ll go there sometime, but not today: big glaciers are an easy place for a lone man to die.
After climbing a few hundred points through the russet-gold beauty of the autumn birch forest, I sat down in the path to cut up some of the bread and cheese and ham I’d brought to eat on the trail. Along came-drat!-another pair of walkers, young and lithe and Swiss, who were as pleasantly sociable as I was not, and stopped to talk until I drove them onwards with obtrusive silence. I overtook them a little while later, exchanged a few pleasantries, and saw them no more.
Another farm-just a hut, really, for a herdsman to watch the herds on the high pastures in summer-and then I was climbing through the sere and battered vegetation of high-altitude grassland. At last I found my rhythm and began to climb strongly, panting in time with my stride and sweating profusely in the strong sun and still sheltered air. Very soon after that, at around seven thousand feet, the thinner air began to tell and I started having to stop to pant for breath.
The snout of the Lotsche glacier lies at around seven and a half thousand feet. The glacier itself looks like nothing so much as a stone field, as the ice is almost completely covered by a thin layer of shale and grit. I guess this means the glacier is retreating, as the upper surface melts and deposits its stones faster than the ice builds up again. On warm days, such as this, water pours in runnels across its surface: Alpine glacial melting, going on right before your eyes. I gingerly walked across its half-mile width and up the moraine on the other side, where I met an unfathomably over-fit man running the other way with his T-shirt soaked in sweat, barely panting even in the thinner mountain air. He trotted on across the rocky terrain with barely a word. I went on, humbled.
Right up in the Lotschepass I found the little hut they have there, where you can buy something to eat and even bunk down for the night if you’re planning something arduous the next day. They had a dear little dog, who came and watched me ardently as I sliced into more of my bread and ham; and, more surprisingly, they had a black pig who wandered tranquilly around the barren rocky terrain, apparently looking for acorns that it would never find there.
After twenty minutes or so I bought an extra bottle of drink from the hut warden and went peacably on my way. From there it was all downhill, reprising the changes of terrain I’d followed on my way up: barren rock, weathered grass, birches, pines, and finally the partly-wooded farmland of the valley floor as I came down to the village of Ferden. As I approached the village a bus pulled out of it and I rather cursed my luck, but then another bus appeared going the other way. I never did work out what schedule it was supposed to be on, but for two francs it took me to the train station and onwards I went to civilisation.