Aletsch Glacier

The weather this past weekend was decent. It was a beautiful Saturday while I worked in the lab ( protein not biotinylated but I digress), Sunday had a bit of rain but sunny enough that I took the train to see the Aletsch glacier. As this was fairly last minute, I went by myself. I'm still jetlagged from Canada so getting up at 6:30am was pretty rough...  However, I'd been wanting to see the Atlesch glacier for some time, it's the longest glacier in Europe and has two medial moraines! I like glaciers, and things that cover geologic time.

First I took the train and cablecar to Fiescheralp and went right to the top to see this UNESCO world heritage site from the UNESCO world heritage viewing platform. I wouldn't recommend it in the future. Actually, for this photo I left the 'exit the gondola and view' viewing platform and climbed the closest peak. Wet rocks = not exactly safe going but I digress. There you see it, me and two medial moraines!

This is the glacier that grew and grew and dug out Lake Geneve in previous glacial ages.

Anyway, the advantage of the rain meant fantastic rainbow over the glacier.

After climbing down from the peak, I continued to climb down almost all the way back to Fiescheralp so that I could go around the peak and walk close to the glacier. In the future I would avoid going all the way up to the platform since the glacier is more impressive from beside it.

On my way to the glacier however, there were these unusual fuzzy plants.

There were also sheep everywhere at this height. Lower down were cows and even at this height there were cow paddies. The alpine meadows here in Switzerland are less impressive than BC because of all the grazing.

Up close the glacier looked fantastic. Truly a giant river of ice.

While walking along the trail I saw this marker, I'm assuming it's used in research about the flow of the glacier or something.

More sheep, they were on the narrow trail and you had to walk around them as you were walking.

Here you can see the end of the glacier, and you can see how much it has receded over the years.

At the end of the glacier trek I climbed up on the ridge and through more alpine meadows. Here there were small pools and with the sun shining it was very pretty.