An encounter with a glacier

We’re spending a few days in the Saas valley.

It’s great when your work is the internet, as the whole world is your office. Sometimes the view out your window is a brick wall.

Sometimes it looks like this:

In between stints of work, I’ve gotten out to explore a little. We went up to Kreuzboden and Hohsaas for a walk around. There’s a wee lake up there, with a great view and a wooden raft on which you can pull yourself across the water. 

In the afternoon, we went further up the Saas valley to Sass-Fee, and took a gondola (Gondelbahn) and cable car (Luftseilbahn) up to Längfluh. I hadn’t met a glacier before, but up here, the Feegletscher was too close to ignore. 

If you listen to it for a bit you can hear it creaking and cracking as it inexorably works its way down the valley. We walked up from the Luftseilbahn station to the snow-line, and got to a point where we could walk out onto the glacier. It’s a weird experience; it has a depth to it and is crossed with little streams of glacier-melt. The surface is littered with stones and grit, which seem to be suspended somehow.

Walking on the glacier at this time of year is a little safer, since, without any decent snow cover, you can spot all the cracks and crevasses. This one was wide enough that I wasn’t game enough to jump across it (in running shoes):

Toby, and later Noah, ventured out with me – it’s really quite an awe-inspiring experience.

So after 24,000-odd steps today, it’s back to work tomorrow. If I’m not too distracted by the view from my ‘office’.