Hikes to the glaciers of Switzerland

Hikes to the most beautiful Swiss glaciers: the Aletsch, the Morteratsch from the Capanna Boval, the Forno and the Glacier d'Orny.

Switzerland holds the largest glaciers in the Alps, and some of them can be approached on a day hike without mountaineering equipment, staying on the trail the whole time.

The most famous is the Aletsch, the largest in the Alps, which we rated 10; the others are the Morteratsch seen from the Capanna Boval, the Forno Glacier at the head of its valley above Maloja and the Glacier d'Orny in the Mont Blanc massif.

Swiss glaciers by the numbers

Swiss glaciers are shrinking at a pace the Swiss Academy of Sciences has called catastrophic: according to the GLAMOS monitoring network, they lost around 6% of their volume in 2022 and a further 4% in 2023, which is 10% in only two years. On the Great Aletsch Glacier, at Konkordiaplatz, the ice thinned by 6.3 metres in 2022 and 4.7 metres in 2023, against an average of about 2.5 metres a year between 1950 and 1980. The Aletsch is the heart of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch site, inscribed in 2001 as the first natural World Heritage Site in the Alps, and in the Morteratsch valley the glacier trail from the station of the same name uses signposts to mark where the snout reached in past years.

Seeing a glacier up close does not mean walking on it. Without a rope, equipment and someone who knows how to use them, the glacier surface is best left to mountaineers, because crevasses can be hidden by snow bridges even in high summer, and the snout should be viewed from a distance, because blocks of ice can break off at any moment and ice caves can collapse without warning. The ground recently freed from the ice, among moraines and polished rock, is unstable too, and paths may be moved from one year to the next: always follow the most recent waymarking, even when the line on the map says otherwise.