The Aletsch Glacier
If you love glaciers or are after a Himalayan vision without having to fly to Nepal, the Aletsch Glacier (Aletschgletscher) is for you. While many other glaciers in the Alps look increasingly sickly, are covered in debris or have broken up into several tongues (like the Ghiacciaio dei Forni in Lombardy, which lost all its poetry once the 3 tongues that fed it turned into 3 separate glaciers), the Aletsch Glacier looks entirely different.
About 20km long, covering 78 sq km and in places more than 1km thick, it is the longest and largest glacier in the Alps, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001, and so imposing that even today (2022) it gives you the feeling of looking at a glacier from the Little Ice Age.
The enormous accumulation basin, enclosed by a curtain of 4000-metre peaks, gathers an outrageous amount of snow, which is then compressed and channelled into a single, relatively narrow and deeply set tongue that flows down the valley at a speed of 200 metres a year. Although it is retreating by tens of metres every year, this tongue is still a 20km serpent of ice and crevasses (better not to wait too long to visit it, all the same, since its disappearance is forecast by 2100).
As a reminder of how precious and ephemeral it is in years of extreme climate change, in 2007 an artist and photographer, Spencer Tunick, chose the Aletsch for a Greenpeace awareness campaign, having 600 naked people on the glacier pose (probably for over an hour). You are free to do the same during your visit to the Aletsch.
Fiesch cable car: Fiescheralp
The classic loop for visiting the Aletsch starts from Fiescheralp (m2212). A road goes up there but it is closed to traffic, so we have to take the Fiesch to Fiescheralp cable car (27CHF return, 13.50CHF), or one of the others that climb to this plateau. More information and webcams on the Aletsch Arena website.
From Fiescheralp we set off south-west, first on a dirt road, then on a path, climbing the grassy shoulder of the Hohbalm on our right (m2488, 1 hour). From here, within a few minutes, we get our first look at the Aletsch Glacier.
The Aletsch panoramic trail
From here, 5km of almost level walking in the company of the Aletsch colossus. As we push further east and lose height, the view becomes ever more spectacular. We then bear right into the valley that opens north of the Eggishorn and reach the Märjelensee (m2302, 1 hour), dotted with cotton grass in July. From here we can go down to the glacier and touch it, reassessing once again the proportions of this colossus of ice.
For the way back we take the Tälligrattunnel, a dead-straight 1km tunnel through the mountain that opens a short distance from the Märjelen-Gletscherstube. At first sight it looks like a pointless tunnel, the product of a local council with too much money on its hands, but it served a purpose when it was dug, as an outlet for the water of the Märjelensee, at a time when the glacier was higher and threatened to cause glacial outburst floods that would inundate the Aletsch valley.
Coming out of the tunnel feels like being teleported: the landscape, the light, the view, everything is different. With this slight daze in our heads, we return to the Fiescheralp cable car (m2212, 45 minutes) for the ride down to the valley.
The Eggishorn variant
Instead of the lower panoramic trail, you can also follow the whole ridge of the Bettmerhorn, the Bettmergrat and the Eggishorn, which is relatively easy, with a few sections protected by chains. Among other things, after the Bettmergrat there is also a short, easy via ferrata, the Eggishorn Klettersteig (grade B/C), which runs parallel to the normal path to the top station of the Eggishorn cable car. From the cable car station you can then go down towards the Tällisee, a tiny lake not even marked on the Kompass map but particularly lovely, and from there on to the Märjelen-Gletscherstube or Fiescheralp.
