Aletsch glacier, labelled as ‘the greatest glacier of alps’, is actually beyond its brand of greatness – it is literally the largest glacier of the European Alps – source of many rivers feeding to the European continent. Starting from Riederalp, you have a good view of the small villages placed like Lego all over the patches of the greenery of mountains.

The first emotion which strikes you as any other mountain is the scale of the entire landscape which stands in front of you, quite proudly. Personally, it has been very difficult for me to understand that a 3 km, which is 3000 m, is standing vertically in front of you. And then there are these tiny sheep herds grazing on it – quite comfortably, very zen, very chilled. How do you compare these two?

Even before you are over the emotion of this scale paradox, you are thrown with the number of colors – in the vegetation – among the rocks, among the yellow, red, blue hiking marks – among the fluorescent colors of all the hiking boots, coats and fancy sunglasses. The colors come in forms of humans too – some people are extremely happy and having the happiest day because come-on, they are in mountains. Others are just fine, because it’s a daily affair - they were conceived in mountains, for starters. Few are just angry because it’s the uphill or the downhill or they have a lousy hiking partner or only one Mercedes back at their homes, and crying their hearts and sweat out. And yeah, the pissed ones are the most colorful folks.

Aletsch glacier has 27 effing billion tons of ice, and it is 23 km in length. I am going to let you think about these numbers for a while. It has these huge cracks and a gushing river flowing under it, looking at which runs a shiver to your core. But the scale paradox again messes up a bit here, because looking from a height, it looks just like any other snowy-icy patch placed in a valley. Meh. But again, go to the first line of paragraph and read those numbers –“If the Aletsch Glacier were totally melted, it would produce enough water for every person on Earth to have a litre of water per day for 4½ years”. Not meh, eh?

The mountain pass around this huge chunk of ice is quite an exercise on your toes, knees and calves – with changing ascents and descents. The path was insanely pleasant experience irrespective of it though, because it started from beautiful vast stretches of mountain grassland and then ended up in very rocky patches with no scope for a single grass. At the top of our path, there were just rocks placed over one another, mostly formed due to constant snow and ice-based erosion. Basically, a very tall pile of pebbles and small stones also qualify as mountains in these regions.

Now comes an actual emotionally sad part: the glaciers have been melting, surprise surprise – because we are fucking the planet – surprise surprise. And this is not even half of the sad part at all – it is a fact, the sad part is that the mountain hiking passes are slowly closing and even going much away from the glaciers because the mountain is literally cracking up. As the glacier melts or let’s say retreat with a much faster speed than expected, the mountains start shifting downwards with much faster erosion and a loss of foundation ‘land’. This has cracked up the mountains and eaten up the hiking paths completely. This is something we realized when we saw many closed paths. Also, we felt like stuck in matrix - we ended up being 2 hrs from the hut, even after walking an hour from the first post which mentioned we were 2 hrs away from the hut.

Why do I chose to talk about this Aletsch trip specifically when there are even higher peaks I have been to? So this was my first ever hike in mountains which was planned to be longer than a day, including a stay. And what you get to see in this is not just the spatial x-y-z axis of the mountain, but the 4th dimension – changing time (‘t’ axis) in mountains. For us, the view of the glaciers remained quite pleasant and not at all scary – because we remained there in a good amount of daylight. It started becoming quite windy and cold as we approached our first destination at the Marjelensee hut. By the time we were ready for dinner, the dusk had approached and the darker shades of blue and golden streaks of red were visible. The stars were still shy. By the time we were done with dinner, it was pitch dark and the first thing we noticed as we got out of the hut was the mega(aaa) Ursa Major right over the mountain. We made unsuccessful attempts to find the Orion, but maybe wine had done it’s job and it remained a mystery if Orion was visible in Vallais Alps.

Like my last blog, I am aware I end up talking again a lot on the time-scale revelation which is induced by the nature’s mere presence and its vastness. But there was one more thing which stood out in this trip, which I think remains primarily human (and natural) – the human company you end up being with in this landscape. This time I was able to share my time with a wonderful friend and kudos to her that I ended up having feeling of extreme anger to extreme peace in few minutes – something which might be slightly induced by the tiredness from the hike as well - but mostly because of just an honest company.

So the biggest realization from this unique hike experience was quite simple, irrespective of where you are at – in mountains hiking, in city driving, in a desert lost (not suggesting), you remain a human at the end of the day – filled with all those experiences and definitely amazing memories, but mostly those emotions which last longer, and your efforts might go in maximizing those which makes you feel most at comfort (or at ‘home’) . But moreover, if we are human enough, it is important that we let everyone have these beautiful experiences – especially our next generations – and that means a ‘sacrifice’ at our own parts to be more responsible. The melting glacier and moving mountains, moved me deeply and made us realize that we are already late for not just this beautiful humanity but the entire nature – so lets take a step back, think and then, (re)start.