Glacier Dreams

Ten years ago, I read about a trail hidden between the Swiss Jungfrau and the Bernese Oberland. This runnable trail is near the largest glacier in the Alps, the Altesch Glacier. I read that this mass of ice was so vast and deep that if it melted, it could provide every person on Earth with a litre of water for three and a half years.

The article talked of the glacier's adoption into the UNESCO list, but it was the image that drew me in. Beside the text was a photo of the ice field, shot through the frame of a wooden window. Something struck me about the image. Here, besides words of possibility, of adventure, was this frame, and within it, something so alive, yet seemingly still. Just like that, the window became a portal to a dream.

On the morning of the run, we took the cable car from the village of Reideralp. This relatively unknown village that seemed to be inhabited only by yogis in loud leggings and overpriced supermarkets was our starting point. We chose to take the cable car in the knowledge that we had 21km to run, and the weather had proved to be unseasonably hot. With way too much expectation and a mounting fear that I would be disappointed, we left the metal steps of the lift station and the noisy human world behind and headed over the ridge. Within minutes, this place I longed to see revealed itself.

I had seen many pictures of the glacier, but I still was not ready for the expanse of space or the length of the corridor of ice that runs from right to left; I was silenced. The place is immediately affecting. I felt small, as if I was a tiny being on the icy axis of life: one way, the past, and the other, the future. I saw myself as nothing more than a dot in the ebbs and flows of life.

The path I had come here to run was edged in the rock and ran parallel to the ice. This wasn't a journey across the glacier but a trail along, like a journey back in time. We stopped often to capture moments, to log thoughts and memories. We ran past the famous Valais black-nosed sheep, and at some point, our stride was broken by a tiny stoat in hot pursuit of a bird—a collision of lives. We watched for ten minutes, maybe longer, until his black and white pipe-cleaner tail disappeared into the rocky distance.

We arrived at a path junction and chose to descend to the edge of the ice field. As we did, the seemingly flat ice morphed into something the height of a street, with cracks and crevasses as wide as a road. I pushed my hot face against the ice and looked into the water-cut mouth. The exterior was not white, not pure in the way we may imagine ice and not pristine in the way we perceive wildness; it was a dirty, earth-stained, a kind of dishcloth grey, with the texture of smashed glass. Where the water flowed in, only a meter or so below the rough beauty of the exterior, lay a cavern of polished walls and aquamarine light; it held an atmosphere of otherworldliness and uncommon serenity, like a secret world. I wondered then how many other secrets this glacier hid.

I stepped back, and for the first time, I felt cold air prickle my skin; I felt coolness tumbling from the belly of the ice, I shivered. Is it possible this glacier is breathing?

At first, I hear only the sounds of water on ice and the skin of rock; then, from below, comes fizzing and popping. It is said that glaciers are silent at night; they wake with the sun and yawn and stretch into the day. Our moment with this beauty is punctuated by the movement of air from within. Is it possible this glacier is speaking?

I sat and wondered why I didn't come before. As I watched sunrises from some other mountain, I was often reminded of the window and the glacier that was busy leaning into a kind of timefulness, but still, I didn't come. The path was always here; from it, I can see the other summits I have travelled to in those years. It was like I had somehow circled this point, savoured the moment and allowed all my hope to brim. I now know that I was waiting not for the decade, the year, or the month but for when the time felt right, for the moment when I could understand the meaning.