Revealing Journey

This afternoon Piper and I walked up the stunningly beautiful Morterasch Valley with the spectacular Morterasch Glacier at its head. One of the many intersting features of this valley are the series of posts which record the extent of the glacier down the valley. The first dated 1860 is situated just above the hotel and mountain railway station and is kilometers from the snout of the glacier and on they go at roughly decade intervals. I am currently reading for the nth time Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage by the famous Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl who visited the area in 1950; I climbed my first Alpine route in 1968 and at each of these respective points we would be wearing crampons and carrying an ice axe, now Piper and I wandered along a wide path in trainers (well I was). On we went for a few more kilometers as the posts became more and more frequent as the retreat of the glacier accelerated. We stopped at the end of the trail which recorded 2010, which was a good 500 meters from the snout. As an old impact of man on global warming cynic, the walk was a Damoclean revelation! Another intersting feature was just how quickly trees, bushes and grasses have colonised the moraines.