![]() The dusk and dawn light shows were incredible, and I filled a memory card with images of alpenglow and drama, but even as I was capturing these images I could hear the boom of collapsing seracs as erosion continued to happen right before my eyes. I’d packed my bivvy gear along with my camera and tripod, and was looking forward to spending the night right on the summit – despite a frisson of anxiety that a thunderstorm would roll in from Italy and force a hasty and dangerous retreat. Acres of rubble gleamed like bleached bone in the heat of the afternoon sun. Monte Rosa’s ice-draped west flank looked a lot more bare than it had been 10 years before. In the vast basin of the Gorner Glacier far beneath, I saw seracs (ice towers) collapsing, and meltwater rushing through channels. On my 2007 ascent with my brother James, we’d walked on snow much of the way along the ridge now all was rock except for a final, anaemic strip of glacier just beneath the summit. I climbed Stockhorn (3,520m), the highest point of the long, rocky ridge extending east from the Riffelhorn with unmatched views of all Zermatt’s 4,000m peaks. Views that had gleamed white in 2007 looked dirty now, blackened by rockfall. Mostly, though, I noticed how depleted and skeletal the glaciers looked, the crumbling and eroded banks spilling debris onto the ice below. This trip was all about revisiting old haunts with a photographer’s eye I found myself noticing details I’d never seen before, such as how difficult it is to compose an image of the mountains at the head of the valley without ski infrastructure intruding in the frame. It was interesting to see how my perspective had changed. Erosion gnawing at the Matterhorn’s roots © Alex Roddie When I returned to Zermatt in September 2017 and revisited some of the climbs I’d done 10 years before, I was shocked at what I found. ![]() On an intellectual level, I knew that climate change was affecting the Alps, that glaciers were in retreat, but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself to drive the point home. The same can be said of the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, or even Iceland.īut it was only when I returned to the same spot a decade later, in 2017, that I comprehended the true scale of this reality gap in the Alps. ![]() Humanity’s presence is everywhere – even if landscape photography rarely embraces that presence to its full extent. Switzerland is a developed country, not a wilderness. The reality I saw was quite different, and yet perhaps no different to any other mountain landscape. ![]() A quaint wooden chalet or cobbled street leading the eye over the rooftops and back into the mountains. Almost every image I’d seen published of the Swiss Alps portrayed pristine, beautiful desolation – or, at most, a minimal human footprint on the land. But I remember feeling puzzled at the disconnect between reality and my expectations. I wasn’t a photographer then – I came to the mountains as a climber, a passion that slowly morphed into a love of landscape and mountain photography. But how accurate is that depiction of an unspoiled natural mountain environment? And as photographers, is it our duty to tell the full, uncensored truth? The Matterhorn is a dominant visual motif in popular Alpine imagery. Chances are, you’re visualising a gorgeous scene of the Matterhorn, perhaps rising above a meadow of wild flowers, maybe reflected in the still waters of a pool at dawn. Think of an image depicting the Swiss Alps. This feature was first published in On Landscape, October 2017 As outdoor writers and photographers, it’s time for us to be honest about the realities of environmental destruction – and how these realities affect the mountain landscapes we love.
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