Centuries ago locals in Switzerland told stories of devils, demons, and souls wandering the cold night in search of rest. The Aletsch Glacier always generated these stories. Occasionally a brave soul would venture out to the glacier. If they didn’t return, everyone knew why. Their soul had joined the others who wandered the glacier at night — lost and hopeless.
The local legends persisted over the years. And the glacier continued to swallow up the many of the souls who dared explore it.
In 1926, three brothers set out to explore the Eggishorn and the Aletsch. Johann, Cletus, and Fidelis Ebener stopped at a hut located near the glacier for a night. The next morning they left to explore the area, but found themselves caught up in a terrible storm. It forced them to return to the hut for safety. The next day they set out once more. This time, no one heard from the brothers again. They vanished like so many before.
That is, until 2012. That’s when the glacier revealed three of its ghosts. Frozen for nearly 90 years, the glacier receded enough to free the brothers.
Johann, Cletus, and Fidelis Ebener, who disappeared in 1926.
The Ebener’s story is familiar to locals. However, today’s stories aren’t shrouded in the mysteries and myths of yesterday. There are no demons and wandering souls. Today’s stories are told in the context of a glacier that is receding. Rapidly in the past 150 years. Slowly, it reveals the bodies of long lost hikers, explorers, and locals.
The Great Aletsch Glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps and is visible from space. It’s also a retreating glacier. To add some perspective, the Konkordia Hut is a mountain hut built for shelter near the glacier. The hut was constructed in 1877 and was positioned 164 feet above the glacier. Today, it sits 492 feet above the glacier.
The retreating is now revealing the ghosts of the Aletsch Glacier’s past.
A few years after the Ebener brothers disappeared, the glacier enticed another traveler. The beauty of its surrounding mountain landscape and the glacier itself did what it has for centuries. It inspired, it awed, and it left them struggling to find the words to describe its majesty. They spent the afternoon watching the fog and imagining the day to day lives of locals far below.
At some point, they took a pencil and postcard and began to write. To try to explain the sight was impossible. But, they tried.
Do not make the mistake of thinking this is a lake picture. It is, but an ocean of fog very similar to the one I have looked on with rapture all afternoon. Far below the surface of this fog the inhabitants of Switzerland are buying and selling, prodding their oxen before them; passing each other with their “grüß gott”* and wishing that the abominable fog above them would rise. Every valley about us was today almost full of the rolling billows, whose surface rose higher and higher towards evening until some valleys filled to the brim and the buoyant liquid began rolling lazily into the valley adjacent. Far out over the low lands of Switzerland the fog lay, only here and there a white capped peak rose above the surface, looking like white islands in a boundless ocean, gorsh, it was handsome.
The back of the postcard. The writer filled the entire card in an attempt to describe the scenes found in the Swiss Alps.
Overcome with emotion, they tried every adjective possible to explain the scene. If you’ve ever seen the Swiss Alps before, you know this exercise is an impossible exercise.
German novelist Thomas Mann made an attempt in The Magic Mountain. “But if there was something roguish and fantastic about the immediate vicinity through which you laboriously made your way, the towering statues of snow-clad Alps, gazing down from the distance, awakened in you feelings of the sublime and holy.”
As they sat down with their pencil, so many descriptive words were floating around in their head. None of them seemed adequate I am sure. Feelings sublime. Feelings holy. Feelings that expressed a sense of being overwhelmed. We will never know for sure. Their identity is a mystery to us today.
It’s as if they adventured to the mountains and glacier that day in wonder. But, disappeared into its thick, frozen fog — leaving us only these words on the back of a postcard.
grüß gott is “Good day” in German.