An Hour Walk to Reach Something That Used to Be at the Station

July 12, 2026

Off the Bernina train and up the valley to the Morteratsch glacier, which has been walking backwards for a hundred and seventy years. Bare moraine, flowers moving in behind it, and two mules on the way home.

The train was the point of the day and I have already told you about the train. This is what we got off it for.

Looking up a wide valley of bare grey rock and boulders towards a glacier tongue and snow covered peaks under a deep blue sky, with no vegetation anywhere on the valley floor — Everything grey in that photograph was under ice within living memory.

An hour up the valley floor, flat the whole way, to the tongue of the Morteratsch glacier. And the walk is the exhibit.

When the Bernina railway opened at the start of last century the ice came down to within a few hundred metres of the station. It is about two and a half kilometres back up the hill now. There are panels along the path telling you where it reached in which year, so you spend the entire hour walking through a place that used to be solid.

What that leaves behind is the grey in this photograph. Not soil. Ground up rock, dumped where the ice let go of it, in every size from dust to house. Nothing has had time to grow on most of it.

I have never stood in a landscape with so little colour in it and I could not stop photographing it. Everything I have shot on this trip has been warm. Ochre render, terracotta, gold leaf, red awnings. This is one grey, one white, one blue, and it is the most severe thing I have seen since I left home.

A clump of small alpine wildflowers in pink, yellow and white growing out of a crack in bare grey glacial rock and gravel — First tenants. Pink, yellow, white, on a pile of rubble the ice left last week in geological terms.

Except it is not quite one grey, because things are moving in. Down in the cracks, small hard flowers, pink and yellow and white, holding on with almost nothing under them.

Everything about that clump is the same argument at a different size. Somewhere on that slope is a line where the rock has been bare long enough for a seed to hold, and above it there is nothing, and it is creeping up the valley behind the ice at whatever speed a flower can manage.

I sat down beside them for a while. You do not often get to see a thing beginning.

Seventeen seconds of walking back down. Lupins to the knee and the snow still up there. Open full size

And then you turn round and walk back down, and about twenty minutes later this is what the same valley looks like.

Larches, a sand path, and lupins to the knee on both sides of it, purple all the way to the trees, with the white stuff still sitting up on the skyline. Give the moraine a few hundred years and that is what it turns into.

Same valley. Same walk. One end is a quarry and the other end is a garden, and the only difference between them is how long the ice has been gone.

Two mules, one black and one grey, resting on a steep green alpine hillside among long grass and wildflowers, with conifers and a stone wall above them — These two have the best office in Switzerland and they know it.

Last thing, from the train window on the way back down. Two mules parked on a slope so steep I do not understand how either of them is still on it, one black, one grey, both completely at ease.

I got about four seconds. Long enough to notice that the black one has no edges at all in that light and the grey one is nothing but edges. Two animals, same field, same sun, and you would draw them with completely different tools.