Here's a map of our hiking route. Pontresina is (A), the Hotel Roseg is (B), the lake at the foot of the glacier (Lej Vadret) is at (C) and the Hut Coaz is (D). So now I'll explain what all those places are...
Friday after lunch we started at the Pontresina train station and hiked south up the valley. This part of the hike looked a lot like British Columbia - dry pine forests, mountains and the river...
The hike wasn't very steep and we arrived at the hotel early for dinner. This is Claire on the bridge just outside the hotel...
The scenery there was already beautiful, but it got better... The next morning, Saturday, after fortifying ourselves with a big breakfast with lots of cheese, we headed up the valley. That big ridge of gravel along the left side of the picture below was left behind by the glacier as it melted, only a few decades ago. The hotel had some old black and white photographs showing the valley filled with ice up to there - it looked very different then.
There are waterfalls down the sides of the valley, and sometimes you can see mountain goats.
A few hours up the valley, looking back down toward the hotel:
Me on one of the bridges over mountain streams:
And Claire with the mountains behind her:
After a few hours we made it up to the lake. Here's Mom and Dad with the lake in the background:
The trail continued along the lake for a while, and then turned steeply up the side of the mountain. Until that point the hike had been pretty easy, but after here it was more difficult, with scrambles over large rocks, rough footing, and a relentlessly steep climb which switchbacked upward for what seemed like hours.
After a while, the Hut Coaz (our final destination) started to be easier to see, out by the edge of the glacier. But we still had about an hour to go to get there...
We saw some marmots, but other than birds, no other wildlife:
Finally we got there! The view back down the valley was incredible, we could see all the way back to Pontresina, where we had started the afternoon before.
The view of the glacier was also incredible. It was melting in the afternoon sun, with chunks of ice sliding down the rock, loud cracking sounds, and even little avalanches of ice:
Our last picture from the top... Heading down was much easier of course. We're looking forward to doing lots more hikes like this next year! The weather has started to turn cold now, and although it's just five weeks ago that we took these pictures, many of the mountain huts will have closed by now.
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