The staircase that grows every year

Here is the Alpine detail I keep turning over in my head. High on the Great Aletsch Glacier, above the spot where all the tributary ice flows together, there is a small stone hut called the Konkordia Hut. When it went up in 1877 it sat only about fifty metres above the glacier, close enough that you could more or less walk off the ice and in through the door.

You cannot do that now. The Aletsch has been losing roughly a metre of thickness a year, quietly sinking away below the hut, and today the building stands something like a hundred and fifty metres above the ice. So to reach it you climb a long staircase of steel steps drilled into the rock face, first put in after a rockfall in 1965 and added to over and over in the decades since. It is a staircase that gets longer almost every summer, and not because anyone is extending it upward. The glacier is simply dropping away beneath it, leaving the hut higher and higher on the cliff, like a tide going out and never quite coming back.

I painted it in watercolour and ink, the pale river of ice curving away below. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  The Aletsch Glacier, Swiss Alps · Travel Poster