The Aletsch Glacier, Swiss Alps · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

High above Konkordiaplatz, where the great tributaries of ice pour together to form the largest glacier in the Alps, there is a little stone refuge called the Konkordia Hut. When it was built in 1877 you could almost step straight from the ice onto its doorstep, it sat barely fifty metres above the glacier. It does not any more. The Aletsch has been thinning by roughly a metre a year, sinking away beneath the hut like a slow outgoing tide, and today the building stands around a hundred and fifty metres above the ice it was meant to serve. To reach it now you have to climb, up a long ladder of steel steps bolted to the bare rock face, first installed after a rockfall in 1965 as nine wooden ladders and two hundred rungs, and lengthened again and again ever since. It is the strangest staircase in the mountains, one that grows a little taller every summer, not because anyone keeps building upward but because the glacier keeps falling away below. The guidebooks show you the hut. They rarely tell you it is quietly turning into a lighthouse on a shrinking sea of ice.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.