today, i finally did a hike i already wanted to do for a long time: i visited the morteratsch glacier in the engadine. there is a train station nearby, called morteratsch. from there, a trail leads to the ice front. it used to be that the train station was at the ice front, but that was more than 100 years ago, and since then the glacier retreated quite a distance – almost two kilometers. here are a few impressions from the hike to the ice front:

shortly before i reached the ice front, and just a few moments before i could see anything, i heard a loud noice. some ice collapsing, something breaking off, i don’t know. happens all the time, and it is always a good idea to know what you are doing when going on a glacier. for example, never go too near to places where ice seems to break off :-) anyway, even though i only was at the very bottom of the glacier – i’ve seen much more of some glaciers in canada –, there were many interesting views of ice formations, of mixtures of ice, dirt, rocks and water. glaciers are so beautiful!

while looking through the photos, i found a polar bear hiding in one of the photos. can you find it?

last weekend, i did a hike through the roseg valley with anmut and nik. the weather was stunning, it was warm (t-shirt time!), sunny, not many clouds. and, of course, snow. not as much as there’s supposed to be that time of the year, but still enough to be happy :-)

here are some impressions from the hike and the rest at the roseg glacier restaurant:

(and yes, most of these photos would have been perfect for project 52 a month ago…)

today, i went hiking with a friend. our destination were cirque lake and cephren lake, located at the icefields parkway. the trip went pretty smooth, and we decided to first go to cirque lake. there was a bit of rain in the beginning, a few drops during the hike, but nothing serious, and soon the sun came out and presented everything in its full beauty. the hike turned out to be harder than expected, whence we decided to skip cephren lake, but we were rewarded with a really gorgeous view on cirque lake. here are some impressions of the hike to the lake, and the lake itself:

(note that the first photo was taken somewhere between calgary and banff, and not anywhere near to cirque lake. the first photo in the second row is a view of the upper waterfowl lake, if i’m not mistaken.)
unfortunately, while resting at the lake, it started dripping again, and when heading back the drops turned into water turned into graupel. not that much fun. we got pretty wet, and the trail continued and continued and didn’t want to end, until it stopped raining. only after that we left the forest and returned to the car, too exhausted to do anything more, so we returned home.

we started our canada tour by flying up to yellowknife, the capital of canadas northwest territories. it’s a town having around 20.000 inhabitants, but it is probably the most touristic place in the northwest of canada, and there are a lot of (non-expensive) flights going there. and, one reason why we went there, it’s quite likely that you can see northern lights. besides that, the area is also very different from southern canada.
on our first day there, it was sunny and we did a hike on the trail around frame lake. this resulted in many beautiful views and photos, some of whose can be seen here:

maybe you, the reader, noticed that i didn’t really wrote anything here during the last three weeks. well, the reason was that i had a visitor here, namely my girlfriend, and that we did a 10 day tour through western canada. in this and the following posts, i will show some photos from our trip.
the first thing we did was attend our department’s excursion, a hike on top of ha ling peak. here are some impressions from the hike:

on saturday, some friends and i went on a hike to lillian lake in the canadian rockies. due to time restrictions, we didn’t continue to galatea lakes. in fact i’m happy about this, as this was the first hike for me in this season and i was really done when we arrived at the lake. gladly, the way back was a lot easier. here are some impressions from the trip:

yesterday, i did a snow hike in engadine. first, i walked from guarda to lavin, and after that, i continued by train to saint moritz, and afterwards i returned home. the weather was awesome in the beginning, but after some time the sun hid behind some clouds, making it impossible to make good photos of the snow. too bad. the sight was still great, though.

on the third day of the ants, we had half a day off. some of us took the chance to make a small hike to sundance canyon on that afternoon.

on the way to sundance canyon.

to reach the sundance canyon, one has to walk a bit through beautiful nature.

sundance canyon.

the first picture still belongs to the way to the canyon. the canyon itself is going upwards, a small river is floating downwards. it’s pretty steep, as you can see. when one reaches the top, one gets a pretty neat view.

on the way back.

the way back featured several other great views.

finally, we reached the banff hot springs, which are not in use anymore to ensure the living of the banff springs snail. this is a kind of snail which basically only lives at exactly this place.

the banff springs hotel.

after returning to the conference center (which involved a stop in banff and drinking some beer), we took a small walk to the bow river, from where one has a good view on the banff springs hotel.

the bow falls.

another thing one can see from there are the bow falls, a pretty low (just a few meters) waterfall.

well, last but not least, a really big thanks to all involved in making this trip possible!

as promised, some panoramas from our trip to monte generoso on last weekend.

on saturday, we hiked the monte generoso, located next to the city of mendrisio in the ticino. here are some pictures from our trip.

first, some pictures from the cogwheel train ride up to bellavista:

then, some pictures from our walk from bellavista up to the top of the mountain:

and that’s me on the top of the mountain, one step from the abyss:

a picture of the village mendrisio:

finally, some pictures from my train ride to northern germany on sunday: