M rested that afternoon. I suspected a touch of altitude, and gave her Diamox. Later she made a few phone calls on an encrypted connection we made for her. After that she napped, woke in time for sunset. Strong alpenglow against clear sky, some high clouds to east also pink. M said she could work by phone and hide here for a while very happily. A good sign.
Another good sign was her appetite that night. Cooks did raclette and rosti, salad and bread. Hutkeepers a middle-aged couple, with a pair of young assistants. They led M to a dorm room, all they had, which meant she had an entire matratzenlager to herself. She laughed to see that. The single mattress extended down the whole length of the room, with numbers on the long headboard marked for twenty sleepers, a duvet and pillow for each. She took two pillows and said good night. 9:10 PM.
Next day, hut empty except for us and the hutkeepers. M breakfasted in dining room, did her e-mail and made calls on encrypted lines provided to her. Then drinking coffee on patio overlooking lake, 1,200 meters below. The Alps are big, she remarked to Priska.
Later that day she asked to go for a walk, and we led her up to the foot of the Fründengletscher, some six kilometers up basin. Less steep than the ascent to hut had been the day before. Priska explained why this was when Mary remarked on it: instead of going up the side of a big glacial U valley, as we had yesterday, we were now walking along the bottom of a smaller higher U valley. Rock-strewn floor of a hanging valley, much less steep than where it falls into the bigger valley below. Same as always. Less moss and lichen and alpine flowers the higher we ascended, until bare rock, probably under ice until just a few years ago. By midafternoon we reached the foot of the glacier, which was mostly covered with black rubble fallen off the ridge, but also cut by white vertical melt incisions, making the glacial ice visible, and in the deepest parts of cracks, quite blue.
It must be depressing, M remarked. You can really see the glaciers are melting.
It’s bad, Priska said. Maybe not as bad as the Himalayas, where the melt is their water supply. Still, it changes things here too. We lose some water, some hydro power. And it feels wrong. Like a disease. Some kind of fever, killing our glaciers.
Even so, the remaining wall of this glacier’s foot stood about fifteen meters overhead. Getting onto the glacier proper would involve climbing a lateral moraine, then crossing the gap between moraine and ice. Possibly a job for crampons going up the ice itself, unless a good level bridge of rock or ice were found. Not on this day’s program.
Hiked with M back down basin, seeing better just how steep our ascent had been. Pleasant evening at hut.
We all woke at 2:46 AM to a very loud roar and clatter. We rushed to M, prepared for trouble, Jurg with pistol ready. To windows to look out, but a moonless night, nothing to see. The sound had ended, nothing more to hear or see. Avalanche, Priska suggested. No, rock fall, said one of the hutkeepers; not snow but rock. Rock for sure, he said, the noise had been so loud. It had lasted perhaps thirty seconds. The hut was set on its little rise of rock, well away from the cliffs flanking it, so the hutkeeper said we shouldn’t be in any trouble from rock fall or the run-outs that sometimes happened.
Back to bed for most of us, but Jurg and Priska and I stayed up for a while outside M’s room, sitting on floor not sleepy. Thomas and one of the hutkeepers went out to have a look around, came back reporting a new mass of rock now lay just west of the hut. We alerted Bern, wondered what was going on, if we had been attacked. Waited to hear back from Bern about incident, get their take on possibility that hostiles had located M and sent something her way.
At dawn we went out and saw it; a new rockslide, yes. It had come off the steep ridge to the west of the hut. The run-out across the basin floor had reached almost to the hut. Immense boulders of schist and gneiss and granite now stood tall on the basin floor. Contact between different kinds of rock was always a weak point, Priska said. The biggest chunks had rolled the farthest, in the usual way. One boulder, almost as big as the hut, lay only about twenty meters from it. Looked like a rough statue of the hut itself. It would have crushed the hut if it had run into it with any momentum at all. One more roll of this big dice, in other words, and boom, we would have been crushed.
I conferred with my team, in Schwyzerdüütsch so M couldn’t understand us. This is too much of a coincidence, I told them. I have a bad feeling about this. We are now code red. We moved into that protocol.
Bern agreed. Code red for sure. Get ready to leave, they said. We’ll get back to you with an evacuation plan as soon as we have it. Cover must be blown.
We considered that. If cover was blown, it would be dangerous to extract by helicopter. Drone attacks were all too possible. Of course the hut itself vulnerable as well. Bern said the plan for us would be ready within the hour.
Long before that Priska proposed her own plan. I called Bern and ran it by them. They took it in, put
