2022 - 2023 Far West Skier's Guide - 76

LEFT: Bettmeralp is a car-free village at
the lower elevations of the Aletsch Glacier.
Residents and visitors use their skis in the
winter months to meander through the streets!
RIGHT: Jysky Lehto enjoys Lötschental powder
as the Bietschhorn (3934 m) looms in the
background.
While these kinds of large numbers are
very impressive, a few smaller numbers, on
the other hand, gave us reason to take pause
and feel uneasy. Like virtually all of the
world's glaciers, the Aletsch receded 100
meters in only one year during the past decade,
and it has lost 3.5 kilometers of length and
300 meters of depth over the past 300 years.
The times have certainly changed. In
olden times, the homes of Fiesch were forever
threatened by floods, caused when blocks of
ice from the glacier fell into the nearby Märjelensee.
Ultimately, in 1678, the villagers
began praying for the glacier to recede and
promised to live virtuous lives in exchange for
their prayers being answered. Their prayer
was officially sent to Pope Innocent XI in the
17th century, and locals even began an annual
five-hour march to a nearby church in the
mid-1800s to back up their prayers with actions.
Today,
the villagers have seen that a reversal
of their prayer is necessary and they
have once again asked the Pope to sanction
their prayers - this time for the glacier to
grow once more. Tatu, Jysky, and I are not
really complete believers in divine intervention,
and decided that we had best do as much
skiing as we can on this trip. One can never
know what tomorrow may bring. Even if a
new ice age approaches, we would require a
tad of divine intervention of our own to be allowed
to enjoy the snowy fruits of a new
epoch of ice. For the present, it was time to
move on to our second destination in Valais -
the Lötschental - and keep skiing.
LEFT: The gondola
brings skiers and
boarders to the summits
in style. Even many
hidden gems offer
quality lifts and
gondolas to ascend their
well groomed pistes.
THE LÖTSCHENTAL -
BEAT'S PRIVATE
PARADISE
Not far from Fiesch, in a parallel valley
just to the north, is the Lötschental. This little-known
region is comprised of the villages
of Ferden, Kippel, Wiler, Blatten, Kühmad, and
Fafleralp - a short list of villages that are certainly
not even household names in Zurich or
Geneva.
From Wiler (1419 m), a series of four
lifts takes skiers up to the Hockenhorngrat
(3111 m). These lifts are more or less all there
is, but one really doesn't need anything more.
The Hockenhorngrat is one of those rare
76 Far West Skier's Guide 2O22 - 2O23
peaks where a well-situated top station opens
up more off-piste terrain than many ski areas
with five times as many lifts can offer. The uppermost
gondola was constructed just a few
years ago, transforming the Lötschental from
a rather ordinary small and unknown ski area
into an extraordinary, but still small and unknown
freeride mountain that offers countless
possibilities.
As Tatu, Jysky, and I rode up the first
cable car, everyone around us was speaking in
some sort of Swiss dialect that only a local
mountain goat could understand. It was clear
that the secret of the Lötschental had still not
passed beyond the border. But there is one
ttttt
2022 - 2023 Far West Skier's Guide

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