I was going to hold off until the 501(c)(3) exemption application was complete; however, landing oneself on the front page of The Guardian is a way of letting the cat out of the bag. So here it goes: I have launched a nonprofit called the Global Glacier Initiative. The purpose will be to fly to and photograph as many non-polar glaciers on earth as possible, before they melt or before I die, whichever comes first. Photographs at present will be offered for nonprofit use for free. I am largely taking them for future generations that will be born into a world with very few glaciers or none at all.

While I have effectively “dabbled” with my American Rockies and alpine adventures, these are merely a prologue to whet my appetite and develop sufficient skills as an aviator to execute this kind of plan. The quantity of glaciers that are in my crosshairs is something rather exponential compared to what I have accomplished to date. Bring it on.

The pragmatic reality is that the mission will require more than a decade, and up to four aircraft in total, stationed in four separate continents. The areas of focus are: rest of the Alps, Scandinavian Mountains, Iceland, Canadian Rockies, Canadian Coastal Range, American Pacific Northwest, Alaska, a few glaciers in Mexico, a few in Colombia, a few in Ecuador, quite a bit in Peru, Bolivia, years of pleasure in Chile and Argentina, and New Zealand. For the time being, I am skipping on the small icefields of equatorial Africa, the Himalayas (American with a plane and camera = jail), and the Caucasus Mountains.

Difficulty can be measured in a number of fronts: overall quantity of glaciers (Alaska), distance for which they are spread (Canada, tropics), altitude (roughly 20,000 feet in Alaska and up to 23,000 feet in South America), weather (polar storms, tropical fickleness), wind (Patagonia), and local jurisdictions (South America).

It is particularly challenging that glacier photography is best done in the summer, as seasonal snowfalls blur about 90% of the utility photographing them. That means that most of the year will be life as normal, until a blistering war cry attacking them with a vengeance on sunny days, snarling when it rains in August, bitching up a storm when forest fire smoke blocks the view, and back at it when the sun comes out. As my experiences in 2015 prove, there is little in the way of satisfaction like completing a massive glacier binge just before winter sets in, even though I ended up with a rather sore ass from sitting in the Cub for 65 hours in one month. Perhaps a better seat cushion is in order?

The Southern Hemisphere does aid in balancing the glacial pursuit, as generally glaciers are best pursued from December to February. That is, at least, the case in New Zealand, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. For some enigmatic reason, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia are best done June to September, due to the Humboldt Current and moody tropical weather.

In any case, this is something I will be doing no matter what, for personal reasons. If fundraising is a success, then I will be able to do more of it and do it faster (yes, you can send me cash!). If not, it’s still happening, just at the pace I can pull off.

The website for the Global Glacier Initiative, Inc is here: http://globalglacierinitiative.org. There is more to come content-wise, inclusive of some outreach initiatives and a hopefully very sexy map with images added to it as time goes by. In the meantime, this summer hopefully shall feature a conquest of as much of the Alps as I can muster.

The Jura Mountains featured in my early fantasies not too long after coming to Europe. When viewing the Alps on Google Earth, one notes a secondary mountain range to the north, which straddles France and Switzerland. It looks like something out of Appalachia, with long ridges similar to what one would find in Pennsylvania. Oddly, I grew up not far from Pennsylvania, thought the place was a dump, and never went there. Then I did finally fly there, over one of those Allegheny ridges that seemed so curious, and the airplane blew most of the oil out of the engine, so I limped into Maryland and that was that.

Well, its Europe. So, the same thing that exists in redneck Appalachia is now suddenly laced with mystique, culture, and intrigue. At any rate, my first chance to go near the Jura Mountains failed spectacularly when I was escaping Germany in 2016. A low-pressure system was stacked up against the range, so I had to weasel my way toward the Rhône River while gazing in wonder at a pile of clouds that came all the way to the ground, wondering about this Appalachian promised land that I wasn’t able to see. For some reason I blocked the Alps out of my mind. I might admit that I am capable of fear.

Fast forward a few years, with added evening sessions staring at Google Earth, and I grew ever more convinced that I would fly this range at some point, especially “when I am in the Alps.” Perhaps I was bamboozled by a drive through Switzerland from Chamonix in 2016, where I saw a decent snowpack on the range, in early April, despite a rather warm winter. What appeared to be potentially insipid from a distance now had a seemingly subtle erotic appeal, as though the range was rugged as well as Appalachian.

Did I fly to it? Of course not! What reasoning person, when presented with a choice to spend the same time, money, and fuel, would choose the Jura Mountains over the Jungfrau, Mont Blanc, or the Matterhorn? It would be idiocy to think that such a trip would make sense, my sessions of cartographical musings aside.

It is not to say that one can ever get enough of Mont Blanc. It is to say that I drove to Spain and stared at the Jura Mountains from the car, for the umpteenth time, and said to myself: “Enough! You must fly to that damn mountain range!” If anything, I get a certain perverse pride pointing out from the car that “I flew to that mountain” to which my wife says [proportionally as repeated as I say it]: “I know.” That, and there was still some snow, which would soon disappear. Time to get it over with.  It is no irony, by the way, that I can see the Jura Mountains almost every time I go flying in the Alps. They sit on the horizon, which, unsurprisingly, means that the Alps sit on the horizon from the perspective of the Jura. How novel.

So, I did it. It was a mildly flat light midday April day. Haze was a tad more than I like but not bad. It was explicitly not an artistic flight, which I seem to be doing nothing but these days; it was a flight to actually, you know, go somewhere…. the main reason people seem to have airplanes.

It turned out to be quite a pleasure. It reminded me of the first reasons I started authoring photography books back in 2013 in Colorado: it is the joy of seeing a new place and sharing it, of crossing over the horizon, of exploring what I have never seen before. Not everything is National Geographic, nor is a glacier exploding in overwhelming beauty. Not every photograph needs to be illustrious artwork either. Sometimes it is just interesting, and that is delightful enough.

Of course, I have set myself to visit the Jura next winter, when the Swiss Plateau usually is fogged over. That should make quite some artistic images of the two ranges with fog in between.

Rochers de Naye & Dent du Jaman.

Lake Geneva with Vevey below. There is a sculpture of a large fork on the waterfront.

Lake Geneva with the Jura Mountains on the horizon. One can understand why they are an itch that must be scratched.

Lake Geneva, looking south, with Mont Blanc on the horizon. Why go here, when one can fly there (and freeze important body parts at 15,000′)?

The Jura Mountains with the west end of Lake Geneva.

Jura Mountains looking southwest in France. This scene is more like something I would expect to see in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Jura Mountains, Mont Blanc on the horizon, Geneva in the middle, with a dense forest of scrubby pines. Pinus mugo uncinata, how I miss you. They are the dominant tree in the Pyrenees which, at the time, I deemed as too “scrubby” and wished the trees looked like “normal” pines, of which proliferate the Alps, for which I am now bored and get excited every time I see a single pinus mugo uncinata (which is admittedly rare). 

Base of the Jura Mountains with Geneva. The Large Hadron Collider lurks in here. That is one of many things that differentiates this area from Appalachia.

Not pinus mugo uncinata. “Normal” pine trees. Yawn. Elevation about 5,000 feet.

Looking the other way, into French Appalachia. One difference is that this is mostly coniferous, whereas Appalachia is mostly deciduous. This scene is more likely to be viewed in the timberlands of Montana than Pennsylvania, but I digress. It is a very wet area, which is why is does not burst into flames annually.

One of the few places that had a glacier in ancient times in the Jura.

Jura, Lake Neuchâtel, and the Alps. The view is typically the other way around.

Descending over Lake Neuchâtel. This mysterious boat must be doing some sort of dredging activity. It probably involves money. It’s Switzerland.

Climbout from Neuchâtel Airport. Yes, I finally bothered to land somewhere else.

Crossing Lake Neuchâtel. If the engine quit, I would have gotten wet.

Schiffenensee, near Fribourg. 

The Alps got a lot of snow this year.

Dolomiten von Saanenland.

Les Rodomonts, Rougemont. Another buried chalet. Gstaad Airport is in the abyss on the other side of the chalet, about a mile below.

Sometime in the last month or so, a rather eerie sandstorm from the western Sahara blew into the Alps, turning the sky a grayish brown haze. I wanted to get a chance to see more of it, so I investigated web cams, only to find a salacious apocalyptic Martian orange on the other side of the Bernese Alps. It was unfortunate that winds were gusting to 50 knots at all observation stations on the ridge, including that of Evionnaz, down in the valley below, so I couldn’t get over there to see the orange as I would have hoped. I suppose it was consistent with adequate wind energy to transport sand from another continent.

I ended up flying that day, staying on the north side of the Alps, wandering around in what became a sand-filled fog of delightfully orange disorientation, hugging Class G airspace to remain legal in light of atmospheric conditions. Needless to say, it was a lesson in why pilots tend not to fly in sandstorms, as one cannot see very well. The airplane got a new air filter afterward and remained covered in so much dust that I washed it sometime later.

In the ensuing weeks, one would expect some classic midwinter alpine weather, which tends to consist either of snowfall or pleasant sunshine. That did not materialize. Sand lingered in the air for days, albeit toned down from the “book of Revelation” setting to merely “Arabia.” That gave way to cloudy and foul weather which, in turn, gave way to an early bout of unfortunately classic early spring weather in central Europe: a vile, opaque, filthy airmass from the German fatherland and Poland. I am not sure if it is humidity, coal exhaust, wood burning smoke, or what; the point is that it is gross and puts me in a foul mood just looking at it. When it is “supposed” to be sunny after a storm system, an ill-placed high-pressure zone ruins it all, sending air from behind the Iron Curtain to foul my expectations of visual purity.

It is intriguing that I have yet to speak to a local that notices the condition. It does not cumulatively last more than a few weeks per year, though for four out of five years in either Germany or Switzerland, whether living or visiting, I have run into smog that would make residents of Los Angeles proud, typically in early April. Anyway, that ruined flying for even more time.

Then the Sahara spewed more light dust, followed by another bout of foul light precipitation, resulting, finally, in a nice day. I could tell looking out the window that it was clear, so I set my mind to head to the Matterhorn. I hadn’t flown above it in some time, and I was in the mood to look down on the summit.

Checking the weather, all was swell for the flight, with no mention of deleterious particulates suspended in the air. It was due to be sunny, so I took off. As I was approaching the Bernese Alps on an illustrious sunny day, something seemed off. Grand Combin, a peak on the Italian border in excess of 14,000 feet, appeared to be cloaked in haze. “Perhaps it is the sun reflecting,” I thought, briefly. “No, something is up as it should be clearer.” Surpassing Plaine Morte Glacier, I discovered the problem: there was a thick layer of Saharan dust at 12,000 feet and higher, with a pronounced base. It was occluding all of the peaks I wanted to go to.

As the layer was incoming from the west, and since it was quite clear what it was doing there, whereas it was much lighter over the Matterhorn, I decided to avoid having to wash the plane again, right after having done it before, by heading west and ducking under the dust. Dismayed that my little scheme to go to the Matterhorn didn’t work, I did have the chance to see Mont Blanc ensconced in dust while I skulked around the glaciers below.

Grand Combin on the left horizon, hiding in the haze.

Mont Blanc, hiding in the dust to the right horizon.

Kind of a delightful view, if you ask me.

Looking up the north slope of Mont Blanc. A bit more visible from directly below it.

Toward the northwest, with a cloud layer moving in above the dust.

Tongue of a glacier to an avalanche path down into Chamonix. I normally don’t fly at this altitude; however, the dust forced the perspective.

Chamonix in the valley, Glacier des Bossons at the bottom of the image. Since the atmosphere looked like Pennsylvania in February, I made it black and white.

Mont Blanc summit, looking the other way, also black and white. It is virtually indistinguishable from the “color” version. Sand does wonders.

Mer de Glace, Grandes Jorasses, et Dent du Géant. Note the orange color in the foreground. That is from the prior sandstorm. One can see a bit of teal color, which is the glacier showing through winter snow (and dust).

To the northwest, above Mer de Glace.

Glacier du Tour with some Saharan sand on it. 

Mont Blanc in quiet respose, hiding in the sand, to the left.

It is an understatement to admit that airplanes are expensive. In a twist of irony, the preceding months have featured a nagging itch to upgrade my equipment. Why? To produce more profit, or otherwise make some financial sense? Try this on for size: the overarching rationale was that I am spending so much damn money on this airplane, I might as well get good enough photographs to match. I am not sure if that is cynical, brilliant, stupid, or all of the above.

Part of the problem stems from a camera malfunction over Chamonix, France. I was using a Canon EOS 77D, about a $900 camera package, which I had bought as, 14 months before, my Canon Rebel 7ti ($750) failed ingloriously above St. Moritz, Switzerland. If anything, I am amassing a collection of world class destinations to have camera failures. In each case, I swapped lenses in flight from my secondary zoom lens camera, a Canon Rebel 6ti ($650), and carried on, using a prior camera as a backup.

I ran into an issue a year ago where the 6ti just was not getting the crispness I wanted for focus, although it has the same sensor and lens. “Perhaps it is the Dual Pixel AF technology on the 7ti and 77D” I thought to myself, and tried to have less dynamic motion while flying, which didn’t amount to a hill of beans. After taking my 550,000^th photograph recently, it being out of focus, I decided that “enough was enough, time for another camera,” though that old sensation of making good on my prodigious bloodbath of money (by spending more) came to mind. Is it not time to upgrade to something that is commensurate with my level of aerial fanaticism?

I went on a bender researching high end Canons, and nothing jumped out from the models costing thousands of dollars that made any sense. Megapixels were the same, features similar, processor generations sometimes older. I almost bought a low- to mid-range camera again, until a friend suggested the Sony Alpha series, which at minimum, achieve the goal of breaking the bank.

I went to a big box camera store to defecate roughly $3,000, and they would not allow me to see the camera before purchasing it. “Um, I would like to compare lens field of view in the store to my existing camera.” “That is against policy.” “But I’d like to see how it works before buying it.” “That is against policy.” “You don’t have a floor model, so can I return it 5 seconds after I buy it if I don’t like what happens when I open the box?” “There is a restocking fee as it is not a floor item.”

Walking out of there, I went to a traditional camera shop, spoke to a British chap, and got the lowdown of why sub-$1000 Canon cameras are an insult to my profligate expenditures on aviation. Build quality and longevity is a significant element, though it boils down to the sensor. Quality is vastly superior with expensive cameras. I decided to spring for it and buy the body somewhat on a whim.

It is a significant deviation from my current workflow, as the Sony Alpha 7r III is mirrorless, which means that there is an OLED sensor in the viewfinder. Finding it hideous on the first flight, from the second onward, it was glorious. The field of view is massively larger than SLRs, to the point that my SLR camera looks like a somewhat silly eye-exam machine, where the viewing area seems small and projected far away, which explains why I would often find intriguing details after downloading photographs taken from the zoom lens camera – I simply couldn’t detect them in such a small visual field in the air.

The journey wasn’t over with the camera purchase. I left with a rental lens, a 24mm full frame fixed focal length piece, which equates to much wider than my field of view with an APS-C 18mm, though I thought that the “grandness” of such a wide-angle lens would make up for it. Aside from including the wing and propeller in 90% of images, it had the reverse effect. The reality is that a massive scene is compressed into the same size image, which ironically makes things look smaller and flatter.

Since variable length lenses of good build quality are rather heavy, I went with a 35mm fixed focal length (nothing like harking back to the 80s), and it had a nice composition and feel to the final product. Images were balanced and had a decent perspective, except I came to realize that I was flying way too close to mountains to try to frame the image. With no ability to change focal length, the airplane had to try to kiss the mountain to get the image right. That would likely result in a fiery death, so I finally settled on a 28-60mm variable that works rather well.

In any case, I used some flights over France, in the dead of winter, to a) try to freeze myself to death repeatedly and b) sort out the saga of working out my new equipment. Some images of these overpriced and dubiously justified escapades are below. Final images are now 42.4MP, instead of 24.2MP, are of incredible quality, and are virtually never out of focus. That reality means that I had to defecate $305 on another 10TB drive (I have over 60TB now), so as to do financial justice to the overwrought camera purchase, which was meant to “balance” the lack of sense spending too much on airplanes.

The 24mm full frame lens (too wide)….

Champéry, Switzerland & Dents du Midi, from the French border.

Avioraz, France on the middle left.

How am I supposed to know where this is? Its all clouds. Geneva is somewhere to the right of the sun.

Western terminus of the French Chablais Alps. Lake Geneva is to the right, under the clouds.

Now to the 35mm lens…

Avioraz again.

Les Hautes Fortes, with Mt Blanc on the horizon.

Dents d’Oddaz

Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval, France. Well, its under the clouds. Thumbs up for great emergency landing options!

Chamonix around the bend to the left, under the clouds. Mt Blanc dead ahead. This is me thumbing my nose at the site of my Canon’s “original sin.”

More of the same. “See one, see them all.”

Looking somewhat toward the sun (southwest).

Col de la Forclaz. It seems lewd.

Western edge of French Chablais Alps, with Lake Geneva hiding below the clouds. I can declare the camera a success!

Yes, it is getting old. I promise no more in 2020.

I didn’t think I’d go for #8. I had previously sorted, retouched, exported, labeled, and organized all of the photographs for this book (not mention getting my sorry ass into the airplane and actually taking the photos) almost a year ago. The thing is, it is hard to do a book about the villages in which Catalan and French people live, publish it in English, and expect anything to happen. Upon further research, translation is not cheap. For that matter, I’d really need it in Catalan, Spanish, and French, and, while I am at it, I would be writing the text in English, so might as well throw that in too. Then I got the brilliant idea: why not go light on the text and just be done with it? But how do I find three translators? Will they get it done in time for this fanciful little goal of mine to get it on Amazon before December 31, 2020?

Happily, the translators were available and delivered quickly, something unusual when someone is located anywhere near the Mediterranean Sea…

The story behind the book is somewhat interesting. As is readily evident, I generally like to keep people out of my images. While many do not like that, I point to Ansel Adams, who did the same, and he is considered one of the American forefathers of photography. So, phooey…people are not needed. Anyway, after so much time in the air above La Cerdanya, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the artistic arrangement of the villages below, many of which looked drastically different one from another, though each equally as interesting.

Eventually, I got the idea to do a book on the subject, but it was only after having completed the flights in Cerdanya. What I mean is that I was not actively taking village photographs intended for a book; I decided after having a massive pile of images collected that I wanted to do a village book. That meant sorting through well over 100,000 images. I am pleased that I may have only missed a small handful of villages, or if one wants to debate the point, none at all.

While it may seem a tad uncouth to be blogging so soon after the last post, the fact is that I am in the middle of a craze to get the announcements out for my 2020 books (before 12/31, for self-imposed reasons). Number 7 for the year has been squeezed through the birth canal. It is a monument to the illustrious rocky features of northern Catalunya that graced the pages of this blog for an extended period of time.

Standing proudly over the Alt Berguedà and La Cerdanya, Serra del Cadí, Serra del Moixeró, and Pedraforca are massive rock features, unusually gnarly and vertiginous, and they captivated my attention for quite a while. With the Mediterranean roughly 60 miles to the east, deserts to the southwest, and pure Pyrenean alpine climate to the north, there was always something going on in this collision of weather zones. It was a baptism in a new method of flying, to revisit the same place in different conditions, many of those marginal or what would previously be considered dangerous.

If there is one lesson that I learned from this production, it is not to make a favorite subject wait. The result is that much has to be discarded for favor of the constraints of attention spans and the publishing process, which means that, if I could do it over again, I would have come out with something a few years ago and found a way to keep the conversation going.

As lockdown in early 2020 got started, I set my mind to doing something I usually do not: submitting to an art prize. Normally I avoid these kinds of things, as the chances of getting selected are extremely small, and the workload is disproportionately high, which means it is basically for suckers, except for the one person that wins. For some reason that I do not understand now, I actually thought I had a reasonable chance, which caused me to set aside the calloused views that have developed over the years dealing with the art and publishing world. Suffice it to say that merit is a very small part of why things get published or selected and much of it has to do with hard to quantify things such as how cranky the person is making the decision at the time. While I can lose count of the quantity of people that feel that my stuff belongs in the prestigious art museums of the world, it doesn’t do anything to get it there, unless the mysterious powers that be permit it and, so far, they have not been in the mood to explain the mysteries of their moods.

Knowing those realities as a backdrop, I still had hope. Then I got carried away, and I had to ask myself how I’d react if I did not win. Then my enterprising brilliance entered into play, and I decided that I would just make the submission a book. That way, I couldn’t lose. Well, lose I did – not a winner, not a finalist, “but we encourage you to submit again next year.” Any feedback as to why that is the case? No. 33,000 words and 100 image submissions later….nothing, well, except for the prospect of a book.

I then wrote an honest yet cynical introduction, packaged the whole thing up, and then realized, disappointment aside, that I have put together a) the third most text heavy work to date and b) the most varied and comprehensive representation of my work yet in existence. Every other book has been focused on something much more narrow, whereas this one is complete open season on what I thought was best across the board.

Prior to this whole art prize nonsense, I had someone review my work and note that my books “do not explain what the images are.” I pointed out that they are labeled, with precision, as to the subject and location, and he said, “But it still doesn’t tell me anything about it. You’re telling me all this background about the image as I review it. It should be in the book.” With “My Struggle,” I put it in the book. After failing to be selected as a finalist, I exchanged a conversation with an art professional, in particular the person that recommended submitting to the prize, and she said, “Perhaps next time you shouldn’t say so much.”

For whatever it is worth, this is book #6 for 2020, so I have broken my record, which turned out to be quite a struggle.

I have often wondered if there is a hormonal cycle that I am unaware of that influences my propensity to pick a fight with the sky. Weather had been straight out the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania playbook (gray and bleak). It was forecast to clear, had not yet, and my wife and I had made dinner arrangements (to the extent it is possible in spite of a mountain of rules) with friends. Ever averse to the idea of fixing a time on anything that would interfere with flying, I now found this dinner engagement to be a thorn in my side, as intuition said the clouds would clear. I would have preferred to go up after mountain snows, versus waiting until they got tired days later.

As I previewed web cams, weather models, and satellite shots, I had the view that the clouds would dry up pretty quickly. I saddled up the flying gear, did a flight briefing, scurried to the airport, and fired up the airplane, noting broken overcast to the west, overcast overhead, and some soup to the east. By the time operating temps were in the green, things were at minimum adequate VFR below the clouds. Full power and off we go….

By the time I got to 6,000 feet, there was an adequate hole in the clouds. The overcast deck was also pretty thin, perhaps 500 feet thick at most in that spot. The next logical question is: what if the hole closes? I left with full fuel and had confirmation that a number of airports were in range and had VFR access. The issue would not be CFIT or VFR into IMC, it would be a wife who would demand some form of penance as I then would have to ride a train back, while missing dinner.

It turns out, none of that drama was necessary. I scooted around for 30 minutes in the islands in the sky, found a bigger hole, dropped down, landed, and by the time I got home, cloud coverage had reduced to 50%. We made it to dinner on time.

As for the proposed hormone cycle, some days I pick a fight with the sky, other days I don’t even notice that it is there. I am eternally curious as to what I see and what is going on, though the difference between a fat, lazy, inertia-inducing shrug and a battle cry that results in a flight remains unknown.

700 feet above the airport on climb out. Such is the Alps.

The hole, between Flendruz and Château-d’Oex.

Massif du Vanil Noir.

The airport….

Knife edge…

Above Sparenmoos.

Rinderberg.

Approaching the hole.

Descending through it. 

Left hand downwind for runway 26, looking right.

Wispile. About to turn left hand base 26, looking out the right.

Left hand base 26, looking left. The hole, now growing, is visible down valley.

One may wonder why I am blogging so much these days, and why so many book releases are taking place. For reasons that I cannot recall, it came to my attention that the maximum number of titles that I have released in one calendar year is five. That happened twice, and with this email, has now happened for a third time. Never one to leave an autistic goal alone, I decided to go for it and break the record, logically settling on six titles to get it done. While that will likely be met, and possibly exceeded, I ran into another self-created issue: I have a personal view that I “cannot” post two book release posts in a row. For some inexplicable reason, I feel that readers would rather get more of my transcendent, venomous bitterness sandwiched in between, lest they feel that they are being “sold to.” So, the only answer to these seemingly nonsensical rules is to speed up the posts a bit, which will invariably irk someone else into unsubscribing.

“Abstractions of the Alps” is a response to a lesson I learned with my Spanish creative exploits: it is silly to wait until the flights are done to release books about them. There is simply too much beauty, too many adventures, too many stories, and literally, too much of a good thing, to wait so long to put something together. If I were to do a book on, say, “The Alps,” I would wait years and end up not publishing the overwhelming majority of my images. I do not see what purpose that serves.

Thus, this book is basically a collection of things that I find pretty in the Alps, thus far. I did not restrict myself to a geographic list or claim for it to be the “best of” anything in particular. It is variety, beauty, comprehensive coverage, aesthetic appeal, the unusual, the expected, and the unexpected. It is frankly whatever I wanted to put together, which, well, in this crazy year of 2020, why not?

 

Chronicles of Existential Dread: Episode XIII: Partial Failure of the European Illusion

The story behind this flight began in January 2003. It was an unpleasant time in life as I found myself driving south on New York Route 16, from East Aurora to Arcade, in route to what may have been the most miserable term of employment in my existence. I was comforted by the fact that, after not seeing the sun for months due to continuous lake effect snow pummeling the area south of Buffalo, it was a resplendent clear day. To assuage the misery of my commute to the gallows, I tuned into CBC Radio 2 out of Canada, to listen to a cultural radio program. I wanted to give myself hope that life couldn’t possibly suck as bad as it did into perpetuity, or maybe I wanted to drug myself with the illusion that, if I was listening to above average intelligence radio content beamed from outside the United States, somehow rural backward depression in front of me wasn’t happening.

The program spoke of travels to Bern, Switzerland, the capital of the country. The presenter had spent an inordinate time in the old section of town, beneath the many “arcades” present in the city. While I was duly intrigued, it was a slap in the face that the place where I was serving my [purportedly voluntary] work camp sentence was….Arcade, New York. At any rate, I managed to not forget about that radio program and the associated ‘road to Golgotha’ now 17 years later.

The genesis of this flight was ultimately a need to go flying while solving the problem of boredom. “Boredom?” you might ask. The weather has been positively Pyrenean: weeks of relentless dry and sunny weather which, at first glance comes off as a gift, as the transition to winter on the north side of the Alps has the meteorological finesse of a raging Scottish storm. The problem then in Spain and now in the Alps is that mountains lacking clouds, snow, or anything interesting happening get really fatiguing after about 10 days. So…what to do? I negotiated with myself that I have two projects that I have wanted to work on, though have managed to avoid actually doing much about, at least with regard to the parts over the Swiss Plateau: the Aare River and the Saane River. The Aare departs from the lakes around Interlaken, flows right through Bern, and then the Saane joins it, which I decided I would follow in reverse back to the airport.

The flight over Bern was admittedly quite spectacular. The old section of the city is perched on a peninsula sticking out into a strong bend in the Aare River, high up on a cliff, with views of the Alps behind. The old city, with its over wrought “arcades,” is larger than Google Maps would have one think. The spire of the old church and the Parliament building, seat of one of the possibly only countries in Europe to avoid centuries of bloodshed, sits large and proud.

Bern ATC was rather cooperative to my requests to “follow the Aare River,” “perform continuous S turns,” and to orbit right over the capital multiple times. I am told by another pilot that I should consider myself lucky, and indeed I do, as many national capitals, the United States included, would rather not allow private pilots to circle overhead. Anyhow, the flight was very special, and I decided that it was time to visit the old city on the ground.

Bern, Old City.

In the shadows at the base of the buildings, one can find the cockamamie “arcades” that have tormented me since 2003.

This is where the wheels come off the idea. I have had many people gush with some form of awe at the idea that I live in Europe. I realize where they are coming from; it is an exotic continent which has enough appeal that it seduced me to endlessly self-punish and move here, yet, as I told an acquaintance “nothing about Europe that you think is good is the reason we stay. It has all turned out wildly differently, albeit somewhat net positive, though for reasons nobody would expect.” As usual, people are surprised to hear this notion, though that would make sense. Is not everything that I have written thus far confirmatory of the European illusion, from the depressing misery of wintry, rust belt, rural Americana to the illustriousness of flying an old airplane over top a beautiful old capital?

Prior to COVID, I had anticipated riding the train into Bern, as it looks too chaotic with a car. Given that the pandemic should reduce traffic coupled with the fact that I did not want to wear a face condom (mask) on the train, I made the ill fate decision to drive.  What first greets a person when entering from the west is nothing short of a ghetto. The outer section of the city, at least where I was driving, was positively gross, which is admittedly not that unusual. Most European cities, including the ones of the Disneyland/once-in-a-lifetime/oh-honey-we-must-go-there/tourism sort, are surrounded by filth. “No wonder they hate foreigners,” my wife quipped.

As we approached the train station that we would have ridden in on, it was total chaos, with cars and people everywhere. Apple Maps sent us the wrong way, which turned into a fiasco much like driving in Manhattan. By the time we were done nearly getting into multiple collisions, we inched our way toward the old city. My plan was to just find a parking ramp and deal with the annoyance of it, instead of illusions of that perfect parking spot in front of one’s destination. Well, there was no parking ramp, so I followed the one-way streets, driving ever so slowly, snaking our way past Starbucks, through a crowded giant square, and then promptly getting ejected from the old city. The place was swarming with people and cars, and nowhere to park them.

I turned toward the terminus of the old city peninsula, where it was evident that there was neither a parking ramp within 2 miles, nor a parking spot. We were taken down to the river, across it, and out of the area we wanted. “Just get out of there. This is nuts,” my wife said. “Oh no, we don’t! I drove past a Starbucks and I will be damned if I don’t go!”

That resulted in another two miles of driving, this time through a totally unmarked intersection where six lanes converge. No traffic lights, no signs, no yield, no stop. Just standard Swiss rules where the person on the right as the right of way, although bicycles weren’t keen on listening. After some horn honking and restraint with the middle finger (illegal in Switzerland), it was over the bridge back to the old city, which revealed that the two parking ramps were full, with 10 cars in line, simply waiting until someone exited the parking ramp, so they could go down multiple stories into the bowels of hell to drive in circles and ram their car into a spot that is too small, followed by walking two miles to the old city to invariably stare at quaint [closed] shops while contracting COVID.

By this point, I started just driving…anywhere but where I was. Finally approaching what appeared to be a key intersection, I was still hell bent on doing what I drove 90 minutes to see, and my wife ever so kindly demanded that I “get the hell out of here or take me home, now. I don’t care!”

Presented with Fribourg and Interlaken as options on the road sign, I made a flash decision toward Interlaken. Some minutes later, we were on an expressway, with the Jungfrau in the background, me ranting and declaring that “I am never going to visit a city again, ever!”

Out of instinct, we went to the nearest place with a positive memory, which is Schloss Schadau, an illustrious Biltmore style castle on Lake Thun, with the Alps in the background. We had been there a week before, as I discovered the place from the same flight. This time, we decided to get something to eat inside, for which we were seated at a table with a view of the lake and the mountains.

Schloss Schadau, inconveniently blocking the view of the Jungfrau behind it.

View from my table, with the Jungfrau in the background. It is an iPhone shot with minimal retouching and looks like a fairy tale.

“This view pisses me off.”
“Why?”
“Because it is so pretty, which is just a slap in the face after the dehumanizing experience I just had. I just hate that if I share this with anyone, the experience in Bern cannot go with it. Everyone will just think it is ‘just wonderful’.”
[No response]

After consuming fish and chips ($78), said pile of fried food in my stomach revealed that I must have had low blood sugar, as my bitch fit entirely abated. Gazing at the famous peaks of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau from my table, I said to my wife, filled with warm fuzzy feelings: “It is hard to believe that just 3 days ago I flew over the summit of the Jungfrau. See that illuminated ridge, that is the one where I sent you the video flying right by it.”

“I didn’t watch it.”
“What?”
“You sent me two. The first was good enough.”
“Seriously? The first one was from the Jungfraujoch. The second was sideswiping the summit.”
“What do you want me to say? I got the idea from the first one.”

The video she watched.

The video she didn’t watch. “Mountains. Seen one, seen them all.”

Summit of the Jungfrau, also visible from Schloss Schadau (albeit at a distance).

Jungfraujoch. Schloss Schadau is at the far shore of the lake in the distant center of the image.

At our belated lunch, my wife ordered Moroccan mint tea, a favorite after discovering it at some freakish hippie joint in Vancouver, Washington some years ago. At the exit area of the grand lobby, I noted that tea boxes were for sale, for which she grabbed one. I thought I heard the price, and after we got in the car, I asked “What did that run?”

“7 something, I think.”
“I am pretty certain it was 17 something.”
Pulling out the receipt, “Oh, you’re right 17.20 francs.” ($18.90)

The Swiss are a kind culture. Even if you’re a foreigner that does not speak their language and you arrive in their country, burdened by the obligation to have liquid assets, whether paper bills, coinage, or money in a bank anywhere in the world, the Swiss very kindly will drop everything and aid anyone that is beleaguered with the fatigue of possessing it. They dutifully will take it from you and then you don’t have to worry about having money anymore!

We’re used to it, which meant that, after savoring some of the [expensive] and illustrious tea, we ordered other flavors, which arrived in a box 19 hours later, one of the advantages of paying 4 times the normal price. It is admittedly rather good.

The whole trip is representative of many dimensions of our European journey. Going back to 2003, I was fantasizing in delusion about the “arcades of Bern,” came here with an airplane, drove myself to the point of both insanity and an automobile collision, left without seeing the damn arcades (or the old city for that matter), had a positively memorable lunch, where we could discuss my recent wanderings, flying at nearly 14,000 feet over the Jungfrau. The experience so far has been very similar the journey to Bern: a mix of transcendence and scathing fury, so yes, come to Europe. It is both like a vacation to Disneyland and Afghanistan at the same time.