Schellenberg Ice Hole
Ice underground inside a Bavarian mountaintop [1250 words 6 mins
The Substack posts appearing last Wednesday and the Wednesday before were an illusion. For the last two Wednesdays I’ve been up in the Alps, overnighting in mountain huts with no Internet or phone signal at all. And just when I should have been tapping in my piece about the high-level wildflowers of Helvellyn, I was high above the border city of Salzburg, in a limestone cave, underneath some ancient ice.
The whole thing was pretty puzzling –and also, as we'll see, borderline terrifying. First off, an ice cave underneath a glacier: green light and weird intestinal shapes, as portrayed by one of my favourite painters, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham of St Andrews. But can there really be a glacier in mountains less than 2000m high, some preserved patch of north-facing ice, specially refrigerated perhaps by the German Tourist Board? The answer to that is, in fact, no.1 And what our guide led us round into, after we'd waited half an hour on a ledge 1100m above the valley of the Königsseer Ache, and paid, in cash, our 12 euros entry fee –
Because no advance tickets for the Schellenberg Ice Hole; and no contactless either, of course. But can you imagine, in the UK say, a minor tourist attraction whose only access is a four-hour hike from the car park involving 1100m of ascent?
There is also, this being the Alps, a cable-car option. But the cablecar itself involves –
First off, a bus journey into Austria. Then a dangly cabin, standing room only, rising up a near-vertical limestone crag. With a special moment at two thirds height: a ridgeline cut across, and they've carved a slot in it, and planted a pylon, so that you get a sudden lurch downwards and at the same moment find yourself out in the open again, in the rock-walled canyon at the back.
And after lurch, lunch: a full-on café with balconies dangling over the northern edge of the Alps. Here you can contemplate how this whole mountain range is just the crumple zone of Italy being shoved northwards by the inexorable arrival of Africa. And how, at the northern edge of it all, you look down over the uncrumpled flatlands of southern Germany, and the city of Salzburg with its gleaming fortress where ancestral archbishops sheltered from their peeved parishioners behind high walls of off-white limestone. All of it so close below you could spit down onto Salzburg's airport runway….
At 1853m, the Salzburg Hochthron is the second easiest hill in Germany – the 500-metre wander from the top-station to the top is an inch or two more arduous than Germany's main mountain, the 2962m Zugspitze. But behind the summit, paths get more arduous: mud and bare dolomite limestone rambling among knee-high pines, with huge, hazy views out on either side. Dipping to something even more exciting – perhaps, we're about to find out, a little bit too exciting – a Path with a Name, the Thomas-Eder-Steig.
Any time, in the Alps, a path's got someone's name attached, this is so that when you find yourself above impossible drops clinging to a loosely stapled wire cable, there's a specific person for you to swear at. The Thomas-Eder-Steig doubles back across contour lines close enough together to represent, basically, a precipice.
Well, the Ice-hole guide will eventually confirm this. Thomas-Eder was not, in fact, a human being. The path, an iron balcony stapled above several hundred metres of empty air, was clearly constructed by the gold-mining gnomes that once infested these mountains (and who's to say, maybe still do).
Because the path twists inwards and descends on steep wooden steps into a tunnel of the rock. Every 20 metres or so it pays a brief visit to the outer air, partly for the view but mainly to save the hassle of installing artificial lights. An airy traverse along a ledge; a geological interpretation board about the bauxite staining; and we finally arrive at the Ice Hole.
Which, as I said, doesn't in the end involve any tiny and artificially refrigerated glacier.
Helmet on, fleece retrieved from the rucksack, and around the corner into the mouth of a standard Yorkshire-type limestone cave. Which is odd in itself: caves are carved by underground rivers, and what's a river doing 1560 metres up a mountain? There's a moment to imagine the valley below us filled to the brim with a great grey glacier, and mighty meltwater torrents sweeping us away into a crevasse, before we descend to darkness, and a sudden chill, and a patch of dirty ice of today. Except that the dirty ice we've stepped on is, also, ice of ten thousand years ago.
When you dip your hand into an ice-cream cabinet, the ice cream stays cold even though you've lifted the lid, because cold air sinks. And that's what's happened here. The cave, formed along the intersection of the limestone and the overlying dolomite rocks, dips into the mountain: a pocket of cold air restored every winter, preserved through every summer, that's been sub-zero since the end of the Ice Age.
Hot air rises: cold air sinks. We already know this; but still it's uncanny, from hot August in the mountains, a few steps down into the deep chill of winter. Okay, this is a common sensation if you're in the habit of bathing in mountain lakes. Me, I'm not in the habit of bathing in mountain lakes.
Anyway, a brief explanation of it all, in German. The gnomes, needless to say. And Charlemagne, of course, lurking inside the mountain with all his knights, ready to emerge when the nation's in great danger and bring Peace to the Earth. Funny, never thought of Charlemagne as a particularly peaceful sort of chap: do we suspect his legend's been sanitised for the tame 21st century? And how come he and his knights took a long lie-in through two world wars? I'm not casting any special aspersions here: our own King Arthur, similarly, remained tucked away under Glastonbury Tor right through the Twentieth Century.2
And then a tunnel leads on downwards, underneath the ice. In the lower chamber, we shine our torches on the faint grey stripes, like tree-rings, that mark the passing of the years and centuries. The ice is formed of rainwater and snow drifting into the cave. In the slot between rock and ice, a very slim palaeobotanist slid down on a rope to retrieve pollen from 50,000 years ago.
All that remains after that is a mountain hut with coffee and cream-cakes on the balcony, 1100 metres of descent through beechwoods and pine, and a bus to Salzburg for supper.
So that's what I was doing when you thought I was writing up the hanging gardens of Helvellyn. Now, according to the National Life Tables for Scotland, I'll be dying off some time around 2035 – maybe, as a hillwalker, hanging on a year or two longer than that. By which time, an AI version of Ronald will be programmed up, ready to go on generating weekly Wednesday posts for ever and ever…
In our disconcerting world, it's a comfort to dangle along a dwarf-carved precipice, and examine the ice of ten thousand years ago.
The entire German bit of the Alps today contains just four tiny glaciers, none of them expected to survive beyond 2030.
This is the Bergentrückung or motif A 571 "Cultural hero asleep in mountain".
Class!
Terrific piece of writing!
Great pics, amazing topic.
(Maybe there really was a race of dwarves in those mountains, once upon a time.)