Visiting the Rhône Glacier & Furka Pass from 1990

Death of an Ice Giant: My Visits to the Rhône Glacier & Furka Pass from 1990 

There is a kind of sadness in outliving a landscape. When we think of extinction, we usually picture animals - the dodo, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, etc. But over the course of my own lifetime, I have watched a massive, multi-million-ton geological giant wither, slowly vanish, and alter beyond all recognition.

I first visited Switzerland’s Furka Pass as a tourist in 1990. Over the decades, I have returned to its sweeping switchbacks, noting the quiet, devastating retreat of the legendary Rhône Glacier through my camera lens. To truly understand what has been lost across this timeline, one has to understand the deep, grand history of this high-alpine gateway…

Brief History of the Pass & the Ice Giant

For centuries, the Furka Pass - sitting at 2,429 m (7,969 feet) - served as a rugged, but treacherous trade route connecting the cantons of Valais and Uri. Long before tourists arrived, traders braved the elements on foot and muleback, navigating past the towering snout of the Rhône Glacier, which once reached all the way down into the valley to Gletsch.

The landscape transformed completely in the mid-19th century when the Swiss military built the modern, sweeping pass road in 1867, inadvertently opening the floodgates for early alpine tourism.

Around the same time, local ice-cutters began carving a walkable tunnel straight into the glacier every spring, creating one of the earliest and most famous roadside glacier attractions in the world.

The Legendary Hotel Belvédère: High Society to Hollywood

Perched on a razor-sharp hairpin curve with an impossible view, the Hotel Belvédère became the undisputed crown jewel of the pass. Its story began in 1882, when a visionary hotelier named Josef Seiler bought a small plot of land on the ridge. 

What started as a modest, single-story wooden building quickly evolved into a grand architectural marvel. By 1904, the Seiler family had added a striking stone tower and a mansard roof, transforming the Belvédère into a luxury hotel that defined the glamour of Europe's Belle Époque.

During this golden age of tourism, travelers didn’t just visit for an afternoon - they stayed for weeks. The hotel became an exclusive retreat for the wealthy elite, royalty, and high society from London, Paris & Berlin. 

Guests arrived in style via horse-drawn carriages, seeking the pure, crisp mountain air and the thrill of looking directly out of their bedroom windows into the glowing blue crevasses of the glacier snout.

This sparked an intense, million-franc "Hotel Arms Race" across the peak. Rival hotelier Franz Karl Müller fiercely built out the competing Hotel Furkablick and Hotel Furka, leading both owners to aggressively add grand floors and sprawling architectural wings just to outdo each other's panoramic glacier views. The logistics behind running these architectural giants were brutal. 

Every October, the families had to "hibernate" the massive properties - completely draining every single water pipe, cutting the power, and boarding up the structures to survive the crushing weight of winter snowpacks. 

Every spring, because the pass road was still buried under meters of snow, the operators literally had to fly into the hotels via helicopter just to dig out the roofs and start prepping the properties for the summer season! 

The area hosted incredibly high-profile historical figures. Queen Victoria traveled up to Gletsch on August 23, 1868, famously writing in her journal about enjoying a delicious cup of tea right at the edge of the glacier valley. Decades later, Pope John XXIII (then Cardinal Roncalli) also checked into the Hotel Belvédère to admire the spectacular view.

As the decades marched on, the nature of travel shifted. Carriages gave way to sleek, modern cars, & the Furka Pass road became a legendary proving ground for sports cars. The hotel’s unique location solidified its place in pop culture in 1964, when Hollywood arrived. 

The Belvédère served as a prominent backdrop for the iconic car chase in the James Bond film Goldfinger, cementing the hotel and the pass as a global bucket-list destination for generations of movie buffs and road-trippers. It was this grand, historical alpine playground - still buzzing with the energy of its storied past - that I stepped into for my first visit…

Chapter 1: 1990 – A Golden Era of Blue Ice

In the summer of 1990, the Rhône Glacier didn’t require an expedition to find - it greeted you right at the edge of the road. Pulling up to the iconic, curved stone walls of the Hotel Belvédère, the energy around the mountain pass was electric. 

The grand hotel had just officially reopened its doors to overnight guests that very season after a massive, multi-year restoration project by the Carlen family. 

The site was alive with travelers, classic cars, and the iconic yellow Swiss Postautos navigating the tight curves. To see the ice, you simply stepped into the Gletscher-Souvenirs shop, paid a modest fee, and walked out the back door. Instantly, you were face-to-face with a towering, brilliant wall of glacial ice. 

A short, completely level wooden boardwalk delivered you straight into the mouth of the Eisgrotte - a 100m-long tunnel carved by hand directly into the living glacier.

Stepping out of the warm summer sun into that cavern was an incredible sensory shock. The light inside was a dense, luminous sapphire. It glowed from within because the immense pressure of the glacier had squeezed out every pocket of air, leaving only a deep blue wavelength to filter through. The sudden, bone-chilling frost hit your skin immediately, a stark contrast to the warmer mountain air outside. 

A constant, rhythmic, hollow dripping echoed down the frozen tunnels as the outer shell of the glacier gently sweated, and deep inside the winding path, a pair of life-sized ice bears, beautifully sculpted by local ice-cutters right out of the frozen alcoves, stood as silent sentinels. It felt massive. It felt permanent. It felt indestructible…

Chapter 2: 2016 – Intermediary Shift – Driving Past the Void

26 years later, in September 2016, I found myself driving along the Furka Pass once again. I didn't stop long this time, but as I rolled past the familiar hairpin turn, I captured a few photographs that documented a brutal geological turning point. 

The illusion of permanence from 1990 was shattered. Looking out the window toward the gift shop and ticket office, the ice was entirely gone from the plateau. 

The roaring blue wall of my first visit had pulled back, replaced by a newly formed, still-expanding proglacial meltwater lake. The water sat directly behind the gift shop, filling the crater where millions of tons of solid ice used to rest level with the road. I didn't pull over that day. 

Seeing the void from the window of a passing car felt like catching a glimpse of an old friend who had grown suddenly frail. The glacier was no longer a roadside companion; it was retreating up the mountain, leaving a gray, liquid footprint in its wake…

Chapter 3: 2023 – A Journey Through Time, Stone & Shrouded Ice

In 2023, I returned for a third visit, this time planning a deeper, immersive route through the geography of the pass. This was no casual stroll; it was a serious high-alpine trek covering roughly 15 km with a grueling 1,100m of vertical elevation. I began my journey in grand style, boarding the historic Furka Steam Railway in Realp - see my other article. 

Riding that vintage, beautifully restored steam locomotive as it chugged and hissed its way over & through the mountains felt like stepping straight into a 19th-century landscape. 

When the train rolled into Gletsch, I stepped off to explore. I visited the old train station office, soaking in the immaculate railway history, before walking through the quiet mountain village. I spent a quiet moment by the historic blue-roofed Anglican church, then followed the path out toward the old valley ruins, where historical moraines show where the glacier's snout had reached over a century ago. 

Long before I hit these trails, this terrain bore witness to one of the greatest "mind melds" in human history: in the summer of 1913, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie went on a family hiking trip right here, passionately debating his unfinished Theory of General Relativity while walking the Gletsch paths. 

Hiking past the historic Grand Hotel Glacier du Rhône in the valley, I noticed it was blanketed in active construction. The landmark, owned by the canton, is undergoing a massive multi-million-franc stabilization and renovation to preserve it for future generations, with a slated reopening in 2029.

Looping back up toward the railway line, reality set in: there is no direct footpath linking the valley floor to the face of the glacier. To see the ice, I had to begin the massive climb up the sweeping switchbacks of the pass toward the Hotel Belvédère… 

As my boots ate up the vertical meters, the mountain put on a spectacular display. The physical exertion was rewarded by breathtaking vistas of towering alpine peaks, the rush of wild mountain rivers, and beautiful, crashing waterfalls fed by the high snowpacks. 

But as I finally neared the top of that 1,100m climb, the raw beauty of the running water gave way to a stark geological truth, and the sheer weight of visual memory clashed brutally with the landscape before me. 

The roadside entrance I walked through in 1990 was a distant ghost. The glacier had completely surrendered the rocky plateau. I was struck by a profound sense of shock at the sheer volume of bare, gray, exposed rock stretching right up to the doorstep of the hotel. The mountain had been stripped completely bare…

The glacial lake I had glimpsed in 2016 had grown massive and deep, filling the void where a solid wall of pure ice once sat level with the parking lot. The hotel itself sat permanently shuttered and empty, a ghostly monument. From the pass, I hiked further up above the glacier to stand near the rugged high-altitude source of the Rhône River. 

Peering down at the shrinking ice tongue from above, a sadness washed over me. Instead of the raw, towering crystal wall of my youth, the glacier was draped in massive, insulating tarpaulins - a desperate, artificial attempt to shield it from the blazing summer sun.

Down below, the entrance to the ice cave was technically still operating, but I couldn't bring myself to go down. I was simply too sad to pay an admission fee to see a once-majestic giant reduced to a patient on life support, swathed in plastic sheets. Turning back along the road to the Furka passhole to complete my 15km trek, the contrast felt absolute…

Chapter 4: 2026 – The Final Silence of the Ice

This year, in September 2026, the final chapter of the Rhône Glacier tourist era was officially written. The doors didn’t just close; they were locked by law. Following a protracted legal and environmental battle, the Valais cantonal authorities stepped in and ordered the absolute, permanent cessation of all tourist operations at the site. The landscape had simply become too volatile to manage.

The permafrost melting that I witnessed accelerating in 2023 had reached a critical tipping point. The steep, rocky cliffs framing the approach have become deeply unstable, creating an obvious, catastrophic risk of rockfalls and landslides onto the lower footpaths. 

At the same time, authorities cracked down on the massive fleece insulation blankets I had seen draping the ice tongue, ruling that the microplastics and unauthorized excavations violated federal protections. The blankets were ordered off, and the mountain was left to face the sun alone…

Today, you can no longer hike down to the water from the Belvédère. You cannot buy a ticket. The chainsaws that buzzed every springtime of my life to carve out that incredible 100m blue freezer have been packed away for good. The area has been returned entirely to nature and a peaceful silence…

Chronological Review: A Lifetime of Change (1961–2026)

When we step away from human memory and look at the hard data collected by glaciologists over my lifetime, the story of the Rhône Glacier reads like a dramatic, and worrying decline.

1960s & 1970s (My Childhood): a Frozen Advance

During the first two decades of my life, the glacier was surprisingly stable and thick. Due to a series of unusually cool summers and heavy winter snowpacks across the central Alps, the glacier actually went on a minor advance. It crept forward by dozens of meters and gained significant depth, building up the heavy, dense structural mass that would set the stage for the tourism boom to follow.

1980s (My Twenties): a High-Water Mark

The minor advance peaked in 1987. Throughout this decade, the glacier snout remained aggressively pushed up against the rocky plateau right behind the Hotel Belvédère, resting just steps away from the road. The ice was at its modern maximum thickness over the grotto area, filtering sunlight into the intensely deep sapphire hue I would encounter at the decade's close.

1990s (My Thirties): On a Cliff Edge

Right around the time of my first visit in 1990, the tide turned permanently. The brief advance halted, and global warming triggered a continuous, accelerated retreat. Over this decade, the glacier lost roughly 10% of its total mass. The thick ice tongue began to flatten, and the snout started to thin out and slip away from the upper edges of the plateau terrace.

2000s & 2010s (My Forties & Fifties): a Great Retreat & the Birth of the Void

The retreat shifted into hyper-drive, between 2000 and 2020, the glacier lost a staggering 100m (over 320 feet) in structural height & vertical depth. By 2005, the ice snout pulled back completely off the roadside shelf, exposing the bare bedrock basin. Deprived of solid ice, the basin filled with glacial meltwater, giving birth to the proglacial lake I would photograph from my car in 2016.

2020s to 2026 (My Sixties): Collapse and Isolation

Over the last five years alone, Swiss glaciers shed an unprecedented 20% of their entire total ice volume. On the exposed glacier tongue below the Belvédère, the ice was losing up to 4m of thickness in single summer seasons. By the time of my hike in 2023, the majestic ice giant was reduced to a shrunken, gray, dirt-stained remnant requiring artificial blankets to exist. 

In 2026, with the ice dangerously thin and the surrounding mountain walls structurally collapsing, human access was closed permanently.

Final Thoughts: Remembering the Blue Giant

Having stood inside the deep sapphire heart of the glacier in 1990, I feel an overwhelming gratitude that I got to witness the Alps when they were still fiercely cold and whole. Nature has a way of changing quietly, but seeing the vast empty space where millions of tons of ice used to sit is a reminder that the places we love are transient and fragile...

Choosing not to descend to the ice cave in 2023 was my way of keeping my 1990 memory alive. My recollections of that vibrant blue ice cave, the sudden bite of the high-alpine cold, and the carved ice bears remain frozen in time, even if the glacier itself is not…

As noted, visits in 1990, 2016 & 2023. See my other articles on hiking & travel in the area. Contact me by email for photos or to ask questions.