Illegal excavation at 3000 meters? Trouble about Zermatt departure

Excavating work at an altitude of over 3000 meters because of a ski race? What is happening on the Theodul glacier near Zermatt is not only raising questions for Greenpeace.

20 October 2023

From: dpa/apa/sn

Dredging work on the Theodul glacier near Zermatt on a slope for planned ski World Cup races in November has caused outrage in Switzerland. Greenpeace Switzerland, along with other nature conservation organizations, suspects that some of the work is taking place outside the approved sports zone. Dredging on a glacier is problematic, said glacier researcher Matthias Huss in a broadcast by the station on Thursday SRF.

On Thursday evening, the canton's building commission ordered a halt to construction work outside the ski area zone. She will be making an inspection shortly to take action when all the facts are available. The decision can be appealed, she said.

“It doesn’t hurt the glacier much because that ice would probably have melted away next year anyway.” Matthias Huss, glacier researcher

“In the high mountains we usually find untouched nature and here we have construction work at over 3000 meters. It's definitely not good for the glacier. It loses mass locally where work is being done,” said Huss from the University of ETH Zurich. However, it must also be said that “climate change is much more dramatic”. The dredging on the glacier looks bad. “But it doesn’t hurt the glacier much because that ice would probably have melted away next year anyway.”

Nevertheless, says Huss, one has to ask whether such races need to take place in November instead of in late winter, when there is a lot of snow on the glaciers and designing the slopes would be easier. Snow sports will be possible on glaciers in late winter for a long time, said Huss. In early winter, however, massive interventions are necessary to make the slopes snow-sure.

Premieres November 11th

The race track is called Gran Becca and would be the highest in the World Cup. The starting point would be at an altitude of 3720 meters on the Theodul Glacier in Switzerland. The route then leads to Cervinia in Italy and ends at 2835 meters. Last year the premiere was canceled and all planned runs had to be canceled due to lack of snow.

For this year, the dates were pushed back by two weeks and larger snow depots were created to prepare the slopes. The men's races are scheduled to take place on November 11th and 12th and the women's races on November 18th and 19th.

Similar pictures from Sölden

At the end of September, Felix Neureuther had already called similar images of dredging work on Sölden's Rettenbach glacier "a catastrophe for skiing." In the Pizza & Fries podcast of Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), the former top German ski racer said: “I was speechless because of the pictures. They are very disturbing and simply out of date.”

He hopes that the World Ski Association FIS will give in: “Why don’t they check that the start of the World Cup should be postponed? I hope that there will now be a rethink when it comes to the calendar.”