In Austrian Alps, a not-so-glacial retreat - Europe - International Herald Tribune

In Austrian Alps, a not-so-glacial retreat - Europe - International Herald Tribune: "The glacier is broad and grand, like the river of ice it is, and yet something about it is visibly not right, and you can tell right away what it is from the steep cable car that was built a bit over 40 years ago to take tourists from the heights above down to the glacier itself.

'When it was built, it went right down to the glacier,' said Erhard Trojer, owner of the Hotel L�rchenhof in the nearby ski resort village of Heiligenblut.

But now, if you stand at the bottom of the cable car run and look down at the tourists disporting themselves on the glacier, it is as though you are looking at them from an airplane.

'It's going down from four to eight meters a year,' said Trojer, who grew up in this valley. 'In the early 1960s, they used to have a ski race every spring from the top of the Grossglockner to the bottom of the glacier.'

The Grossglockner, which looms above the Pasterze, is, at 3,798 meters, or 12,460 feet, Austria's highest mountain.

'They can't do it anymore,' Trojer said a bit sadly. 'It's warmed up, and there isn't enough snow.'

Austria's glaciers - there are 925 of them - are shrinking fast, and as they shrink, this part of the world is slowly losing one of its many attractions, those rivers of ice that, figuratively and almost literally, reflect the grandeur of the mountains around them."