INTRODUCTION It is already getting dark. Somewhere behind me I can sense the silhouette of the Julian Alps and their trademark Triglav pyramid. Back on the left hand side, the darkening ridge of the Karavanke is disappearing, beyond which the lights of towns and villages in Austrian Carinthia are already coming on. Below me run the serrated ridges of the Kamnik Alps. On the left are Grintavec, Skuta, Planjava and Ojstrica glowing red. To the right the light on the Krvavec transmitter is blinking. The mountains are covered in deep, newly fallen January snow. The winter sun has already gone behind the Julian ranges and has sunken into the misty plains of northern Italy. The sky is red, yellow, and the high cirrus are violet. It is completely still. The noise of the microlight plane is lost in the descending night. It is probably disturbing no one, since it is flying high above the ridges. Here and there I put the aircraft into a gentle left turn, to see if there are any new natural wonders taking place behind me. I am completely relaxed. I switched off my radio connection, since up here I’m not really going to encounter anyone. My headphones fill me with the sounds of the MP3 player. Mark Knopfler is followed by Vlado Kreslin, then there is Joe Cocker and Enya. An endless cycle of great musicians strum in tranquil satisfaction and bring tears to my eyes. I open the window and put my nose to the small opening, inhaling deeply and stealing molecules of oxygen from the rushing flow of cold air. I look for my camera with my right hand. I put it up to my left eye. I wait until the image I like comes into the viewfinder. I press the shutter and suddenly there go ten shots. The final memory card is full, and I hope that I’ll finally run out of beautiful views. Today has been a long day. It started in the early morning dark somewhere near Grenoble in the French Alps. The sun was gilding the icy slopes and glaciers of Mt. Blanc. The yawning crevasses were soft and warm. There was nothing sharp or dangerous even in the images of the ridges. A very strong east wind was blowing, but on the windward sides it was calm. When the aircraft went around to the other side, too far west, it suddenly found itself in an invisible dance of swirling air which threw it about like a dry oak leaf in the final gusts of autumn wind, already carrying with it the scent of snow. In the distance I could make out the sharpened horn of Cervinia in Italy which turns into the Swiss Matterhorn behind the Hörnli ridge. It was still early and the sun was still lighting up the vertiginous northeast face, which runs the famous Schmid route, the Alpine classic. I had always been “saving up” this route for my older years, until the old unclimbed route became just one more unfulfilled dream. Then for a few more moments I photographed away wildly. How many peaks there are here! I don’t know the name of many of them. Famous and less famous rock faces come and go and I have the feeling that my past life is quickly unfolding in front of my eyes. I can look at my life from afar, from one side, and it appears to me in a different light. The altitude is 4,300 metres. Perhaps the rapid ascent and lack of oxygen are the cause of my numb fingers tingling with the sensation of needles. The Alps are an exceptional and unusual environment. Like a giant banana they stretch from Liguria around to the Gulf of Trieste. On satellite images they look like a kind of seam joining the Apennine peninsula with the main European continent. Alpine ridges range off into infinity. The great altitude spanning from the green valleys to the white peaks have always represented a barrier to people travelling, and also for shifting air masses. The Alps create their own peoples, customs and their own weather, which affects flora, life and development. When you are down in the middle of a tropical forest, where every step is an effort, where every direction means several days of arduous trekking, it is hard to understand the importance, uniqueness, fragility and irreplaceable nature of that ecosystem. It is the same in the Alps. As an entire system with a unique living environment that creates similar climatic conditions, and that offers visitors similar pleasures and inhabitants the same opportunities. We can only really comprehend the mountain chain from a light aircraft which can fly low enough to take your breath away after flying over a knife-edge ridge, beyond which opens up an abyss thousands of metres deep above a dark valley. At the same time it can fly high enough for your gaze to halt only on the diminished distinguishability of infinity. It can fly slow enough for you to pick out people mowing grass in mountain pastures, cows chewing on their succulent morning cud, or a tailback of cars at a mountain pass; yet it can also fly fast enough for the Dolomite chain not to appear as a separate entity, but as continuing naturally into the Julian Alps on one side, the Orobie Alps on another side and the Zillertal Alps on the third side. They fuse into the ridges of the Carnian Alps in the north, and gradually roll down into the northern Italian plains. In just a few hours you can see the entire chain, gaining the feeling of an arc, and it seems that you could gently run your hand across this humpbacked “banana”, feeling all of its sharpness, warmth and fragility. Rocks and glaciers are no longer enduring monuments of time, but a vulnerable little piece of our planet for which we are responsible primarily because we ourselves think that we are stronger than time, harder than granite and wiser than the laws of nature. Ignorance, which is followed by arrogance and hatred, is reflected in the rivers of metal, in the hundreds of kilometres of steel boxes, in the tall chimneys of the deep valleys, the angular buildings on rounded pastures, in the designer shoes on deadly glaciers, and especially in the mind-set that the end justifies the means, that each person can grasp the greatness, the irreplaceable and unique nature of this environment simply by buying a ticket. The illusion of power evaporates in the disappearing glaciers, the mythical rock falls, the destructive avalanches, the apocalyptic floods. The Alps will remain a jewel of our planet if we do not remove their stormy peaks, shady ravines, unpredictable glaciers and their destructive forces, which can shake any person seeking to conquer them. They have become and will remain a linking element of a physical environment where the unwritten ethical rules of habitation are a subject of everyday life and not some worn out topic of philosophical, literary or political debate. Matevž Lenarčič