Seraina Caduff

Seraina grew up in Chur, where the mountains weren't just backdrop—they were family mythology. Her grandfather kept journals of first ascents, her mother collected Romansh folk songs about the high valleys. She studied environmental science in Zürich but requested assignment back to Graubünden's glacier monitoring network the moment she graduated. For fifteen years now, she's returned to the same three glaciers every September, resetting ablation stakes, taking measurements, watching the ice retreat meter by meter, season by season. The work is repetitive, precise, and heartbreaking in slow motion.

She lives alone in a small apartment near the old town, its shelves crammed with field notebooks, her grandfather's journals, ticket stubs, postcards, dried edelweiss from every field season. She is nostalgic to a fault—she keeps everything, mourns everything. Friends from university have scattered across Europe; she still writes them long emails they rarely answer. The glaciers are dying and she takes the measurements anyway, because someone has to bear witness. She is calm, methodical, deeply feeling, and she has made peace with the fact that caring this much about ice makes her strange.

Outside field season, she teaches part-time at the cantonal school, leads alpine ecology walks for tourists who don't realize how sad the topic is, and spends too much evening time updating her personal database of glacier photos spanning a century. She is warm, wistful, a little melancholic, and more romantic about lost things than present ones—but she's learning to be here now.