MAGIC MOUNTAINS: THE SWISS BERNESE ALPS

            The Lauterbrunnen Valley in the Swiss Bernese Alps is what spawned the cheesy Swiss calendars we’ve all seen in auto repair shops and in doctor’s waiting rooms.  It is the Alps of pancake house placemats, and collectible porcelain figures that grandmothers are fond of.  But this mountain-lined valley is the reality behind the cliché.  It’s Helen – the face that launched a thousand ships and sparked the Trojan Wars.  It’s Cleopatra as played by Elizabeth Taylor – hopelessly, unmatchably beautiful.  It’s beauty defined in granite and lush grasses and towering glaciers.

            The Lauterbrunnen Valley lies above Interlaken, which is a touristy-cute town between two lakes.  To get to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, you must take a little yellow or orange train to Lauterbrunnen, the town that lies along the valley floor.  From Lauterbrunnen you can take a cable car up a steep mountain face to a tiny train station, and catch an even smaller, one-carriage train into Murren, a car-free village cupped in a cleft in the mountains.  Or from Lauterbrunnen, you can take a little train that grinds its way straight up the opposite mountain’s face to Wengen, another car-free village that’s bigger than tiny Murren but still a one-street affair. 

Either choice brings you chin to chin with the big mountains.  Either choice requires that you climb out of the Lauterbrunnen Valley into the heart of the Alps, which grandfathered the valley a long millennia ago.  The valley winds along at the foot of the mountains, carved by glaciers that bullied their way through stone.  Water trumped rock.  The weight of snow, the probing fingers of ice, the eroding drip, drip, drip of meltwater, the flowing sheets of waterfalls, made a deep cleft in granite.  The valley was born.

Now it is an emerald green expanse of fields and trees, farmed in tidy squares and marked with the red tile-roofed houses of Lauterbrunnen.  Waterfalls fed by glaciers cascade down the sides of the mountains.  They have been counted at 72, but there are arteries of waterfalls and spidery veins of them, too, conveying the life-blood of water from the glacier-smothered mountain tops.  At night, the town of Lauterbrunnen shines a huge electric light on the biggest waterfall, casting a beam upwards from the valley floor onto this shimmering sheet of water.  We hiked up the side of the mountain and stood behind the waterfall in a cleft carved out by some enterprising engineers nearly a hundred years ago.  I stood on the water-slicked gray rock, a shimmer of waterfall flying by my face, both inside the mountain and clinging to it side, simultaneously.

It’s the mountains, though, that draw my eye, beyond the cascades of water and green valley and cute little villages.  The big three tower above at all times:  the Eiger, its faced sheered off by glaciers.  On one side, it’s a pointy mountain.  On the other side, it is a flat surface, one half of its triangular apex surgically removed by the crushing weight of glaciers.   Beside it is Monch, with jagged edges.  And beside it the mighty Jungfrau.  The mountain top is a half-circle with ragged edges scratching at the sky.  Its concave side, also collapsed by glaciers, swoops up into a series of points and peaks, as if the force of the glacier smashing down the side of the mountain caused a new rock formation to burst out.  After the Jungfrau there are more peaks and serrated tips, massive knobs and cones of stone:  a mountain range of grandfathers lining the valley.

Glaciers lie in the folds of the mountains.  Some look exactly like what they are:  frozen rivers of snow, caught in a tumble down the mountain in a time-lapse of sub-freezing temperatures, which have trapped the gurgling liquid movement of river into a frozen expanse of ice.  Rims of snow line the jagged edges of the very tops of the mountains.  The snow hangs off the mountain, a lip of whiteness stories high.  The snow is frozen motion.  Movement arrested in mid-air.

What makes these mountains so extraordinary is that they are touchably close.  The air is so clear it nearly shimmers.  It is the difference between tapwater and spring water: both are water, but the quality of the two is very different.  Here the air is clear to the point of near liquidity.  Distances are collapsed.  You feel like you can reach out, from the trail or the hotel window alike, reach out and touch the mountains, they feel so close, so unseparated from the viewing eye.

In the face of this grandeur, I cannot look away.