"Standing among the Alps, it's easy to believe that they will last forever. They seem too big to fail, too old to change. This illusion of permanence has long entranced travelers who have visited to experience the intoxicating feeling of being daunted and dwarfed by a landscape's authority. But even mountains move: This past May an avalanche of ice and rock tore through the Lötschental Valley, erasing the village of Blatten in less than a minute."
"This slow, visible retreat of ice colors every breathless hike, every chilly swim, every preposterously pretty train ride. This can be felt especially sharply in the Jungfrau region, a high-altitude area south of Bern named for the tallest of the three great peaks around which its five small villages are gathered. A few ridges east of Blatten, its snowcapped summits tower above valleys that appear preserved from another century."
"Just as a foreigner might visit Texas to experience America at its biggest and most absurd, I came to experience Switzerland at its most visually extreme and aesthetically narcotic. The area's outrageous beauty-which has inspired everyone from Goethe and Lord Byron to J.R.R. Tolkien and my own husband, who, on our second day there, said it was the only place he's ever been that looks absolutely exactly as it does in photos-encourages a kind of descriptive rapture."
A visitor accompanied by family and friends delights in the simple pleasures of Switzerland's high-altitude Jungfrau region. The Alps appear eternal yet are shifting; a recent avalanche in the Lötschental Valley erased the village of Blatten in under a minute, with scientists blaming thawing permafrost. The visible retreat of ice now informs hikes, swims and train travel across jagged terrain. The Jungfrau area, south of Bern and centered on three great peaks with five small villages, amplifies Switzerland's famed beauty while also revealing environmental fragility at high altitude.
Read at Conde Nast Traveler
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