A Few Moments During a Week Spent Backpacking in the Swiss Alps

As we climbed, the walls of the gorge rose until they blotted out all but a narrow strip of sky. Streams, carrying meltwater from the glaciers high above us, boiled down ravines and over lichen-covered boulders. They speckled the silty, mud-white surface of the river with pools of alpine blue. The depths of this massive cleft were occasionally blurred in foggy murk, while at other times, the high-altitude sun brushed the tips of the granite towers rising on either side of me.

None of the adjectives that are usually applied to mountain scenery are adequate here. Indeed, the word ‘scenery’ is comically inappropriate. ‘Splendor’ or ‘grandeur’ are useless words, if one is trying to convey the feeling of this tremendous canyon that twists narrow and dark and deep for mile after mile after mile.

Gazing upward, the gray-brown crags, sheer precipices, and steep slopes almost make me forget that below, where the river changes to a deep emerald-green and sometimes tumbles into a dazzle of white foam, exists a kingdom of vegetation.

As the river has found the only possible way through this formidable knot of mountains, there is no alternative but to follow it. Without traveling through this gulch on foot, there is no way to conceive of its drama.

I felt the transformation in the features of the light before I actually noticed where I was. Grinding down a long, plunging decline in late afternoon, the sky brightened. The claustrophobic ravine walls widened, gradually decreased in altitude, and then gently rolled out into the distance, before rising again into the ring of snow-capped giants that surrounded the valley before me. By the time we accelerated onto flatland at the bottom of the pass and through another descending notch in the geology, the river unclenched its muscles and relaxed into a clear, meandering, lake-like width.