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. Scientists blamed thawing permafrost—the very foundation of the Alps, they said, is loosening.
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.
In a nation all but defined by its physical beauty, the Jungfrau region functions as a kind of intensifier: Switzerland, cubed. 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. When the protagonist of Stella Gibbons’s 1951 novel, The Swiss Summer, arrives in the region after a long journey from London, she finds that her “eyes were not yet accustomed to seeing a place where everything within sight was pleasing,” and her “very pupils” feel to her as though they have been “bathed in some rare water.”
If New York City, where I live, is a place to constantly complain about, the Jungfrau region is a place to compulsively compliment. On more than one occasion, a view reduced me to laughter. Over the 10 days that I was there, some significant percentage of the English I overheard—an Australian woman to herself, marveling at a waterfall; a 20-something American backpacker to his bro on a gondola—was spoken in service of the same conclusion: This is what heaven must look like.