WE CHECKED OUT OF THE hut and were on the Kander firn Glacier by eight-myself and my rwo sons, Andre and Nick, and their school buddies Jerome and Alex. The snow was still frozen as we traversed beneath the long, jagged ridge of the Tschingelhorn, a bloom of sunlight projecting over us onto the rock walls across the glacier, five miles away. The air was clean and smelled of wood smoke.

     After 45 minutes we reached the Petersgrat, a 10,OOO-foot-high spine of pure snow with a sweeping view of the southern Alps. There they were: the Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, the Zinal Rothorn, Mont Blanc. Our plan was to descend intO the Lorschental, the valley that gaped thousands of feet before us. The way down wasn't exactly clear; whatever tracks there might have been to follow had been erased by wind. But I didn't think it was going to be a problem, because I'd made this descent rwice before: in 1961, when I was a teenager myself, with my dad and brother, and 20 years ago, honey mooning with my long-gone first wife. She was an ocean person, it turned out.

      There are actually three routes from the Petersgrat down intO the Lotschental, but we weren't able to find any of them. We ended up going too far down the Talgletscher, between two ribs known as the Chrindelspitzen and the Tellispitzen.- The snow gave way to corn ice laced with small crevasses that dropped off to a small lake maybe 700 feet below. This was definitely not the way. But it was only a short traverse to some rocks and then another down to the lake, below which we could see a trail. We could have climbed back up and descended the Chrindelspitzen, but we decided to take our chances on the rock.

      If we had had crampons, I wouldn't have had to chop steps. My fault: I was trying to keep everybody's weight to a minimum, and I didn't think we were going to need crampons on this rwoweek trek in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland, which wasn't supposed to involve anything hairy or technical.
The object was simply to revisit some of my childhood haunts, to take my boys to the high mountains that had once fed my imagination, in hopes that I might pass along the legacy of those days and this place.

     At least we had ice axes and a rope, and I remembered how to tie a bowline on a coil.  We roped up, and I made a loop for each of the boys to slip his ax-shaft into and showed them how to plunge the pick into the ice and belay in case one of us slipped-which, I added, was absolutely verboten. Reminding myself that Alex's dad was a successful personal-injury lawyer, I diligently hacked bigfoot steps that sent shards of ice skipping down to the lake, and the boys, belaying each other from above, followed one at a time.

     Suddenly, from close by, there was a thunderous roar, and an avalanche of blue ice that had broken off the glacier came crashing down a gully just beyond the rocks-right where I had planned for us to descend. Chastened, if not a bit paranoid, we picked our way nimbly down an outcrop until the last 20 feet, where there were no holds to be found. Heaving our packs to a snow patch below, we slid on our butts to a bed of crystals, landing next to each other. In some way, our proximity to disaster only heightened the moment-its beauty and dimension. If the boys hadn't understood the mountain's dichotomous moods- its sudden flashes of violence giving way to majestic calm -they were humbled by rhem now.

      IN 1951, WHEN I WAS FOUR AND MY brother was eight, my parents left us for two months in a camp in Gstaad, where we were fined ten centimes for every word of English we spoke. My roommate was the crown prince of Afghanistan, who was later assassinated. Our hiking boots had hobnails-the Vibram sole was still a few years in the future-and in them we scaled the surrounding sawtoothed summits.

     My parents fell in love with the Alps. We began to spend summers in Gstaad, and then we rented a chalet in nearby Gsteig, which was less glitzy but boasted a thundering waterfall (since siphoned off by a hydroelectric plant). In 1958 we discovered Kandersteg, a low-key resort, deep in rhe Bemese Oberland, catering mainly to the British middle class. Twenty years now since my last visit, the village, sprawled out along the Kander River, is unchanged. The hotel dining rooms are still filled with Brits taking their meals in silence.

     Our plan, hatched several months earlier after poring over maps and books in my parems' home, was to spend a week hut-hopping around Kandersteg, then to hike over a series of passes to Grindelwald, and from there to push on to Meiringen, best known as the birthplace of meringue and the place where Professor Moriarty pushed Sherlock Holmes into Reichenbach Falls. We would then return by train to Geneva. My parents are now in their midseventies, and alpine research is their spiritual practice. Their last major expedition was to the Pamirs, in central Asia, more than ten years ago. Since then Mom's health has declined, and their outings are limited to a daily walk in the local woods. So the boys and I would be doing this trip partly for them, too.

      My best friend in Kandersteg 30 years ago was a young mountain guide named Christian KUnzi. The Kunzis had been leading people through the high country for generations. Among the local guides listed for Kandersteg in the 1922 Baedeker's Switzerland are Joh., Peter, Gottfr., and Fritz Kunzi. Christian's father, Hermann, had guided roo, bur by the rime I knew him he had retired and was running a mountain inn above town. Christian and I did some memorable climbing in the early sixties. Now he was 51, and he was running rhe Hotel Steinbock.

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