The hotel, open from May to October, is in the Gastemtal, one of the five high valleys above Kandersteg. The road to the valley is cut out of a limestone cliff. To the left, the Kander River smashes through boulders, and then you come our on the valley floor. It's like arriving in Shangri-la. On either side, cascades stream down thousands of feet of nearly vertical rock from snow peaks above. In several places warerfalls spurt right out of the rock. One winter Christian followed the frozen duct of one of these falls for half a mile into the bowels of the Balmhom, across rhe valley from the horel.
    When I saw him again afrer so many years, Christian had grown a mustache and married an Englishwoman named Ann; they had two children. He had basically stayed put, while I had traveled almost incessantly (in search of what, I no longer knew) and was in my third marriage. Despite these differences, the bond we had formed years ago was still there. Hermann Kunzi was 81 and still going strong. I found him milking his cows on the ground floor of his chalet, behind the horel. He recognized me right away, even rhough I was bearded and, as he pur it, "a bit dicker" -a remark that he punctuated with an explosion of laughter and a poke at my broadening waist. I introduced my sons. Andre had heard Hermann's laugh before and eventually connected it to another mountain man he knew, Warren Ashe, who delivers propane in the Adirondack village where I live. A lot of things here reminded us of home. The plants had a strong family resemblance to our flora. It was as if the Adirondacks were the Alps minus the top stories.

HERMANN AND I REMINISCED about an afternoon we'd spent together back in the midsixties. I'd been sraying at the inn for a couple of weeks, helping with chores. Hermann had shouldered a chain saw with a four-foot blade and handed me a bark peeler and a cant hook, and we'd climbed up to a wooded slope maybe 1,500 feet above the valley floor. There Hermann had dropped a huge larch, over a hundred feet rail, peeled it, and muscled the slippery pole down a streambed, over waterfalls, down scree, until at last it lay on the road in front of the hotel. I had really just tagged along, marveling at the spectacle, for the man, already in his fifties, made poetry out of collecting firewood.

      The boys were eager to get up to the snow, so late in the morning we set out for the Lotschengletscher, which spreads between the Balmhorn and the Hockenhorn, the next peak up the valley. In ancient times this notch was an important pass. The Romans used it while subduing the Helvetii, the local branch of the Celts, and in 1419 there was a pitched battle here berween the Valaisians and the Bernese.

      We climbed through a forest of birch, Arolla pine, and mountain ash loud with the rollicking, wrenlike song of chaffinches. It was the third week of August, and summer was already winding down. The flowerslobelias, gentians, buttercups, Queen Anne's lace, mimulus-were slightly past, and the butterflies were faded and tattered. This is where I am at 46, I mused as we drank tea and Coke at a trailside chalet: Summer is ending, the warranty has run out, and the knees are going, but the gut is here to stay.
We crossed the torrent coming down from the glacier and made our way up a boulder field to the old Roman route through the pass, which had been hacked out of a cliff and ascended in switchbacks. At the top of the cliff, above the snowline now, two chamois bucks stood silhouetted against the sky. I pointed out a stubby little mountain at the far end of the glacier-the 9,428-foot Mutthorn-tomorrow's destination. Then we turned back. The boys tore down the trail to Christian's like mountain goats, reminding me of my brother and myself in the fifties, leaving our parents in the dust. I proceeded slowly, testing the strength of joint and sinew, literally picking my way down, popping raspberries andjohannisbeeren, black currants. Firing up a Swiss cheroot on a bench beside a waterfall, I told myself I was going to have to make more time for the mountains. Like the British climber and poet Geoffrey Wmthrop Young, I had forgotten what they did for me.

    "Our vivid and daylong consciousness of the mountain, of each other, and of the drama which we and the mountain played out at length together cannot be faithfully reproduced," Young wrote in 1928.
"The mountaineer returns to his hills because he remembers always that he has forgotten so much." 

      Nothing worthwhile is accomplished unless there is a pain barrier to be broken through, I told Jerome and Alex, who were resting every ten feet as we climbed up to the Kanderfirn Glacier the next morning. Several tortoiseshell butterflies patrolled the glacier's edge, which we didn't reach until an hour and 15 minutes behind the estimated hiking time posted on a yellow sign we saw down in the valley. It had been a while since I was in a country where everything was so worked out. It kind of spoiled the fun.

      This was the first time, apart from a few hundred yards on the Lotschengletscher, that any of the boys had been on a glacier. I told them about my first time-on the Aletsch Glacier, in 1957. Our guide, Hans Burgener, from Grindelwald, kept pointing down into crevasses and saying, Dart is! HefT So-and-So, sporlaus verschwunden. There is Mr. So-and-So, lost without a trace. One of the disappeared was Hans's own father. The only trace that Hans found of him, decades after he plunged into a crevasse, was his gold watch, which had worked up to the surface. And it took more than 5,000 years for that Copper Age man to be regurgitated by a glacier in Austria a couple of years ago. There were mushrooms in his bag.

       At the end of the moraine we found tracks in the slushy snow and followed them to the Mutthornhtitte, nestled at the base of the mountain in an alcove. The hut's outhouses are as dramatic as those on the Hopi mesas, hundreds of feet above the Lauterbrunnental Valley. It was on a trip to these outhouses, during a freak August blizzard in 1961, that my mother heard 11 Boy Scouts and their scoutmaster from Birmingham, England, calling for help from below. We threw them a rope and pulled them up, one by one.

      Near the top of the Mutthom, we roped up, and I reviewed with the boys the sitting belay and how to climb with three points on the rock at all times-no knees allowed. At their age I had been as fanatic about rock climbing as they were about snowboarding. After school, my buddies and I would repair to the worn Appalachian slabs of Indian Hill with mail-order pitons and carabiners and a manila rope bought at the local hardware store. I devoured Edward Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps, which recounted the first ascent of the Matterhorn: how, coming down from the summit, the young climber Douglas Hadow slipped, dragging half of his party to the glacier 5,000 feet below; how the survivors staggered down the mountain to Zermatt, dazed by what the mountain had wrought. Another seminal book was Heinrich Harrer's The White Spidel; about the North Face of the Eiger. When I was 19, my father and brother and I attempted the Eiger's West Ridge, but our guide had a problem with schnapps and overslept, so we got up late and had to turn back at a point 300 feet below the summit, where we met a young Austrian guide named Adi Mayr coming down with his Australian client. Yodeling as he glissaded, Mayr seemed in great spirits. A few days later he attempted the first solo climb of the North Face. A crowd at the telescopes in Kleine Scheidegg watched him climb confidently to the White Spider, a snow sheet high on the face, where he bivouacked. But when he started climbing the next morning he seemed to have lost his confidence, or his will to live, and he fell to his death after only 50 yards. The papers reported that he had just split up with his girlfriend and speculated that she may have broken his heart.

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