The valley announces itself before the station does. The train from Interlaken slips between two walls of rock, and the world narrows to a green floor threaded by a river, under cliffs so sheer they seem drawn rather than built. Somewhere above, a ribbon of water leaves the rim and falls so far it turns to mist before it lands. Step down at Lauterbrunnen and the place has already rearranged what a landscape can be.
Seventy-two waterfalls are said to come off these walls, though a count from the valley floor tends to give up somewhere in the teens, which is the honest number. The famous one is the Staubbach, almost three hundred metres off a bare cliff in a single fall, thunderous in spring and, by August, barely there. It is worth standing under once. After that the reward is the unnamed rest: the small falls that only show after rain, the cowbells, the smell of cut grass and cold stone.
Lauterbrunnen makes the obvious base, and the first day belongs to the valley floor: flat, walkable and mostly free. The lane to Stechelberg runs past barns and meadows to the Trümmelbach, ten glacier-fed falls thundering through the rock itself, lit and laddered so visitors can climb up among them. The climb goes through noise and spray and comes out at the top wet through; there is no standing still inside a waterfall.
There is only one sensible way out of the valley, and that is straight up. No road reaches the villages on the western shelf, so a cable car hauls travellers out of Lauterbrunnen and a small train trundles the rest of the way to Mürren, a single street of dark timber hung above the drop. Across the gulf of air stand the three everyone comes for, the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, close enough to read the weather off their faces. On a clear day it is worth carrying on up: the cableway to the Schilthorn ends at a revolving terrace where the panorama runs to the horizon and turns through a full circle twice.
The third day belongs to the railway, because here the railway is the point. From the other shoulder of the valley, a cogwheel train climbs through Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg, a windswept saddle laid right at the foot of the Eiger's north face. This is where the lines meet, and where the most improbable of them begins: the Jungfrau Railway, bored straight up through the mountain in the early years of the last century, climbing in the dark to the highest station in Europe.
No one conquers these mountains. They lend a clear morning, then take it back before the cloud comes in.
The train surfaces at the Jungfraujoch into thin air and hard light, the long white tongue of the Aletsch, the largest glacier in the Alps, curving away below as if the whole range had been poured and frozen. Go early. The summit makes its own weather, and a clear nine o'clock can be a whiteout by noon. This is no place to linger; take the scale in on the move, before the cloud comes down and takes it back.
The last evening belongs back down in the green, where after the glare of the snow the valley feels almost tropical, loud with water and warm with hay. Dinner comes early, and the lane is worth a slow walk as the cliffs turn from gold to violet and the Staubbach keeps falling somewhere in the dark. Five nights is enough to learn the shape of the place, and nowhere near enough to leave it willingly.
