Alpine Points of View - A Collection of Alpine Images

An inspirational book of 100 of the author’s favourite alpine photographs and reminiscences from his four decades of walking and trekking on Alpine trails – from the Maritime Alps behind Nice to the Julian Alps of Slovenia. This book seduces the reader out of the armchair and into Europe’s premier range.

Alps Upon Alps

In the south-east corner of Switzerland, not far from the Italian border and 700 metres above the valley bed, the abrupt slope suddenly eases to a shelf of pasture, not level but rolling with hillocks and hollows, in one of which a pool mirrors distant peaks and glacial curtains. Up there above the chestnut woods, beyond roads and villages, beyond the reach of electricity and piped water, a handful of men and women spend their summers grazing cattle and making cheese in one of a row of timber-and-stone buildings snug against the next steep rise.

I’ve known this alp for almost 40 years. Many’s the time I’ve puffed my way up the seemingly never-ending path that battles among clumps of wild raspberry and rosebay willowherb, and emerged from woodland at last to crest the final bluff with more than a smile of relief at the familar vista spread before me.

I was there again a few weeks ago, at the tail end of a long, dry summer, to be confronted by a parade of ragged spire and shrinking icefield, pushed unbelievably high out of valleys whose depth could only be guessed. It shook me, as it always shakes me, with surprise – the surprise of the familiar that caught my breath and briefly moistened an eye.

Across the arterial valley that pushes into Italy, a tributary glen cuts into the wall of mountains directly opposite the alp of which I write, so that one’s gaze penetrates right to its head. From shadow to sunshine, and from sub-tropical ferns and forest brushed with Lombardy’s breath, that tributary leads the eye to abrupt granite fence-posts, slabs and snow-trimmed peaks – some of which carry the Italian border, while others divide one Swiss valley from another. There are blades of rock up there like bayonet spikes; stiletto spires and smooth-walled cirques tower over moraines formed by glaciers that no longer exist. On one of those moraines there’s a mountain hut of the Swiss Alpine Club; another stands on a shelf of rock gained by a path of unrelenting steepness – the two being linked by as exciting a four-hour trek as you could possibly wish to tread.

All that was a backdrop, though; something on which to focus my gaze as, sprawling on the grass of the alp, I breathed the fragrance of sun-dried vegetation, strained my ears to the myriad sounds that townsfolk imagine to be silence, soaked up the view and reckoned – not for the first time this summer – that I’d found heaven.

Heaven in a View

To those of us who are drawn year by year to the mountains, who spend our winters reliving yesterday’s scenes and anticipating tomorrow’s, there really can be what seems like heaven in a view.

Long before our time John Ruskin, that Victorian arbiter of natural beauty who wandered the Alps during much of the Golden Age and became one of its most influential troubadours, claimed that mountains were ‘the beginning and end of all natural scenery’. Were that all he had to say on the subject, we who are also smitten might applaud his opinion. But then we discover that, despite his great love of the Alps, in a fit of ill-judged discrimination he dismissed much that the mountains have to offer. ‘All the best views of hills’, he wrote, ‘are at the bottom of them’.

At the bottom of them?

On the other hand some find satisfaction only in dramatic scenes of vertical rock or narrow crests of ice, and rejoice in the gymnastics that bought them that view. Exciting though they certainly are, to my mind summit or ridge-top views often lack one essential - the contrast of colour, tone and texture. True, the tock sometimes wears a palette of lichen; ice can fold into turquoise shadow; while snowfields soften blue or take on the blush of sunrise and sunset. But the basic ingredients are missing.

To make the view complete, to bring heaven and earth, so to speak, my preference is for a mid-mountain vantage point. Neither valley bed nor lofty summit, but somewhere in between, this allows you to gage both height and depth, to appreciate meadow and glacier, stand of pine and bare rockface; to look up and down in a single glance and absorb the best of both worlds. In short, alps upon the Alps.