I just enjoyed watching your show on Interlaken.
I skied the area with my family for over twenty years, starting in ’66.
I was there for Grindelwald’s 100th anniversary and read the following at a reception.
My reading was translated to German and French as I read. I looked out at several people who were in tears.

I had a fine and grand sight before me. The mighty dome of the Jungfrau was softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by starlight. There was something subduing in the influence of that silent, and solemn, and awful presence. One seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face; and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rock and ice. A spirit which looked down through the slow drift of the ages upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them, and would judge a million more. A spirit that would still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life had gone and the earth was a vacant desolation.

While feeling these things, I was groping without knowing it, toward an understanding of the spell which people find only in the Alps. A strange nameless influence, which once felt, cannot be forgotten, and leaves behind a restless longing to feel it again. A longing which is like a homesickness, a grieving haunting yearning which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will.

I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who came from far away countries to roam the Swiss Alps year after year. They could not explain why. They first came out of curiosity because everyone talked about it. They continued to come because they could not help it. They would return so long as they lived, for the same reason. They had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it was futile. Now they had no desire to break them.

Others came nearer expressing their inner feelings: They could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled. All frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benign serenity of the Alps. The great spirit of the mountain breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them. They could not think base thoughts, nor do mean or sordid things here before the visible throne of God.


From: A TRAMP ABROAD
by: Mark Twain

I don’t think anyone could, or ever will, say it better.

Another item of note was the James Bond movie, On Her Majesties Secret Service, was filmed there in ’69. We quite often skied past filming crews. The movie played in Grindelwald for about twenty years.

Thanks for a good show,

Ron Dunn