Excerpt from The Overland Monthly

I made their acquaintance on my way from the Bernese Oberland to the Valais, in a train of the Lotschberg railroad which, since 1913, has become the connecting link between the two great cantons of Berne and Valais. They were an elderly couple, in the quaintest garb I had yet beheld, but their ruddy complexioned, wrinkled faces radiated such happiness, such exaltation as one only finds on the countenance of a youngster who has been presented with some marvelous, unexpected gift. - "Wonderful, wonderful" the old old lady would rapturously repeat from time to time. "I never thought that I would live to experience this," the old man would respond. "To think that we ever could have been afraid," they would then both whisper with a smile, and, gradually, I learned that they were homeward bound from the very first excursion they had ever made in their lives by train - and both were over sixty years old!

"But how can this be possible?" I queried in honest amazement, "when almost every famous mountain peak in Switzerland can be reached by train?" And then they began to tell me of their home, situated in the Lotschen Valley, a diminutive Alpine vale traversed by the tempestuous Lonza, which, although populated, did not even possess a carriage road up to the summer of 1921. "A true specimen of a sequestered paradise'" I mused, and as I had just reached that point when I was beginning to long for explorations off the beaten path, I decided upon a change in my itinerary and left the train after it pulled out of the great tunnel at Goppenstein in company of my newly-made acquaintances who, as I presently perceived through their explanations, were unusually well versed in the history of this district.

While this valley rises in a length of 26 Km. from Gampel, in the Rhone Valley, to the Lang Glacier, the cradle of the Lonza, the inhabited middle-portion only, between Ferden and Gletscheralp, is known as the Lotschen Valley. Excavations have shown, however, that this part of the country was already frequented in pre-Roman times and historical records indicate that the Middle Ages saw many a bitter struggle fought in this Alpine vale.

Owing to their natural seclusion the Lotschen people were always dependent upon their own resources, upon the harvests from their fields and meadows which, on account of the dry climate of this region, they have to cultivate by means of artificial irrigation. Some of these canals were pointed out to me by my companions. Huge, crudely hollowed-out tree trunks are used for bringing the fertile glacier streams from perilous mountain heights down on the farmland. Sometimes the distance is so great that a single water conduit numbers as many as 400 channels and it can readily be imagined that the construction and maintenance of these irrigation canals is a most dangerous task.

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