Where tourists now
walk on a suspension
bridge, several hun-
dred feet above a
melt water torrent,
they used to walk
across ice on the snout
of Switzerland’s Trift
Glacier. The lake
didn’t exist before
this century; the
bridge was first built
in 2004. A power
company plans to
put a dam here.“The scales turned against mountain farming,”
he says. Some of his siblings left the secluded
valley, but he stayed.
Winter tourism, Wolf and other villagers reck-
oned, was the only thing that could save them. In
desperation, they sold livestock and put up their
land against loans to invest in a cable car. Ischgl
stood to lose everything, but the gamble paid off.
In 1963, the cable car began pulling tourists up
the mountains, and locals out of poverty. Around
the Alps, a similar transition was under way.
Today, a four-star hotel stands on the
400-year-old farm where Wolf was born. It’s
surrounded in Ischgl by luxury chalets with
Jacuzzis, fine restaurants, and a vibrant nightlifethe size of New York City within hours. Beyond
snow depots like Kitzsteinhorn’s, desperate
locals are swaddling the ice on a few of the Alps’
roughly 4,000 glaciers, to try to delay the rapid
melt caused by global warming. In one visionary
scheme, Swiss scientists hope to save a glacier by
spraying a swath of it with human-made snow.
Some of these methods are ingenious and
tantalizing; others are environmentally and
economically questionable. All are driven by a
profound apprehension: Without winter, what
would our lives here be?
LIKE BRENNSTEINER and photographer Ciril
Jazbec, I was lucky enough to grow up in the Alps
at a time when snow was abundant. I remember
the excitement of leaving my tiny footprints
in the season’s first snowfall; I remember
the color of my dad’s cheeks as he shoveled the
house free, again and again. My parents clapped
my first skis on my feet before I was three.
That period turns out to have been a historical
blip. It was only in the second half of the 20th
century that cold, snowy winters became a boon
for the Alps. Before then they were a harsh bur-
den, attributed in folklore to wicked demons.
My generation is among the last to have heard
oral histories of the struggle to survive here, back
when the economy was based on farming. Snow
used to cover tiny plots of land for months. Ava-
lanches thundered down the mountainsides,
burying villages. One of my grandma’s nine
siblings, Walter, died in one. He was 24.
When food was scarce—and it generally was—
children from the poorest pockets of the Alps
were forced to trek to lowland markets, where
they sold themselves into seasonal bondage as
farmworkers, typically from March to October. “A
barely concealed slave market,” the Cincinnati
Times-Star wrote in 1908, describing one such
market in Friedrichshafen, in southern Germany.
It reported as many as 400 boys and girls up for
barter, some as young as six, “as if they were a lot
of calves or chickens.” The practice lasted well
into the 20th century.
After World War II, an economic boom created
a thriving middle class across Europe—but not,
at first, in the high Alps. The steep mountain-
sides made it impossible for farms to expand or
to deploy the modern machinery that allowed
others to prosper, says Johann Wolf, who was
born in the remote village of Ischgl, Austria,
in 1929, during the coldest winter on record.
68 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC