Roxborough State Park — located about 45 minutes southwest of Denver — has long been a favorite stomping ground for me, especially in the last 11 years, since my parents moved out that way. It’s quiet, filled with wildlife, and defined by a series of sandstone fins rising upwards of 175 feet over the valley. This is the same geological formation as Red Rocks Amphitheater and Colorado Springs’ Garden of the Gods, only it rises up from the hogbacks in a more hidden, lesser traveled part of the Front Range, making it more intimate and — in my mind — more spectacular.

I had very close friends from Tennessee visiting for New Years, and since we didn’t have time for a run up to Steamboat Springs — or any of the mountains for that matter — I opted to take them out to my parent’s house and walk into the park. As soon as we set off from the house, we were greeted by this scene, of the half moon positioned right in the midst of a formation we’ve always called The Molar. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the Matterhorn eclipsing the moon, but it was cool nonetheless.

Here is a sneak peak of my latest project — Italy, Remasted. In 2005 and 2008, my wife and I traveled The Sexy Boot of Europe and discovered that Italy is indeed better than the hype.

For a combined five weeks we toured Northern, Central and Southern Italy, shooting and eating our way through such magnificent icons as Rome, Florence, Siena and Venice, and such lesser-known gems as Bolzano, Varenna, Val d’Itrea, Matera and Sestri Levante. Italy has a firm hold on our heart, and the images I have from there are some of my most cherished possessions.

Italy Remastered (working title) will be a self-published book via Blurb.com. Whether I sell it or not, we’ll see, but Blurb does such an amazing job of providing photographers innovative, clean layouts and quality printing, I can’t pass it up. So, for the last four weeks I’ve been chipping away at the images I have from Italy. It’s like a rock band going back into their catalogue and remastering a great album to enhance each song’s various elements. Since I’ve improved so much at post-production in Lightroom over the last two years, I’ve been pleased to see my images — both old favorites and rediscovered shots — come alive in a new way.

More to come soon.

Who cares about Capri? That’s what I was thinking when we were planning our 3-week trip to Italy back in 2008. What I knew of it was that it was a Mediterranean hoity-toity haunt for the rich. Maseratis, casinos and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, right?

“Mariah Carey has a house there,” my wife added. Thanks … all the more reason to keep my distance. We had other priorities: Positano, Sorrento, Matera, Puglia, Rome, Umbria, Tuscany…it was already a long list.

So when we rolled into Sorrento at the start of the trip — at the end of what my wife and I will forever refer to as The Longest Day in Human History: an 8am departure from Denver, an overnight flight from Philly, a rental car debacle in Rome, a two-hour train ride to Naples, a transfer to Sorrento on the stop-every-50-feet Circumvesuviana, a two-mile hike uphill to the hotel — Capri was not on the agenda. It wasn’t even close to creeping onto the agenda.

And yet within an hour at the Hotel Minervetta in Sorrento, we were decompressed. The boats in the Bay of Naples bobbed like sleeping ducks. Mt. Vesuvius crowned the horizon, looking like it had been in a good mood for a few decades. Authentic Campagna-style pizza and red wine filled our bellies. This corner of Italy was pretty damn special. Maybe we should see as much of it as we could.

A few days later, we left Positano and the Amalfi Coast so that we could take the afternoon ferry ride to the mystical island that gave us caprese salad and short pants. We had three hours — not much time — but upon pulling into the harbor, we knew this excursion would be worth it. Chalky cliffs rose in all directions, and a pastel village with a humble expression on its face hugged a low, green saddle that separated the island’s two peaks.

We beat feet to the depot and took the second hair-raising bus ride of the day: the precipitous journey from Capri to Anacapri, a landlocked town located high on the island’s rocky shoulder. The bus was standing room only, filled with — surprisingly — a lot of locals. Below us lay a sea whose color can only be described as cerulean. Between us? Air and vertical rock. Not much else.

Anacapri was pleasantly sleepy and clearly removed from the outside world. It’s town alleys ensconced us in white wash, and our feet tripped here and there on uneven pavers. With the exception of the school kids who skipped and sprinted around the piazza, the town was largely silent. We giggled at yet another Amalfi Coast restaurant named “Il Saraceno,” had ourselves some gelato, took fashionable pics of each other leaning stylistically against white walls (ahh, the days before kids), and then boarded the Dare Devil Bus to catch our ferry.

We missed a lot on Capri: the Blue Grotto, the Faraglioni sea stacks, P. Diddy and his yacht… But that was perfectly fine with me. For an island that has such a larger-than-life reputation, it’s quite small, and yet we still found a corner where local life felt like … well, local life as you see it elsewhere around Italy. For a blitzkrieg three-hours of observation, we got a pretty good sense for the place.

What prompted this post? Steve Jobs.

“Oh c’mon!” you must be saying. “If I read another tribute to that guy, I’m gonna——”

I should say that one of Jobs’ most unsuccessful products, one of his “biggest failures” — Apple TV — is prompting this post. We bought one of these devices back in July so that we could run slideshows of our travel photography on our TV. For under $100, its been worth it, and so I’m going back through the archives, and retouching photo sets for the upstairs boob tube.

Is this blog timely? No, not always. So what. The whole reason to take pictures is to capture a story so that you can retell it forever.

(Click on images for a larger view)

OK. So it’s been three months since we went to Switzerland, but I’m not done posting images. I’m just catastrophically slow at updating my blog now that I have my own business (by the way, check out our killer website, designed by HeyDay Creative).

On top of that, our little family has decided to move to a bigger house. Where this house will be, we don’t know yet, but getting our current place ready has been pretty consuming. The plus? Eventually, there will be new wall space in a new home to decorate with enlargements of Switzerland.

Switzerland still sneaks up on me and blows me away with what we saw. Will I ever see a landscape more beautiful than the Berner Oberland? Will I ever experience a better network of trains? Will I ever attempt to eat a three-foot-long coiled sausage bathed in brown onion sauce?

The answers are: No. No. And hell no.

For the last three major trips we’ve gone on — Mexico, Kauai and Switzerland — we’ve rented a couple of lenses from BorrowedLenses.com. Each time, we’ve made sure to rent a tilt-shift lens.

Now I have never pretended to be the most technically aware photographer. I couldn’t begin to accurately tell you how the optics inside these lenses work. All I know is that a tilt-shift warps the field of focus so that you can manipulate the scene in all sorts of wacky ways. With a normal lens, the field of focus is always parallel to the front of the lens. With a tilt-shift, you pivot that plane in all sorts of weird angles.

There, that’s the best I can do to explain it. Wikipedia is more eloquent.

On Lake Lucerne, we took a day-long boat tour, and that’s where the Canon 45mm TS-E really came most in handy. As paddle-wheelers and charming villages passed by, I set the aperture to a narrower depth, pivoted the lens down (or sometimes on a diagonal) and fired away.

While tilt-shifts can often miniaturize a scene, I find that they can actually show a place in a way that is more true to how the eye sees it and how memory imprints it. Take for instance, the image above. In my memory, the hills, the water, the trees — they are all splashes of color, nothing more. But the structures, the boats and mostly, the feeling — that’s what resonated and stuck with me most. A tilt-shift can capture just those memory burners. They’re fun images to share: “this is how it looked, but this is how I remember it.”

The same goes for this image of Wengen. No other shot I took of this town showed just how nestled in the valley it really was. A standard 45mm wouldn’t have done it as well.

To that, I say “yay, tilt-shifts.”

(Click on image for a larger view).

The highlight of my trip to the Trappers Lake and the Flat Tops area was hanging out with my dad in a rustic, 400-square-foot cabin in the woods. I cooked up spaghetti with red wine sauce one night, and we polished off a bottle of Plungerhead — which plunged my head pretty badly the next morning, but man, it is such a good wine.

Sure, the lake was beautiful. Sure, the respite from the city was needed. But there’s nothing that compares to good conversation with a good friend over good food and good wine. It made the trip.

While we chatted, I set up my Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod outside the cabin and captured two 20-minute exposures of the night sky with a Canon 24mm f/1.4. This is a situation where the quality of this gear really comes through. Both the camera and the lens are remarkably clear when it comes to shooting the night sky.

There were other guests at the Ute Lodge cabin resort, and since it was so dark out there, I set up a bright white plastic chair next to the tripod so no one would run into my rig. The end result, was pretty cool.

I love star-trail shots. Photography is 99.5% about capturing a moment. This 0.5% of my repertoire is about capturing our place in the spinning heavens. If you look closely in the above image, you might be able to see a straight dotted line, the product of a satellite passing overhead. I had not had this much fun shooting the night sky since Puglia, Italy in 2008. Maybe when I return to the mountains in early October for fall color, I’ll give it another shot.

Summer’s end is fast approaching, which usually means two things in Colorado: luscious Palisade peaches are in season, and most of us are wondering whether we got into the mountains enough.

I started this summer with plenty in the way of mountain time, but they weren’t my mountains. They belonged to the Swiss, and they were ridiculously beautiful. But just recovering from the stresses of that trip meant a good three weekends in a row at home with our little family. By the time we unburied ourselves from the laundry, recharged our businesses, and spent adequate time with extended family, it was late July and I hadn’t seen the Rockies up close in months.

Fortunately, I had a father-son fishing trip on the books, and so on the second weekend of August, my Dad and I strapped a pair of lake kayaks to his pickup truck and set forth to Trappers Lake — one of Colorado’s rare gems, and the birthplace of the American wilderness movement. It was here in the early 1900s that a surveyor named Arthur Carhart told his boss that Trappers Lake needed to be preserved in its wild state for the good of mankind. His boss was a resort developer. Mr. Carhart had some cojones, and thank God he did. The concept of preserved, roadless wilderness is one of the best things about America.

A full 11 years ago, I circumnavigated Trappers Lake with my backpacking buddies. To this day, it was the most ambitious backcountry adventure I’ve done — and its a sweet nostalgic memory, too. Three nights, three lakeside campsites, and more than 30 miles of schlepping. We started at Trappers Lake, ended up clear across the 200,000-acre Flat Tops Wilderness Area, and came back. Two years later, almost the entire area would burn to the ground in one of the many massive wildfires that consumed Colorado in the summer of 2002. I had yet to go back.

It took much of Saturday to get to the White River Valley east of Meeker. Dad and I checked in to the Ute Lodge, a small rustic cabin resort tucked in the woods, whipped together some dinner, and then set off for the lake at sundown. The devastation of the fire was shocking, even nine years later. Empty pine trees covered the hillside like 500,000 upright matchsticks. The ground cover had returned, and returned with a vengeance. Thick green stands of grass covered the adjacent hillside, and along the road in the burn area, fireweed lived up to its name. Both of us found the scenery to be haunting yet beautiful.

At the lake, a profusion of wildflowers greeted us. Columbine, rosy paintbrush, dusky beardtongue, and goldeneye surrounded the trail and wrapped around the lake’s shore. We had come to kayak and fish the lake, which was turning out to be a lot more technically difficult than we imagined. The lake sits a quarter mile from the nearest parking lot, and the two access points were far from boat ramps. One was a wilderness portal trail that banked steeply up loose rocks and curved by the willow-covered outlet and shore. The other dropped from a parking lot down through meadows, but required a long uphill haul at day’s end. With two 12-foot kayaks and fishing gear, this wasn’t shaping up to be an easy launch.

We returned the next morning, and while I seized on the morning light and photographed the fields of wildflowers, Dad assembled the fishing gear and tried to figure out the day. We shore-fished for an hour, which was completely unproductive, and upon returning to the car, we came across an older gentleman who had collapsed on the trail. He was in a cold sweat, and his legs were rubber. I thought we were witnessing a heart attack. Fortunately, he was coherent, and with a little help, we coaxed him 100 yards down the slope to the parking lot where his sons met us. The altitude had completely nailed him, and we were hopeful his kids would do the right thing and drive him to lower altitude. While Dad and I are both fit and can handle the altitude, we’d seen enough. We opted for the other access point for the kayaks.

By noon we were in the water — the hike down from the lot wasn’t nearly as bad as we had imagined. Dad hooked into a cutthroat, but that would be the extent of our fishing success for the day. Trappers Lake has some of the state’s biggest native cutthroat trout, but everyone on the lake was noting that the fish were taking the day off. ”It is too hot and sunny.” “The hatch isn’t on.” “They aren’t hungry.” “It’s too windy.” Whatever. It was still lovely being out on the water.

By day’s end, however, it was beginning to get buggy. Not only are the dead, burned-up trees hard to look at after a day or so, but they’re clearly a breeding ground for mosquitos. Or maybe it was the tall grass and willows. Or maybe it was both. Either way, we lugged the kayaks back up the hill, both arms too occupied to swap at the little suckers. We strapped the boats to the pickup roof, and set off back down the winding dirt road to the Ute Lodge. We had one Samuel Adams in the cooler, and at a beautiful spot where the White River passes through beaver dams, we pulled over, threw down the tailgate, and split the beer with sunset.

After all, that’s what the trip was about: Dad, me, the two of us catching up, seizing the summer and a rare chance to get out of town together. It was the best beer of the year.

It took nearly an hour to discover what was happening.

We had hiked up to this meadow just outside Zermatt, on the trail that eventually leads to Zmutt and the North Face of the Matterhorn. It was getting hot, and Varenna was inspecting the gravel on the trail, handing her best specimens to Mom, and then pushing her stroller like the big girl she was proclaiming to be (“bick guhr! bick gurh!). We were all content, and not planning to go too far. After all, this appeared to be it: the iconic view of the Matterhorn, the one that conjures visions of alpenhorns and men yodeling “Ri-co-la” into the crisp glacial air.

But as we turned to head back to town, the moon was suddenly quite noticeable and on a very interesting course.

(Click on image for a larger version)

And so, over the course of maybe 20 minutes, it swooped low, landed on the summit of the Matterhorn, and temporarily turned the world’s most famous mountain into a Santa hat.

It disappeared, then reemerged, like an arrow piercing the heart of Switzerland and coming out the other side. It was our second-to-last full day in the country, but it felt like an apt conclusion to the trip.

Photographing the Eiger…

Every story needs a bad guy. In the Book of the Berner Oberland, its the Eiger. Its history of mountain climbing is layered with one tragedy after another. From its Wikipedia page:

Since 1935, at least sixty-four climbers have died attempting the North Face, earning it the German nickname, Mordwand, or “murderous wall”, a play on the face’s German name Nordwand.

The mystique of this mountain is palpable the moment you lay eyes on it. From Männlichen, it appears like a blunt arrowhead piercing the clouds. From Kleine Scheidegg (above left), it resembles a lurking sharks fin. Both places are ideal spots for the classic Eiger photograph, but to capture images with a little more nuance, you really have to hike underneath the mountain’s legendary North Face.

We tooled around in the pastures underneath it at the Alpiglen train station (above right), located halfway between Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald, and it turned into one of the most transformative travel moments of my life. I’ll devote a whole blog post to it at some point, but in short, the Eiger began to shed loose ice chunks and snow plumbs in a display that was at once intimidating and exhilarating to witness. Our neighbor at the hotel hiked the North Face trail — which skirts beneath the entire length of the mountain — and he reported that at one point he discovered a single climbing glove beneath the rocks. Who knows how it got there, but it clearly captivated and slightly haunted him just seeing it there.

Photographing the Mönch…

There is not a whole lot said about the Mönch, which I suppose makes its name all the more fitting. It’s the strong and silent type.

Wedged between the Eiger and the Jungfrau, it is easy to put this 13,474-foot mountain in the backseat, but I would imagine that if it were located by itself anywhere else in Switzerland, it would be a major draw for travelers. From certain angles, it appears to be the tallest of the three peaks (its not, the Jungfrau is), and it is punctuated by a large glacier that oozes like an icy, mortal wound from its North Face. But it lacks the Eiger’s steepness and sharp angles, and the Jungfrau’s bulk and dominance. So, you’ve probably never heard of it as a result.

So, naturally, photographing the Mönch typically means photographing it with its neighbors, usually from that stellar view from the Månnlichen, or from Mürren. But its such a majestic beast in its own right, I’d suggest trying to isolate it for a few images as well. As I combed over the shots I came home with, only three really stood out as being just about the Mönch. One was a simple image cropped on the summit, which was simple and arresting just because the mountain is so huge. But I think the above two images tell the story a bit better. On the left is how the Mönch appears as you approach Mürren on the railway, which is an angle that best show’s the pitch of the mountain’s North Face. And on the right is a pair of hikers from near the Eiger Glacier station, who were gazing at the Mönch’s lower wall. They seem to be saying “holy crap” with their body language.

Photographing Staubbach Falls…

The Lauterbrunnen Valley is home to 70+ waterfalls, but hands down the most photographed is Staubbach Falls, which slips off an embankment of meadows and plunges 1,000 feet onto the valley floor, most of it in one unbroken fall. Situated right next to it is the tourist hub and namesake of the valley, Lauterbrunnen, so these falls get plenty of attention and a good deal of the postcard royalties.

I’ll devote a later post to the waterfalls of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, specifically Staubbach Falls and Trummelbach Falls. But I will note here that light conditions are best in late morning when the falls are hit by full sun. Shortly after noon, the spray of the falls catches great backlight, which is also fun to work with.

Photographing Mürren…

Where should you stay in the Berner Oberland?

It’s a question that seems to plague a lot of people based on TripAdvisor’s forums. We spent all six nights in Wengen and would highly recommend it (pros: within striking distance of the trails beneath the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau, easy access to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, first ride up on the Männlichen gondola). Although, next time, we will consider staying in Mürren. For one, this is where Mürren is situated (dead center, below image).

Two, it appears to have the best hiking access in the area, with several trails cruising amongst the meadows below the Schilthorn, and the quickest access to this area’s closest thing to a wilderness area, Hinteres Lauterbrunnental, an UNESCO Natural Heritage Site that is tucked into the back of the valley, and home to several massive waterfalls. Furthermore, from Mürren’s cliff-hanging perch, you could probably throw an Aerobie across the narrow valley into the west face of the Jungfrau. The mountains are as in-your-face as any place I’ve been.

I also found it’s streets and architecture more photogenic than Wengen, Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen. There is a sector in the middle of town that is filled with older wooden structures typical of life in this valley before tourism. Like much of the Alps, these communities used to be quite poor as they were extremely isolated and depended upon the land and its unreliable climate for subsistence. The old sector of Mürren is a compelling reminder that tourism can completely alter a community’s economy forever.

Photographing the Swiss Life…

Quaint could be the most overused word in travel and tourism. I’d say its second behind charming.

They are so overused by writers that they have come to mean nothing, because any place that is desirable in some sense has been labeled so at some point.

But these two words do exist, and truthfully, travelers are irresistibly drawn to places that are simple, old-fashioned and pleasing to the eye. The rural Swiss aesthetic — particularly in the Berner Oberland — seems obsessed with capitalizing on it.

I’d be lying if I said “I didn’t fall for it.” I’m a sucker for the idyllic life probably because I’m not cut out for it. The back-breaking work… The changing weather… The smell of cows… The low wages …

But to see a wall of perfectly stacked firewood under the eaves of a rustic farmhouse? That’s camera fodder!

These images were taken at Alpiglen, a destination along the Grindelwald–Wengen railway that is situated below the Eiger’s North Face. The train station is literally surrounded by cows, and the trail to the Eiger passes through a working farm. In fact, any area with “alp” in the name indicates an area where farmers take their cows for the summer to feed on pastures and fatten up for the winter. Wengernalp, Grütschalp, Bussalp — this is where you’ll find your traditional Swiss cows and burly men of daunting constitution yodeling “Ricola” into the wind.

They move slow, they have massive bells hanging from their neck, and they have a rather vacant look in their eye. The cows that is.

Here’s my dilemma: I have too many good photos from the Berner Oberland for one post.

This has little to do with me and my photography skills. It has everything to do with the extreme beauty of the area. Never before have I been anywhere as dramatic and scenic as this alpine region smack in the middle of Switzerland. We spent almost an entire week here, and it still wasn’t enough. Every day was different, and we kept moving, but even then, I can’t pretend that I am a fountain of definitive photography knowledge on the area.

But what I did learn, I’m putting here, so hopefully there are a few kernels of insight.

In full disclosure, I ran out of time (and money) in the valley to shoot the following areas: Interlaken, Brienzsee, Thunersee, Jungfraujoch, Shilthorn/Piz Gloria, Schynige Platte, Gimmelwald, Grindelwald, First/Bachalpsee and — tops on my Unfinished Business List — Hinteres Lauterbrunnental.

That’s a ton. In fact, if you are reading this because you are researching a vacation in the area, it may sound like I didn’t see any of the big sights. Not true. There’s just simply that much to see and shoot in the Berner Oberland.

This post covers the following subjects:

• The Lauterbrunnen Valley
• The Jungfrau
• The Jungfraubahn

Part 2 will cover:

• The Eiger
• The Mönch
• Staubbach Falls
• Mürren
• Swiss life
• Cows, cows, and more cows.

I’ve included a Google Map of these places — and where I took these images — at the bottom of this post.

Photographing the Lauterbrunnen Valley…
The only way I can describe this area is to compare it to two places I’ve never been (how stupid is that?) — imagine Yosemite Valley with the Himalaya plopped on top of it. Hyperbole? Not really. The town of Lauterbrunnen, at the bottom of the valley, sits at an elevation of 2,608 feet. In addition to having the 1,000-foot-tall Staubbach Falls dumping huge volumes of water on its head, the town is overwhelmed by the 13,642-foot Jungfrau, which soars over the valley just 4.5 miles away. Basically, in the distance between Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Jungfrau rises 11,000 feet higher than Lauterbrunnen, the equivalent of nine Empire State Buildings.

Capturing the beautiful colors and textures of the Lauterbrunnen Valley is easy — capturing its massive scale is extraordinarily tough.

There are three ways to approach this potato — (a) from the valley floor, (b) from just above Lauterbrunnen, and (c) from the top looking down.

I’ve always felt the latter fails to do a place justice photographically speaking, but if you have to get that all-incompassing wide-angle shot from the top, the terminus of the Männlichen lift above Wengen is the place to go (see photo at the top of this post — that’s the view from the Männlichen looking over the Lauberhorn to the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, rather than down into the valley).

A far better option to capture the scale of the Lauterbrunnen Valley is along the cog-railway route from Lauterbrunnen to the town of Wengen. The first view opens up shortly after leaving the Lauterbrunnen train station. The railroad bends uphill, crosses the Weiss Lütschine River and reveals a magnificent view of Staubbach Falls, the town’s chapel, the valley cliffs and the snow-draped Alps in the distance (first photo in this section).

The other priceless view of the valley opens up just before the train reaches Wengen. Make sure you are seated on the right side of the train just after the Wengwald train stop. The view (above) lasts for only 20 seconds or so, but it encompasses the falls, the massive cliffs, the summits of the Breithorn and Jungfrau, and a magnificent foreground of Swiss chalets and emerald pasture. Since you are shooting from a moving train, be sure to have a faster shutter speed. I even went so far to shoot on a motordrive to increase the chances I’d have the right cropping when all was said and done.

Photographing the Jungfrau…
I will admit that I missed a key component to the “Jungfrau’s experience” — at more than 100 CHF roundtrip, we opted to skip the Jungfraujoch, the high-altitude train station situated on the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Mönch that is marketed as “The Top of Europe.” It was sacrificed at the altar of 6 CHF bottled water and all the other gouge-jobs speckled across this beautiful country. We’d just had enough of doling out the cash, and ultimately figured we had plenty to enjoy underneath the Jungfrau.

Frankly, I have never seen a mountain more domineering than the Jungfrau. It’s sheer volume, scale and steepness brought an instant dose of humility. Ultimately, I found dozens of great vantage points to shoot this peak, even during early morning strolls outside our hotel in Wengen, where I snapped this shot. Ultimately, the best place to capture the rugged and imposing soul of the Jungfrau is right underneath it, where trails bisect lush meadows (above image), quaint little trains chug by on the Jungfraubahn and Wengenalpbahn, and traditional Swiss huts are overwhelmed by the mountain’s scale. We took the train to the Eiger Glacier station and hiked down to Kleine Scheidegg and Wengenalp. With our daughter it took the better part of a day, but at every turn, a new face to the Jungfrau was revealed.

The other “must” for shooting the Jungfrau is from the Mürren side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, particularly in the town of Mürren itself, where you face the narrowing chasm of the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the sheer western wall of the Jungfrau. The quaint little choo-choo ride from Grütschalp to Mürren is also great for the precision art form of hanging-out-the-window photography. (Or, you can walk the trails in the area, too, and get the same killer views with better foregrounds … we had a baby on board).

Photographing the Jungfraubahn…

At certain points on the trip, I found myself wondering if certain attractions are more about the Swiss engineering than the natural features of the land. Few tourist draws demonstrate this better than the Jungfraubahn, which burrows into the face of the Eiger, hangs a sharp right, burrows through the guts of the Mönch and pops out at the Jungfraujoch, a snow-and-ice clad saddle at 11,332 feet. There, a whole tourism infrastructure of amusements has been erected, including an observatory atop a rock outcrop called The Sphinx.

The Jungfraujoch is the tallest railway station in Europe, which begs the question: there’s a railway station higher than this? (Yes. The Tanggula Railways Station in Tibet is a ridiculous 16,627 feet high). More incredibly, the tunnel and railway were built between 1896 and 1912. I think lightbulbs were also a rather novel new invention at that time.

Well, Swiss engineering aside, the Jungfraubahn is really a beautiful train to look at, and its bright red trolley cars chugging underneath the burly mountains is really one of the most romantic — and iconic — images of Europe. All along the hiking path between the Eiger Glacier train station and Kleine Scheidegg, there are great views of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger with train tracks running in the foreground, and since the train goes by roughly every 10 minutes, its photographically like shooting fish in a barrel. What makes it such a striking image is the bright red of the train cars contrasted with the various shades of green and blue in the landscape. You get bonus points if you can somehow capture the wildflowers, too, but I was unsuccessful.

The train + landscape shot is easy pickings. But getting the story behind the train, and the sheer madness of its existence, is another matter. I managed to photograph the fleeting moment of a tourist smiling out the window of the train as it chugged out of the Eiger Glacier station with a tilt-shift (above left). Pure luck, but it was about the closest thing I got to capturing the excitement of the Jungfraubahn.

Part 2 will include more on the area, including the Eiger and cows.

(Click on images for a larger view)

Go ahead. Ogle all you want.

Words often fail me. They fail me the most when it comes to mountains. Grandeur. Majesty. Magnificence. Please: those words are chumps when you are beneath the Jungfrau (above two images), a hulking mountain that towers over the Lauterbrunnen Valley like a glacier clad bully. It’s name (roughly translated as Young Girl in German) is hardly worth dissecting. It makes little sense. This peak is a beast.

It’s neighboring two peaks — the Mönch and the Eiger — fit into a little folktale. The Young Girl protected by the Monk from the frightening Ogre. How quaint. Our first full day in the area — in mid-June mind you — was spent underneath the Eiger’s legendary North Face watching mini-avalanches, snow plumes and chunks of ice fall off its sheer walls. The Eiger is less like Shrek, more like an assassin.

And then there is the Matterhorn, the world’s most recognizable mountain. On the approach to Zermatt via the train from Visp, not a seat is used by the passengers. They are all standing, dangling out the windows hoping for that first glimpse of its iconic, snowclad summit peaking over the shoulder of the hills.

So magnetic is the mountain’s pull, people travel across the world to its remote little corner of the Alps, drop $350 CHF a night at a Zermatt hotel, eat $40 CHF pizza, and simply stare at its broken-nose summit. Slipping under the radar are its equally grand neighbors, like the cut-glass peak of the Weisshorn (above left) or the hulking, glacier-clad eminence of Monte Rosa, the tallest peak in Switzerland. “Meh,” the tourists seem to say with the direction of their turned heads. “Just look at the Matterhorn!”

I’m an English major from The Colorado College, and I remember one particularly frustrating lecture that was devoted entirely to “the gaze.” The implications of a character gazing at another. What does it mean to gaze? To pine? To possess with the eyes? Yawn. Maybe it was because we were reading Wordsworth’s poetry, but I thought it was a rather dumb topic.

But if the lecture was on mountains, then I would have gotten it.

Yes, sitting by a lake and staring at a towering, rippled, snow-covered peak is a noteworthy action. You are possessing something with your eyes. The strength, the unflappability of a mountain that has stood there for eons. An undaunted thing that rules over its subjects. An unmoved mover.

What man doesn’t have some stupid, innate, overinflated sense of self worth that he wants to possess the character of a hulking mountain? I don’t know one.