2008-02-14 11:05:09 来自: KK
Alp! I Need Somebody: By Foot, on the Trail of Saint Bernard
From: The Washington Post
Date: June 2, 1996
Author: Pete Hessler
The walk started with a blessing. At 8,098 feet, the Great St. Bernard Pass marks the Swiss-Italian border, and at the very tip of the pass stands a towering statue of Saint Bernard himself, with a Latin inscription that reads: "Pope Pius XI, a great alpinist, establishes me as Patron Saint of alpine people and alpinists. You, who after me have ascended these heights, follow me into the heavenly home."
And while Saint Bernard's statue speaks of Heaven, its outstretched arm points north -- roughly in the direction of Bourg-St.-Pierre, eight miles away in the Entremont Valley, which was where I was heading. In recent years, the Swiss government has established a series of historic footpaths across the country, and I had taken the bus up to the pass to follow "Le Chemin Historique du Grand-Saint-Bernard" -- the historic footpath that leads down from the most famous high pass in the French-speaking Valais, one of Switzerland's most mountainous cantons.
I chose the path at the Great St. Bernard because perhaps no other Swiss pass has seen so much history. The crossing was used as far back as the Bronze Age, and in Roman times it became the most important north-south pass in the Alps, a key point in the long route from Rome to Great Britain. Over the years Julius Caesar, Augustus, Charlemagne and Napoleon all led armies across the pass, and their traces are very much in evidence today. Just behind the statue of Saint Bernard, I could see a deep, well-worn groove in the rocks from the days of the Emperor Claudius, who made the route passable for carriages in the first century A.D.
And although scenes like this -- a rough-hewn road surrounded by the snow-covered peaks of the Swiss-Italian border -- make it easy to imagine the Great St. Bernard in wilder days, the path is at the same time a walk through the safety and order of modern Switzerland. The footpath is meticulously marked, with signs that give the estimated walking time from landmark to landmark, and transportation is never far from the trail. And there's also something to be said for a walk that's entirely downhill, dropping a total of a mile and a half in altitude as the walker, in a matter of three or four hours, goes from the wild alpine beauty of the Great St. Bernard Pass to the unspoiled mountain village of Bourg-St.-Pierre.
It was a sunny day at the end of June, with the temperature over 50 degrees, but still the pass was mostly snow-covered. It had been a harsh spring, everybody said, but even in an average year the mountains of the Valais turn out some brutal statistics: The pass receives an annual snowfall of 65 feet; its tiny blue lake is frozen 265 days a year; the average temperature is just below freezing. Hikers follow the Great St. Bernard path only in the summer months, and the pass has seen less through traffic since 1964, when the 3.6-mile Great St. Bernard Tunnel was completed beneath the pass, allowing cars to move between Italy and Switzerland year-round.
But even with the tunnel, there are still plenty of summer visitors to the pass, mostly because of the hospice that sits on the Swiss side of the border. It was constructed in the mid-11th century, supposedly by Saint Bernard of Menthon, in hopes of bringing order to a brutal trade route plagued by outlaws as well as bad weather. The hospice served all travelers, and an order of monks lived at the pass, trained to rescue people from storms and avalanches. Nine centuries later, St. Bernard's Hospice still stands.
The secret to Bernard's success was as much generosity as organization: Because the hospice was intended to serve poor travelers, it charged nothing for lodging and meals. Wealthy guests, touched by the monks' altruism, responded with lavish gifts -- King Henry II of England, for example, spent a night and promptly gave the monks a large property in Essex. Soon the hospice held land all across Europe, and in the early 20th century it was organizing missions as far away as Tibet. Today the hospice receives 10,000 overnight visitors a year -- although now lodgers pay a minimum of $30 a night, whether they want to or not.
The only guests who still stay for free are the Saint Bernard dogs that were carefully bred by generations of hospice monks. At one time the dogs were invaluable, because their weight and wide breasts could clear a path through the snow for rescue teams to follow. Today, however, rescues are handled by helicopters and ski-clad mountaineers, and emergency crews opt for lighter-weight animals when they need trackers. The Saint Bernards -- enormous red-and-white dogs that sometimes weigh more than 200 pounds -- are simply too big; the same quality that once made them useful has now turned the hospice into a canine retirement home.
"They eat three kilograms {6.6 pounds} of food every day," one of their keepers told me when I visited the kennels at the hospice's museum. He was a young French Swiss from the Rhone Valley, and every summer he worked at the pass. He told me about Barry, the most famous Saint Bernard of them all, who had saved more than 40 people in the early 1900s, and pointed out the alcove near the entrance where a taxidermist had preserved the heroic dog -- at a particularly unpleasant moment, it seemed, from Barry's expression. "Each dog comes from this one," the keeper said proudly. "There is another Barry in Martigny -- he comes tomorrow. He weighs 108 kilograms {238 pounds}."
The dogs winter in Martigny, down in the Rhone Valley, and in the summer they return to the hospice as part of the museum that chronicles the pass's history. And although the museum was excellent, I found wandering through the kennels to be faintly unsettling. Even in the best of times -- during blizzards and avalanches and the glories of mountain rescues -- Saint Bernard dogs have a certain mournful air. I didn't linger. Outside it was a fine day and the trail was waiting.
Spring in Switzerland is a brief affair. It's a vertical season, starting in the valleys and steadily working its way up to the high country, trailing wildflowers in its wake. I was hiking in the other direction, dropping altitude quickly, and over the course of the walk I could almost feel our paths cross: I followed the road for 20 minutes until the snow began to thin out, and then I took the trail through steep meadows that were damp with the recent snowmelt. Wildflowers were blooming -- purple Alpine snowbells, deep-blue glacial buttercups -- and everywhere I could hear the sound of rushing water, torrents and streams that were falling down the rocky cliffs as winter turned to summer in that brief Swiss spring.
I was following the Entremont River down its steep valley, and along the way I passed traces of both the old and the new: the grass-covered ruins of L'Hospitalet, which in the Middle Ages had served as a refuge for travelers who couldn't reach the pass (and a morgue for those who had worse luck), and the enormous concrete air vents for the Great St. Bernard Tunnel, buried in the rock far below. I came to La Pierre, a beautiful alpine pasture with a ruined stone lodge. The land had belonged to the hospice for 500 years, and now at the end of June it was still waiting for cattle to come up from the valley: Swiss cows, like the spring, work their way up the mountains as the snow retreats.
The trail was good and soon my legs became accustomed to the rhythm of walking downhill, my backpack swaying gently. It was a nearly effortless walk, the valley gradually broadening as its descent became less steep, and then it opened up into the Lac des Toules. The path led me above the reservoir, and on the other side of the slate-gray water I could see the mouth of the tunnel. It was strange to watch the cars emerge and think that only moments before they had been in Italy, and that they had completely missed the rugged beauty of the pass.
I was still walking alone, but now there were more signs of life: the cars across the valley, the ringing of cowbells from the pastures below, the first few slate-roofed homesteads just beyond the lake. Below the reservoir I hiked through a forest, and then I came to the St. Charles bridge, a narrow stone arc stretched across a deep gorge. The legend was that Charlemagne had built the bridge in A.D. 800 , on the way home from his coronation in Milan.
It took me three hours to reach Bourg-St.-Pierre. The walk had been easy, but the change in scenery made it seem so much farther -- from the snow-covered pass to the quiet village, from winter to summer. Bourg-St.-Pierre is a lovely place, a steep village of narrow lanes and vivid flower boxes and brightly painted shutters. There were sights to see -- the alpine botanical garden on a hill north of town, and, next to the church, an ancient Roman military column that told of road repairs made by Constantine in A.D. 310.
There were also decisions to be made -- I could find a room in the village, or take the bus down to Martigny, or keep following the series of footpaths that continued down the valley, from village to village. It was something to think about -- but not yet. Instead I filled my bottle from the spring-fed public fountain at Bourg-St.-Pierre, and found a bench in the summer sunshine. Pete Hessler is a freelance writer in Columbia, Mo.
Copyright 1996 The Washington Post.
