TRAVELING IN STYLE : THE SOURCE : The Rhone River Begins Beneath a Glacier High in Switzerland--and Before It Reaches France, It Courses Through an Alpine Paradise

THE MISSISSIPPI FLOODED WHEN I was 12. I spent days sandbagging streets in Davenport, Iowa, as the river swirled angrily and rose higher and higher, until, despite our efforts, the muddy mass suddenly poured through town, cutting new channels as it went. We stopped our hopeless task and stopped worrying, and, enchanted, climbed high banks to watch. How could a single drop of water--then five, then 10--I wondered, multiply into such a frothing, churning mass?

That Mississippi flood cast a long spell on me, a trance still spinning over time and space, across the years and across continents. Years later, south of Lyon, France, I watched a chalky Rhone roar past the peaceful vineyard where I stood, and the long-buried questions returned: Where did this power come from? Which single drop of water became all this?

This time, I decided to try to find out. I decided to see for myself the place where the Rhone begins, to put my hands in those virgin waters.

MOST PEOPLE HAPPEN UPON THE GLACIER THAT IS the Rhone’s birthplace without even realizing it as they drive over the Furka Pass in central Switzerland. When they reach the spot, perhaps they pause to gawk at this mass of ice from the terrace of the Hotel Belvedere, above the town of Gletsch. A tall, Spartan structure built next to the glacier more than 100 years ago --when ice was virtually all you could see when you looked out a bedroom window--the hotel is only a restaurant now, open from June to September. And the glacier has shrunk so much that what you see from the Belvedere terrace is not its flank but its end. What used to be an ice field between the Belvedere and the Hotel Gletsch, half a mile downhill, is now a signposted hiking trail across the glacial moraine--a botanist’s dream of Alpine flora.

I walked down from the Belvedere and around the end of the glacier myself one day in early summer to see the source of the Rhone. It was not what I had expected. As a Midwesterner, I’d imagined that a glacier would melt gently, like the icicles we collected and brought indoors when we were little. I was looking for a miracle, for a drop from the tip of a giant ice cube. I had dreamed its path all the way to the sea.

In fact, the icy melting water does dribble out of the glacier in some places, but in others it shoots out, forming ribbons of water tumbling downhill like so many errant children. They follow an erratic course, creating a spongy mess of damp earth for hikers.

I pressed on, though, to the waterfall that is considered the real start of the Rhone. (Between the glacier and the town of Brig, the river is also called the Rotten.) I leaned forward and, like any good pilgrim who has achieved her goal, tried to feel an appropriate sense of awe and devotion. Then I splashed water onto my face--and was shocked nearly out of my senses by the cold. My enthusiasm literally dampened for the moment, I walked back down from the glacier behind five Swiss soldiers, two were obviously German-speaking Swiss, three French speakers, but they were arguing about a soccer game in their common language--English. Nature’s glory was the last thing on their minds.

From the glacier, the Rhone grows into one of Europe’s great rivers, dropping more than 6,000 feet in altitude before it reaches the Swiss-French border. For the first 176 miles of its 508-mile journey to the Mediterranean, it cuts through the Swiss canton of Valais. From the glacier to the small city of Brig, the Rhone is young and untamed; after Brig, it rushes through rich marshland. As it enters the flat, gradually widening valley bed beyond the marshes, it grows calmer, then explodes in one last wild leap between Leuk and Sion. At Sion, the river enters a straight and terribly tidy canal that controls its run to Lake Geneva. Soon after emerging from the lake, it crosses the border into France. The upper reaches of the Rhone pass through some of Switzerland’s most beautiful countryside, and one of the best things a warm-weather visitor to the country can do is to follow the river down from its source.

MORE THAN 30 RIVERS FLOW INTO THE RHONE. THESEtributaries start amidst breathtaking Alpine scenery and carve out spectacular valleys before reaching the mundane, industrialized valley floor.

In the upper Goms Valley (also known as the Conches Valley), where the Rhone is born, the beauty of the mountains and simple brown, wooden villages is stark. Oberwald, the highest village, has a rare overlay of sophistication for one of these small towns, with a few hotels and restaurants and a small ski-lift system. These, however, cannot erase the reality of the place: It is a tightknit farming town used to short summers and harsh winters. The timbered barns that line the streets have been beaten black by the weather, and hay and animals--not tourists--are the main topics of conversation.

Residents of the Goms Valley tend to be deeply religious Catholics--until recently, farmers used to mark their cows with charcoal crosses before sending them to pasture for the summer--and the churches can be remarkable. About 70 of them were built in the valley in one 50-year period in the 18th Century, and, though their exteriors are usually plain, the interiors are mostly treasure houses of Alpine Baroque art. Those at Reckingen and Munster are particularly impressive.

One native son of the valley, Cesar Ritz, born in 1850, was a typical young shepherd who spent summers in the mountains with his animals and winters in the village of Niederwald just getting by. Then he left the valley to apprentice in the hotel trade, later founding the Ritz Hotels, famous for their exceptional creature comforts. Ritz would still recognize the valley today--it has changed little for centuries--but he would be astonished at the activity. Cows still climb to the greening alps (lower-cased, an alp is a mountain pasture) in late spring, but so do an enormous number of hikers. There are excellent walking trails along the river and up into the hills. A 2 1/2-day rafting trip from Oberwald to Niederwald along the high Goms plateau is popular, as is mountain-biking through the area.

Two-thirds of the way from Oberwald to Brig lies the quiet town of Ernen. Ernen was the region’s capital until the road was moved to the other side of the river 150 years ago, and was also the valley’s gateway to Italy via the mule track across the high Albrun Pass. Its position as a crossroads of trade brought wealth to the town, still noticeable today from its many stone and elaborate wooden houses, a contrast to the rest of the Goms. Here, the neatly laid-out streets hint at commerce, and the houses appear almost smugly independent, standing freely instead of huddling together against the elements. There is, however, a coziness, a real prettiness to the village lanes--an echo, perhaps, of a comfortable past. The road and a hiking trail skim alongside the Binna River gorges in the Goms into one of the Rhone’s more remote side valleys, to Binn. People scrambling along the rock here are not just avid climbers; this is crystal hunters’ paradise. Local residents make a living from their crystal finds, and shops display it in the form of rough-cut rock as well as finished jewelry.

Binn itself is another extraordinary looking village. The original few houses sit just above the river on a narrow bank; later dwellings and the local church are across a Roman bridge on the river’s other side, strung up a steep and narrow footpath, as if the population had almost accidentally increased as villagers were wandering up toward the peaks.

ERNEN AND BINN ARE QUIET SPOTS; THE INTERNAtional resort town of Zermatt, which lies at the end of the Mattertal Valley, is not. A lifetime of postcard views of the Matterhorn and a vague recollection that cars are not allowed here once led me to believe that Zermatt was a quaint little village, the perfect place to send two friends from South Africa who had never been to Switzerland before and were hoping to find Heidi herself. They were astonished at the number of jewels and furs for sale, startled to see people carrying skis in July (the glacier summer skiing around Zermatt is some of the best in the Alps) and positively shocked when they translated the fare of the cograil train to the viewing point at Gornergrat--about $36 round-trip for the 40-minute trip--into weak South African rands. They sank into the chairs of a small restaurant, ordered fondue and Fendant wine and refused to budge. To make matters worse, the Matterhorn was obscured by clouds and all the cliches of international mass tourism were on display around them, from camera-laden Japanese tour groups to Americans with chewing gum and pockets of unspent change in several currencies. As for Heidi . . .

Still, Zermatt remains a beloved pilgrimage for serious mountaineers. Until 1865, the Matterhorn, which rises above the town, was the only major European peak that had not been scaled. That year, two groups successfully reached the top. But one of them, led by Englishman Edward Whymper, had an accident on the way down: A rope broke, and four in the party fell 4,000 feet to their deaths. The small Alpine museum in town is unfortunately closed much of the time, but its display of the frayed rope and one climber’s broken glasses are a grim reminder of the power of these mountains. The Matterhorn remains a challenge: People still die every year trying to conquer it.

There are other ways to enjoy the mountains here, of course. A five-minute walk to the upper edges of town is enough to put you above the crowd; going farther, with a picnic lunch in hand, you can reach remote Alpine meadows and unthreatening crests. Or, with planning, you can spend the night in one of the mountain huts run by the Swiss Alpine Club. People go to bed early and rise before dawn in these huts, but the lodgings are cheap--generally less than $13 a night--and the people are friendly.

There is still another layer of life in Zermatt. For all its worldliness, the town has never lost its pastoral roots. One of the best meals in town is the lamb served in a little cellar spot in the Hotel Julen. Owner Paul Julen keeps his sheep at one end of the village and every summer moves the animals up to the virgin grass of the high mountains, which he swears gives the ewes’ milk something special for the lambs.

Just one glacier (and valley) over from Zermatt lies Zinal--which includes one short street of shops, a number of modern chalets scattered over a lower slope and a tiny, quirky Old Town. This latter is really a collection of little buildings that were once rough old huts on stilts (to keep mice out of the grain), and since have been turned into vacation homes. The glacier, the Weisshorn, cuts one town off from the other, and acts as a linguistic divide: Zermatt is German-speaking, Zinal French. Those equipped with crampons and a guide can trek from Zermatt to Zinal in two days; the rest of us have to reach it by way of a road through the Val d’Anniviers, a narrow valley cut by another Rhone tributary, the river La Navisense.

Until about 30 years ago, farmers in the region practiced a curious form of transhumant agriculture. Their homes were in the middle of the valley, but--despite the distances and the roughness of the terrain--they kept vineyards in Sierre, some miles away, grew hay on the lower Alpine pastures and moved their animals frequently between the lower and higher alps and the villages. Zinal was originally not a village at all, but a mayen or lower pasture where the animals grazed.

Because the villages of the steep-walled Val d’Anniviers are not as accessible as Zermatt and its neighbors, they have kept their distance from the world longer. In fact, Zinal could not be more different from Zermatt. It is an affordable winter resort, family-oriented, with a large Club Med facility and no fancy hotels (though one is scheduled to open next year).

Environmentalism is a hot topic, and the town has chosen to limit development to help safeguard the delicate Alpine environment. Hikers do swarm through Zinal in the summer, heading up the multitude of well-marked trails like horses out of the starting gate. Para-gliders like the strong air currents here, too, and there are several special events--for instance, the guide-led, no-crampons glacier hike to the Bishorn, called the Dames 4000, and the grueling 26-kilometer (16-mile) uphill Sierre-Zinal run, which follows ancient footpaths used by valley farmers who regularly commuted between these villages and the broad Rhone Valley below (and which is said to be as difficult as a level run twice that distance).

Ayer, four miles downhill, is one of Switzerland’s least-changed villages, and it is well worth spending the half-hour or so that it takes to trudge up its one narrow, zigzagging street. It was in Ayer one day that I encountered Willy, a native son who spoke what sounded at first like patois, but was in fact merely French untouched by television. When I met him, Willy was hugging an enormous round of local cheese. What could an old man living alone possibly do with so big a hunk? Well, he explained, his brother’s cheese was ready to eat, but when it was gone it would be gone, and so one had to put another round down in the cellar to age so that when the brother needed more cheese it would be there. Or maybe, Willy allowed, he’d need it first himself. He shrugged. Cheese, when it was ready, was meant to be shared.

Just outside the cafe where Willy was resting was a notice board with two small ads, one looking for a shepherd and an apprentice shepherd, the other telling villagers when and where to buy young cheese in bulk, for a good price.

I TUCKED MY OWN SMALL, firm wedge of local cheese into a pocket and wandered down a steep hill to the Navisense, which was hurrying to join the Rhone. The water was piercingly clear and it made that babbling sound that rivers do in places where nature still has the upper hand. There were other valleys, other tributaries, even two great dams high above me--much more to see before I could say that I understood the upper Rhone. At that moment, though, I was thinking back on the Rhone glacier. As I stood there, a single drop of water was forming somewhere beneath its mass. Soon that drop would grow to five, then 10, then 100. Suddenly, it would become that gloriously swift stream of white water gushing out from beneath the ice. Several weeks later, it will course through the marshes of the Camargue in southern France and spill into the Mediterranean. I still don’t know where that first drop comes from.

GUIDEBOOK

Roaming the Rhone

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Switzerland is 41. Local area codes are given in parentheses below. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 1.49 Swiss francs to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: Swissair has two or three nonstop flights a week from Los Angeles to Geneva, the major airport closest to the source of the Rhone. TWA, United Airlines and Lufthansa offer connecting flights to Geneva from Los Angeles several times a week. From Geneva by car, take the N-1 autoroute to Lausanne, then the N-9 autoroute on to Sion. After Sion, take highways 9 and 19 to the Rhone glacier. Smaller local roads branch off from Highway 9 to Zermatt, Zinal and other tributary valleys. Air tours of the Rhone Valley are available from Air-Glaciers in Sion, telephone (27) 226-464. A one-hour grand tour of the area costs $325 for one to three persons; a 45-minute tour costs $245.

Where to stay: Goms Valley: Hotel Furka, Oberwald, tel. (28) 731-144, a modest but comfortable place close to the Furka Pass. Rate: $70. Hotel Alpenblick, Ernen, tel. (28) 711-537, a cozy, chalet-style establishment with a lovely view of the lower Goms Valley. Rate: $70. Zermatt: Mont-Cervin, tel. (28) 661-122, a very elegant but also relaxed hotel, superbly run by the Seiler family, which pioneered the hotel business in Zermatt and helped it gain international prominence. Rates: $230-$330 for half-board--breakfast and one other meal (obligatory in summer). Hotel Berjhof, tel. (28) 675-400, fax (28) 675-452, a new hotel geared toward the sports-minded. Excellent service. Rates: $90-$95. Berghotel Reffelalp, above Zermatt, via the Gornergrat train, tel. (28) 675-333, fax (28) 675-109, a big turn-of-the-century hotel perched on a mountaintop. Pleasant Alpine ambience. Rate: $178 for half-board (obligatory in summer). Zinal: Le Besso, tel. (27) 653-165, quite elegant accommodations for the price, with an excellent restaurant. Rate: $85.

Where to eat: Most of the aforementioned hotels have good dining rooms. Other possibilities: Zum See, Zermatt, a 30-minute walk or 10-minute cable car ride up the mountainside, tel. (28) 672-045, a wonderful old chalet serving Swiss specialties, $60. Schaferstube, Hotel Julen, Zermatt, tel. (28) 672-481, lamb specialties, $80. Restaurant Sorebois, Zinal, tel. (27) 651-378, hearty food, featuring basic Swiss dishes in the self-service restaurant and large portions of classic French cuisine in the more-formal dining room, $26-$75.

For further information: Union Valaisanne du Tourisme, 6 Rue Pre-Fleuri, 1950 Sion, Switzerland, tel. (27) 223-161, fax (27) 231-572 (English spoken). This agency can provide referrals to local tourist offices throughout the Valais canton, lodgings (including mountain huts) as well as special programs and sports facilities. Also: Swiss National Tourist Office, 222 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 1570, El Segundo, Calif., 90245; (310) 335-5980, fax (310) 335-5982.