ITS NAME IS WRIT IN WATER

LOOKING FORWARD TO RETURN to Zermatt, where it's cool and the skies are open. The mountains host  their share of primal storms, but the community has  created a building code that can withstand the weather. How great to live in a world of ample water, water that's doing good work -- refreshing, powering, sustaining and soothing. The Christiana hotel in Zermatt sits next to the Vispa river. It's frozen in winter, but in summer it provides cool evenings and a delicious white noise that lulls you to sleep. Waking, it's sometimes hard to tell whether a powerful rainstorm has moved in, or whether it's just ol' Ma'am river roaring and rolling rocks down from the glaciers above.  As you can see,the Swiss have found it prudent to corral the waters into a concrete channel -- neatness counts.

Wherever you travel in the mountains there are pounding streams, noisy waterfalls, trickling tributaries over soggy slopes. There is generous snow melt most years, but the rivers "normally" continue into the fall by residual melting of  ancient glacial shelves. But  now those shelves are retreating.  What will happen when the glaciers are gone?