20th Anniversary Dream Trip Contest

Great Travel Moment

The night before, at a sidewalk café in Interlaken, Switzerland, we watched a red sunset reflected in the snows of the Jungfrau. We wanted to see the mountain closer. The next day was good to us. The weather was sunny all the way up the cogwheel train that took us to the highest station, at 11,333 feet, in Europe. We checked often, but no clouds gathered over the peak; however our views from the train were limited by valley walls. We had seen more from the ground below. By the time the train went through a four-mile rock tunnel under the mountain , I thought the view was disappointing, even carnivalesque. Then we came to windows in the rock tunnel where we saw a sea of ice imperceptibly moving past the jagged edges of the mountain. The Jungfrau had revealed itself: vast, cold, indifferent and unforgettable.