Overview
Wonderful and awesome the Alps indeed are- a broken barrier of snow-frosted peaks stretching across Europe from France to Yugoslavia. Within their ramparts huddle villages and farms from the Middle Ages, and winter resorts as new as tomorrow. In the Alps National Geographic writers and photographers take you on a lighthearted tour of the Alpine countries, vacationland for multitudes in both summer and winter. In Switzerland, country of William Tell and Heidi, you join the jet set at St. Moritz and tread pastures rich with wildflowers. You take a nostalgic walk to the end of an era in France on perhaps the last officially permitted transhumance- the herding of a flock of sheep to their summer pasture in the Alps. Stop for postage stamps and a mountain stroll in Liechtenstein, and visit Neuschwanstein, Mad Ludwig's fairy-tale castle in Bavaria. After journeying through Italy's Dolomites and lingering at a fishing village on Lake Maggiore, you arrive in Slovenia, northernmost republic of Yugoslavia, to sip homemade plum brandy and visit craftsman fashioning cowbells and pearwood pipes. Finally, in Austria, you spend Christmas with a farm family, relax to Mozart in the afternoon in Salzburg, and share the exhilaration of skirting mountain peaks by sailplane. In the Alps, you meet peasants and princes, joyous children, elders sustained by memories; probe the mysteries of avalanches; scale Mont Blanc's granite walls.