Walking the Simmenfälle
The whitewater channel carrying the river Simme from the mountains is not what it seems.
Rain fell steadily as we climbed, mixing with the whitewater spray and running down our waterproofs. Beside us the Simme crashed its way down the mountainside. It seemed enraged at being confined to its channel, straining to break free.
Breaking free is exactly what it used to do: when rain and snowmelt swelled the river, it slipped out of its banks and flooded the valley below. Then, in the 18th century, the people of Lenk im Simmental resolved to lock the water up. They decided to divert the Simme, and the result is the whitewater channel we were exploring on our walk.
Such a dramatic re-engineering of nature strikes me as very Swiss. Mountain too steep to walk up? Build a cable car to the top. River keeps flooding? Redirect it. Nowhere to build a railway station? Bury it in the hillside. This is a country defined by rock and reinforced concrete.
The people of Lenk im Simmental altered the course of their river a century before the introduction of reinforced concrete – who knows what they’d have attempted if they’d had access to this modern technology. It’s certainly played a massive part in shaping the country’s infrastructure. I read that by the 1950s and 60s, the Swiss were pouring more concrete per capita than any other country.
Even celebrated film director Jean-Luc Godard made a movie about Swiss concrete. Yes, really. It seems that early in his career he took a job labouring on the construction of the giant Grande Dixence dam high in the Alps. He then arranged a transfer to a less demanding role on the telephone switchboard and borrowed a 35mm camera to make a film about the project. The result was Opération Béton (Operation Concrete), admittedly not one of his better-known works.
The Simmenfälle isn’t on the scale of the Grande Dixence, and hasn’t – to my knowledge – been the focus of any famous filmmakers, but it's still quite a spectacle as it drops 200m down the mountain. Every step of the trail brought us a fresh perspective as the whitewater fell, rebounded and eddied its way down the channel.
Finally, the end. Or should I say the beginning? A towering cascade down a smooth rock marked the start of the Simmenfälle and the high point of our walk, in all senses.
“The water develops a special power here,” says the tourist office website. It’s hard to disagree.