Lauterbrunnen is a valley where seventy-two waterfalls spill straight off cliffs that rise almost vertically on both sides, a glacier-cut trench in the heart of the Bernese Oberland. The most famous of them, the Staubbach, drops about 297 metres in near-freefall from the rock behind the village — one of the highest free-falling waterfalls in Europe — and breaks into drifting mist whenever the wind catches it, which is how it earned its name, "dust stream." Ice-age glaciers ground out the flat, U-shaped floor over thousands of years, leaving limestone walls hundreds of metres high that separate the green meadows below from the sky. The name means roughly "many springs," and the place has drawn writers for centuries: Goethe wrote a poem to the Staubbach in 1779, and a young J.R.R. Tolkien walked the valley in 1911, later using its sheer walls and falling water as the model for Rivendell.
Step onto the valley floor and the first thing you feel is the scale: meadows and farmhouses seem to hang overhead, thin threads of water leak from the rock, and the snow-covered Jungfrau closes off the far end. Wooden chalets and the pointed church spire look like toys against the walls. A yellow mountain railway runs along the foot of the cliff, and cable cars lift you to the car-free terrace villages of Wengen and Mürren above. Inside the mountain, the Trümmelbach drains the meltwater of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau through a carved gorge — the only glacier falls in Europe you can still reach underground. The waterfalls run hardest in late spring and early summer, when the snow melts and the cliffs stream on every side; by high summer the meadows deepen to emerald and the high trails open.