Stutz Falchern
In the United States of today we build our homes with two-by-fours. In the Switzerland of 500 years ago they built their homes with eight-by-fourteens stacked up like Lincoln Logs to form the exterior walls. This makes for a structure of extreme durability and unyielding stoutness as the top of my head can attest having fetched up against every sodding door lintel at Stutz Falchern a time or two in recent days.
To reach this quaint chalet you take the train to the end of the line at Meiringen situated on the flood plain of the Aare River as it courses its way through a textbook hanging valley bulldozed through the Alps by a glacier a few years back some few kilometers east of modern-day Interlaken. At Meiringen you hop on the Post Bus and paste your nose to the window for the scenic twisting climb 1,000 feet up the village of Zwirgi.
You have never heard of Zwirgi but if you are an Arthur Conan Doyle aficionado you may remember Reichenbach Falls where Professor Moriarity and Sherlock Holmes grappled and then plunged into the cataract to conclude The Final Problem and Sherlock’s fictitious life. Reichenbach Falls happen to be precisely in Zwirgi and you can peer down into the fearsome drop from the railings of the narrow bridge leading from Zwirgi to the sub-village of Falchern, four kilometers distant.
Our dear friend Kristina Jetton grew up in Zurich before she married an American and moved to Napa, so when she heard of our travel plans she offered to set us up for a few nights at the weekend/summer home in the Alps that her grandparents bought sixty years ago . . . Stutz Falchern.
Kristina’s mother, Irene von Wyss, drove up there from Zurich to greet us and cook us supper and show us around. Stutz has been modified a time or two over the half-millennium but the original hearth remains, and the concussive doorways.
Every photo below is of or from Stutz, including the one of the best beer cooler on the continent.
Stutz Falchern
A new friend
