The river draws a serpentine through the green fields of the long horizontal valley. This is dotted with a few Bernese farms, typical Oberland hotels [bernois, région montagneuse située près de la capitale suisse]small bars and restaurants as well as two campsites.
[La vallée de] Lauterbrunnen in vertical mode gives stiff necks: it is gripped by cliffs with vertiginous sheer drops. Seventy-two waterfalls scotch the gaze and drown the accounts of instagrammers. In the dark [des sommets] of the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, this natural setting inspired JRR Tolkien for his trilogy of Lord of the Rings and you don’t have to have a wild imagination to project yourself into Middle-earth.
Géraldine Fasnacht remembers this first jump, in June 2001. It was near the Staubbach waterfall, one of the highest in Europe, whose fine drops of water seem to turn into dust in a vacuum. The waterfall is said to have inspired Goethe for one of his poems. “During my jump, I felt like time had stopped and I was falling at the speed of the drop of water I was following along the cliff,” does she picture.
“I stayed for long minutes observing this dream setting and I finally stayed there all week.”
Two decades after his baptism in base jumping, the athlete from Valais feels the same fascination for the valley and the discipline. She was one of the pioneers at the time, before the label of “Disneyland of base jumping” was stuck in Lauterbrunnen.
Practitioners from all over the world threw themselves into the valley and pushed friends from the region to create the Swiss Base Association (SBA) to oversee the development of the discipline, in 2007. It was also necessary to appease the anger of the peasants, some of whom pulled out their pitchforks to scare away the flying men trampling their pastures.
Enthusiasts must therefore obtain a “landing card” costing 40 Swiss francs (39 euros), a large part of which compensates farmers. “They receive between 100 and 1,000 francs depending on the size of their field, says Marcel Geser, president of the SBA. Even the last reluctant peasant ended up accepting us.”
Overweight and drugs
Two cable cars climb up to Mürren, and a fairly technical walk takes us past a sign set up by the SBA. High Nose is one of sixteen exits officials of Lauterbrunnen, accessible sites allowing to multiply the jumps and which contributed to the attractiveness of the place.
“The approach seems easy, and it played tricks on us, because people don’t necessarily have the necessary knowledge”, emphasizes Géraldine Fasnacht.
“Some people are not born in the mountains, others are not always well