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For centuries, Swiss farmers have sent their cattle, goats and sheep up the mountains to graze in warmer months before bringing them back down at the start of autumn. Devised in the Middle Ages to save precious grass in the valleys for winter stock, the tradition of \u201csummering\u201d has so transformed the countryside into a patchwork of forests and pastures that maintaining its appearance was written into the Swiss Constitution as an essential role of agriculture.<\/p>\n
It has also knitted together essential threads of the country\u2019s modern identity \u2014 alpine cheeses, hiking trails that crisscross summer pastures, cowbells echoing off the mountainsides.<\/p>\n
In December, the United Nations heritage agency UNESCO added the Swiss tradition<\/a> to its exalted \u201cintangible cultural heritage\u201d list.<\/p>\n But climate change threatens to scramble those traditions. Warming temperatures, glacier loss, less snow and an earlier snow melt are forcing farmers across Switzerland to adapt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not all are feeling the changes in the same way in a country where the Alps create many microclimates. Some are enjoying bigger yields on summer pastures, allowing them to extend their alpine seasons. Others are being forced by more frequent and intense droughts to descend with their herds earlier.<\/p>\n The more evident the effect on the Swiss, the more potential trouble it spells for all of Europe.<\/p>\n Switzerland has long been considered Europe\u2019s water tower, the place where deep winter snows would accumulate and gently melt through the warmer months, augmenting the trickling runoff from thick glaciers that helped sustain many of Europe\u2019s rivers and its ways of life for centuries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Since he started studying the Rh\u00f4ne Glacier in 2007, Daniel Farinotti, one of Europe\u2019s premier glacier scientists, has seen it retreat about half a kilometer, or about a third of <\/span>a mile, and thin, forming a big glacial pond at its base.<\/p>\n He has also seen the glacier \u2014 which stretches around nine kilometers, or about five and half miles, up the Alps near Realp \u2014 grow black as protective winter snow melts to reveal previous years of pollution in a pernicious feedback loop.<\/p>\n \u201cThe darker the surface, the more sunlight it absorbs and the more melt that\u2019s generated,\u201d said Mr. Farinotti, who teaches at ETH Zurich and who leads a summer field course on the glacier.<\/p>\n To get to the glacier from the road, his students walk across mounds of white tarps, stretched around an ice cave carved for tourists. The tarps can reduce annual melting by as much as 60 percent<\/a>, but they cover only a minuscule portion of glaciers, and in places like ski slopes, where there is a private financial motivation.<\/p>\n \u201cYou cannot cover an entire glacier with that,\u201d said Mr. Farinotti, who also works for the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The government is trying to address the changes and preserve Swiss alpine traditions, including with large infrastructure projects to bring water to the top of mountains for animals grazing in the summer months.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For now, the traditions, while strained in places, continue. After three days of scrambling over rocky mountainsides and zigzagging stone steps, the first sheep in a giant herd of nearly 700 burst into view at the end of their \u201csummering\u201d last fall.<\/p>\n As a crowd of spectators cheered, some of the sheep pranced. Others stopped dead in their tracks and had to be coaxed along by herders in matching plaid shirts and leather cowboy hats, adorned with wildflowers and feathers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The sheep had been living wild for more than three months \u2014 wandering around a high, vast wilderness penned in by glaciers. Their only contact with humanity had been the visits of a single shepherd, Fabrice Gex, who says he loses more than 30 pounds a season walking the territory to check on them.<\/p>\n \u201cI bring them salt, cookies and love,\u201d said Mr. Gex, 49.<\/p>\n To take them back to their owners, who are mostly hobby farmers, he was joined by a crew of herders \u2014 known locally as \u201csanner\u201d from the Middle High German samnen, \u201cto collect\u201d \u2014 who arrive by helicopter.<\/p>\n The job is rough and paid modestly, but locally it is considered an honor to take part in a tradition first recorded in 1830, but that many believe started centuries earlier.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTo be a sanner gives you roots,\u201d said Charly Jossen, 45, enjoying a beer with many of the spectators after completing his 11th season in the fall. \u201cYou know where you belong.\u201d He had brought his son Michael, 10, for the first time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Historically, the sanner would take the sheep across the tongue of the Oberaletsch Glacier. But the retreat of the glacier has long made that route too unstable and dangerous. In 1972, the community of Naters blasted a path into a steep rock face to offer the herders and sheep an alternative way home.<\/p>\n This season, the herders intend to push their return back by two weeks, said their leader, Andr\u00e9 Summermatter, 36.<\/p>\n \u201cWith climate change, our vegetation period is longer,\u201d he said, standing in the ancient stone pen where the sheep are corralled at the end of their trek. \u201cSo the sheep can stay longer.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The tradition of alpine pasturing, or \u201ctranshumance,\u201d spreads all across the Alps, including Austria, Italy and Germany.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nearly half of Switzerland\u2019s livestock farms send their goats, sheep and cows up to summer pastures, according the last thorough study done by government scientists, in 2014.<\/p>\n More than 80 percent of alpine farm income comes from government subsidies \u2014 many for keeping the pastureland clear of encroaching trees, which are nudging uphill with warmer temperatures<\/a>.<\/p>\n That makes Switzerland a rare country that does not embrace tree cover as a solution to climate change.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be all bushes and forest if we weren\u2019t here,\u201d said Andrea Herger, herding cows past an inn for hikers and into her family\u2019s milking barn halfway up a mountain near Isenthal. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t be that open, beautiful landscapes for hiking.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her husband, Josef Herger, is the third generation in his family to run their alpine summer farm<\/a>, which is reached by a private cable car. They bring up seven cows from their own farm and 33 cows from neighbors, who pay them in cows\u2019 milk that the couple uses to make cheese.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Farther west, near L\u2019Etivaz, the Mottier family pushes 45 cows along what they call a \u201cmountain train,\u201d following the newly sprouting grass to a summit of 2,030 meters, or more than 6,600 feet, and then back down to nibble on the second growth of grasses. Starting in May, they make five trips, stopping at three levels.<\/p>\n Near the peak, Beno\u00eet Mottier, 24, climbed onto a limestone outcrop, decorated with the initials of idling shepherds and the years they carved them. The oldest he can find was left in the 1700s by someone with his initials \u2014 B.M.<\/p>\n He is the fifth generation in his family to take cows there.<\/p>\n The Mottiers are one of 70 families in the area who make a traditional Swiss cheese called L\u2019Etivaz. They follow strict rules \u2014 slowly heating fresh milk in a giant copper cauldron over a fire of spruce wood. After the cheese is pressed, they take it down to a local cooperative, where it is aged and sold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n L\u2019Etivaz can be made only on the local mountainsides for six months of the year. The tradition is so important, children from local farming families can leave school on summer vacation weeks early to help out.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the beginning of the season, we are happy to begin,\u201d said Isabelle Mottier, Beno\u00eet\u2019s mother. \u201cAt the end of the season, we are happy it\u2019s ending.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor us, it\u2019s a life of cycles,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Mottier summer farm gets water from a spring. Droughts in recent years have forced the family to adapt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cA cow drinks 80 to 100 liters of water a day,\u201d Ms. Mottier explained. \u201cWe have more than 40 cows. We need an enormous quantity of water.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2015, during a heat wave, the spring ran dry. Three years later, another heat wave and drought hit. And then again in 2022.<\/p>\n During the droughts, the Swiss Army delivered water to alpine pastures using helicopters. The Mottiers, however, had no tanks to store it.<\/p>\n So they have installed a solar-powered pump to draw water from a lower spring, and have purchased a large water bladder to store snowmelt early in the season.<\/p>\n