The shelf that holds the light

The shelf reads as a clean step. Forest climbs off the valley floor, then the slope eases and flattens, and Crans-Montana sits on the level — roughly 1,500 metres up, on a plateau above Sierre and the Rhône. The face runs due south. This frame looks across the pines to a bare rock summit, one tree standing in the near ground.

South across the valley the Valais Alps close the horizon. The Weisshorn stands clearest, a four-thousand-metre pyramid of rock and ice. On a clean day the run of peaks reaches from the Bietschhorn in the east to Mont Blanc in the west, the Matterhorn set among them.

The plateau itself is worked land. Four small lakes sit on it between about 1,420 and 1,500 metres, linked by a walking circuit, and the golf course spreads flat across the shelf — Crans-sur-Sierre, the Severiano Ballesteros course, which has hosted the European Masters on the same ground every September since 1939. Above the resort the ground keeps climbing to the Plaine Morte glacier, near 2,900 metres.

Crans-Montana is billed as one of the sunniest corners of Switzerland, and in August the reason is plain. The shelf tips toward the light. Long after the valley floor has gone to shade, the forest and the bare rock up here still hold the sun.