One hundred years on the Riederalp.

Anton Imboden was a carpenter. In the spring of 1923, on the clearing above Riederalp, there stood only a small alp-cheese hut, half collapsed. Anton bought the parcel for six hundred francs, felled the pines, sawed them in the valley and carried the beams back up. By late summer the house stood, without electricity, without running water, with a tiled stove brought up from Brig. Marie ran the house.

The first guests came from the Bernese Oberland, climbers seeking quarters before the Konkordia hut. They paid in five-franc coins and now and then with a ham. Anton died in the winter of 1948. Marie kept the house alone until 1962.

In 1962 the son Hans took over, with his wife Trudi from Naters. They had the house wired in 1967, built out the two upper rooms in 1972 and put in the first telephone in 1981. Trudi cooked. Hans cared for the timber. Each evening they wrote into the house book what had happened that day.

In 1987 the schist roof was replaced with a new one. In 1995 Hans retired. The same year, had such things existed yet, the house might have had its first website.

Annelies Imboden-Truffer took the house from her father Hans. She studied hospitality in Lausanne and Florence, returned after ten years in Zürich. She has changed some things, modernised the bathrooms, renewed the heating, brought in a lighter breakfast. Many things, deliberately, she has not: the parlours, the bread, the silence.

She still cooks on Sundays. The house book is still kept. The next generation, Annelies’ daughter Lea, is currently apprenticing as a cook at the Walliser Stube in Brig. Who knows.