UP

I’M told there was nothing to see at first, just a staccato rumble thundering up from the valley below. It had been a quiet afternoon in Tyrol, the next blast of summer rain still just a threat to the east. Over at the mountain hut Bettelwurfhütte, the day’s arrivals moved out to the patio as the rumble approached. For 125 years the stone and wood structure has been a refuge for weary hikers, an outpost of warm beds and hot goulash high on the southern face of Austria’s Kleiner Bettelwurf. At 6,814 feet, when the patio is not shrouded in ghostly mist, the view takes in the full vertiginous majesty of the surrounding peaks. Elsewhere in his beloved Alps, John Ruskin, the 19th-century English art critic, wrote of the “ghastly poise” these mountains command. On this day, I learned later, someone had glimpsed that ghastly poise a little too directly. The rescue chopper at last swept into view, slicing through the clouds and banking toward the hut.

Helicopter rescues are not uncommon out here in Austria’s craggy west. Climbers fall, succumb to heat or cold or exhaustion, wander into the path of falling rock. The country’s highest mountains are here, its steepest ski runs, its most formidable hikes. Whatever dangers lurk are indivisible from the grandeur and the splendor and the sheer geologic scale; as with all things sublime, the beauty and the terror are one. But there had been no falls, no exhaustion, no rock encounters that day.

The hiker being rescued had started her trek at Pfeishütte, a hut five-and-a-half winding miles to the west. Her expedition had begun along the edge of a gorgeous limestone valley, amid wildflowers and patches of snow and the clang of sheep bells echoing across the hills. As she went higher, she entered a separate plane of cold and gray, that backdrop giving way to fog and barren rock. She would have just passed memorials to some previous hikers when