Each story is rooted in real local history and landmarks
A brave little goat volunteers to be the first creature across the Devil's newly built bridge in the Schoellenen Gorge. Told from the goat's perspective, the story follows her nerve-wracking trot over the raging Reuss while the Devil waits hungrily on the other side -- only to discover he has been outwitted by a village and one very courageous animal.
A young Russian drummer boy becomes separated from Suvorov's army during the desperate storming of the Devil's Bridge in September 1799. Lost in the dark Schoellenen Gorge, he is found by a local Urseren child who speaks no Russian. Together, the two children navigate the treacherous gorge by lantern light, forging an unlikely friendship across language and war.
In 1878, a child follows their Italian father into the half-finished Gotthard tunnel, discovering a world of deafening dynamite blasts, unbearable heat, and flickering lanterns. Through their father's eyes, the child learns the human cost of the century's greatest engineering marvel -- and finds courage in the workers' unbreakable solidarity deep beneath the mountain.
A child discovers a magical old map in the Ursern Valley Museum that shows four glowing paths radiating from Andermatt -- one for each Alpine pass. Before the mountain spirit seals the routes for winter, the child must travel each pass to collect a token: a crystal from the Gotthard, a feather from the Oberalp lighthouse, a frozen flower from the Furka glacier, and a carved stone from the Susten.
Near the Rhone Glacier on the Furka Pass, a child finds a sepia photograph from 1900 showing the glacier reaching all the way down to the road. Touching the image, they are transported back in time to a world of vast blue ice and the bustling Hotel Belvedere. As the decades fast-forward around them, they must find their way home while watching the ice retreat -- learning what the glacier remembers and what the world is losing.
A child boards the Glacier Express in Andermatt and discovers that each of the 91 tunnels is a portal to a different era of Swiss Alpine history. From medieval mule drivers hauling salt over the Gotthard to Italian dynamite workers in 1878 to the precision engineers of the 2016 Gotthard Base Tunnel breakthrough, every tunnel exit opens onto a new chapter -- and the child must ride all the way to the end of the line to find their way back to the present.
On a school trip to the Sasso San Gottardo museum, a child gets separated from the group in the underground fortress corridors. Wandering through the declassified caverns, they find riddles scratched into the walls by soldiers from different eras -- a World War II conscript, a Cold War sentinel, a 19th-century artilleryman. Solving each riddle opens the next hidden door, until the child emerges into the dazzling crystal cavern, where 1.5 tonnes of giant quartz crystals light up like a secret the mountain has been keeping for millennia.
Young Bernhard grows up in Andermatt surrounded by mountains on every side, and discovers he has a secret gift: the mountain wind speaks to him, whispering the fastest line down every slope. From his first childhood races on the local hills to the great Olympic downhill at Sapporo in 1972, the wind guides him -- a story about listening to nature, trusting your instincts, and how a boy from a tiny Alpine crossroads became a champion.
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