A story in the brand new, sharply designed and overall very intriguing new Jewish web magazine, Tablet, describes the Jewish infatuation with the Alps. The best line, cited at the end, is the famous one from Rav Hirsch: 

Samson Raphael Hirsch, the father of modern Orthodoxy, may have best captured this sentiment: “When I shall stand before G-d,” he wrote in the 1880s, “the Eternal One will ask me: Did you see my Alps?”