When I met him, Hans was preparing to carve a sculpture from the 23-foot-high (seven meters) trunk of a century-old sequoia, which the city had recently cut down because its spreading roots were threatening nearby houses. We stood on a hillside overlooking the town, where he had placed this gigantic piece of raw material.

"I moved to Altdorf to be closer to my customers," he explained, "but I couldn't live without the high country." If he had been born 50 years earlier, he would almost certainly have had to remain on the family farm, satisfying his artistic drive by producing utensils, souvenirs, perhaps the occasional crucifix. Today, the prosperity that tourism has brought to the Alps has given him a chance to pursue his talent and make real money, rather than merely survive at the subsistence level his ancestors had to accept. But it doesn't mean he's become a city boy in one stroke. He goes back to help his brothers when he can, especially at hay-cutting time. The sound of the scythe, he said, is "music to my body and soul."

His idea for this sculpture—"the relationship between man and nature"—is no sentimental fantasy. It has always been the core reality of Alpine existence. The Alps are a realm of crushing and freezing and falling, not a world to be romanticized but one that requires respect, ingenuity, even humility. He accepts that the sequoia had to be cut down—after all, humans have been altering the Alpine landscape for at least 5,000 years. And to own a mass of wood this huge was a tremendous stroke of luck for a young sculptor. But still he moved his hand affectionately across its shaggy bark, breaking off a shard as a present for me. "I hope," he said shyly, "that the sculpture will be a kind of memory for the tree."

Increasingly, the Alps are big business. In the spa town of Évian, France, the people who bottle its mineral water send 1.6 million gallons of liquid Alps out of their plant every day. They promote their product by showing romantic snowy peaks below the simple words "Welcome to Our Factory." They're right: The Alps are a sort of factory. They produce millions of cubic meters of lumber, hundreds of thousands of tons of iron and salt, not to mention spectacular quantities of cheese, wine, and apples, athletic challenge, artistic inspiration, spiritual insight, and many forms of expensive and dangerous amusement. Mining and lumbering are down, but since the invention of winter tourism some 140 years ago, the Alps have become an enormous factory of fun.

All this has catapulted generations of isolated mountain folk into the modern era. "There are people who say, 'Oh, the old days were so beautiful,'" said Xavier Siaud, 70, who grew up on a farm near Le Perrier. "But in the old days there was poverty." Three generations ago, men routinely left their villages in the winter to make extra money traveling across Europe selling everything from blankets to flower bulbs. Today, for every grizzled farmer in lederhosen there are ten ski-lift ticket sellers, nine second-home builders, eight 40-ton-truck drivers, seven Portuguese chambermaids, six pizzamakers, and a batch of people selling postcards and disposable cameras. Adjusting to all this isn't so easy.