Imagine, if you can, a gondola capable of hauling hundreds of passengers every hour from Baker Valley to the summit of Elkhorn Peak, where passengers can disembark, walk into a revolving restaurant and pay an exorbitant price for a hamburger of middling quality.

If that scenario isn’t sufficiently jarring, consider this one:

Paved roads lead from Wallowa Lake to both Aneroid Lake, up the Wallowa River’s east fork, and to the Lake Basin by way of the west fork.

And other gondolas go to the tops of the Matterhorn (with an intermediate station at Ice Lake) and Eagle Cap.

Pure fantasy, of course, all of it.

If you want to visit any of the places in the preceding paragraphs you have to walk or ride a horse.

(Or be handy with a parachute.)

The nearest road, except for the case of Elkhorn Peak, is miles away.

The other sites are in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, where the federal Wilderness Act bans motor vehicles (along with hang gliders and bicycles; the legislation, passed in 1964, is strangely silent, however, on the pressing matter of pogo sticks).

These are, to put it another way, among the least accessible, but indubitably the most beautiful, destinations in the region.

The purveyors of propaganda designed to entice tourists have for decades compared the Wallowas, with their deep canyons and serrated peaks that extend for many miles, to a much more famous mountain range — the Alps of Europe.

The ersatz Swiss theme continues to this day, particularly in Wallowa County, albeit not in a cloying way.

(If you desire to be overwhelmed by homages to another place and culture, Leavenworth, Washington, will accommodate your wishes with aplomb. And leave you appalled, depending on your tolerance for lederhosen and faux Bavarian architecture.)

But although the Wallowas and the Elkhorns resemble the Alps in a topographic and geologic sense, the mountains could scarcely be different in how people have treated them.

I pondered this recently while reading a fine and succinctly titled book, “The Alps,” by alpine historian Ronald W. Clark.

Rereading, actually. I’ve checked out the copy from the Baker County Public Library several times.

Clark’s book was published half a century ago, in 1973. He laments the trend, which started early in the 20th century but accelerated considerably after World War II, to not merely commercialize the Alps but to transform some of the most daunting topography on Earth into the mountainous equivalent of a theme park.

By 1973, significant swathes of the Alps were already accessible by gondolas and railroads and ski lifts and highways. Summits which humans hadn’t touched until well into the 1800s were, a century or so later, reachable by anyone with money to buy a ticket.

And instead of the frigid, windswept and vertigo-inducting aerie that greeted those pioneering mountaineers, modern travelers scarcely have to step outside. They can stay inside the gondola or, on several prominent peaks, walk right into a building featuring a restaurant and gift shop dispensing miniature St. Bernards (complete with brandy cask), replica alpenhorns and assorted other paraphernalia as genuine as a politician’s smile.

I have limited personal experience of how dramatically humans have altered the Alpine landscape.

When I visited Bavaria in the summer of 1986 my host family took me, by way of a rack railway hacked through the bowels of the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, to its apex.

The summit, which also marks the boundary between Germany and Austria, features a glass-and-metal structure so audacious, so improbable given its setting among precipices and snowfields, that I could, at age 15, only marvel at it.

Inside, visitors who burned a minimum of calories to get there, can fortify themselves for the equally easy return trip with the predictable offerings of places frequented by tourists — hefty pretzels, sausages and, of course, a mug of beer.

This is much more tempting, I’ll concede, than the bland fare that people usually eat at the tops of less developed peaks. I enjoy canned cheese product smeared onto crackers, along with handfuls of trail mix, but though that sort of backpack cuisine replenishes calories, it’s not so satisfying as a plate-size wiener schnitzel.

With only that one trip to the Alps on my resumé I can hardly take great offense at how much we’ve civilized parts of the range. I understand, though, why commentators such as Clark lament some of the more egregious examples. I have no doubt that the trend has continued apace — and perhaps has accelerated — in the 50 years since his book was published.

I think we’ve struck something closer to a reasonable balance around here.

We have only one gondola, and it seems to me that the Wallowa Lake Tram, which is outside the Eagle Cap Wilderness, complements the scenery rather than imposing itself on the landscape, as so many of the developments do in the Alps.

I admire the engineering achievements at places such as the Zugspitze. And I appreciate that the gondolas and railroads and funiculars enable people with physical limitations to reach such places and revel in grand vistas once forbidden to all but those with strong legs and lungs and an affinity for danger.

I sometimes wish that everyone who wanted to could see the Wallowas from Polaris Pass, or stand on the summit of Rock Creek Butte, highest point in the Elkhorns, and see sunlight dappling the water of Rock Creek Lake, 1,400 feet (almost) straight down.

But those places would be far less precious — indeed, they might suffer the even worse fate of becoming ordinary — if I shared the view with a fresh load of phone-toting tourists engorged by a gondola every few minutes, exclaiming over the view and kicking me in the shins on their way to the cafeteria.