Via Alpina, July 17--August 8, 2022 - Thursday july 28 grindelwald to wengen

Thursday July 28: Grindelwald to Wengen

Today was Eiger-day! We had watched the movie, and we were ready!

We got up early to catch the Wengernalpbahn cog railroad that would take us part of the way up the trail.

Cog railroads use gears on these cogs to prevent runaway trains on steep terrain. They’re a step below funiculars, which have cables in addition to cogs and are used on steeper terrain.

We got off at Grund and walked up to Alpiglen and stopped for a coffee. And a bathroom break. The Bernese Oberland is not the place to pee behind a rock.

And then… we thought about how to spend the day. We’d been following our route cards so far, but they had us walking straight to Kleine Scheidegg, the pass opposite the Grosse Scheidegg, and then on toward Wengen, in the next valley over. A gorgeous walk, to be sure. But here we were, directly under the Eiger. The sun was actually out for once. And there was the Eiger Trail, which runs right under the north face of the darn Eiger!

We’re all about the quick pivot. On a beautiful day like this, the course of wisdom was to strike out on our own and walk the Eiger trail. We could take a train to Wengen if we had to!

Never have we made a more sound decision. This day more than any other stands out in my mind as the beating heart of our whole Via Alpina.

The trail was surprisingly hard for such a touristic route, steep in places.

The thing about this being the north face is that the sun is never directly on it, making it surprisingly hard to photograph. But here you can see the little windows opening into the train tunnel.

After our detailed study of the Nordwand from the movie and our own reading, we could spot all the geographic points of interest - the windows looking into the tunnel, the Spider, the “Death Bivouac” (surprisingly spacious and comfy!).

Right under the Nordwand! It looks so close, but it’s really a heck of a long way up to the top.

The Mönch is starting to come into view.

You can see all the way back to the Kleine Scheidegg and beyond.

It a longer walk than we’d anticipated – with no cover, and therefore no place for a lady to pee. And it was uphill all the way. Evidently most people walk this thing in the other direction, taking the cablecar up to the Jungfraujoch station and walking down to Alpiglen. (If you go that way, it’s downhill all the way.)

The approach to the pass is pretty rocky.

We finally reached the pass, where the Eiger merges into the Mönch and then the Jungfrau. These tourists all did it the easy way!

This is how the tourists we saw got up there. It’s quick, if you don’t mind the price.

And there’s the Kleine Scheidegg, with our destination beyond it. We’ll definitely be taking a train!

From the pass, you can walk up to the Jungfraujoch station, but we headed down and north to the Kleine Scheidegg proper – a surprisingly exposed and narrow trail.

And the clouds started to close in, as they always do after noon.

And now we’re moving on to the Mönch and the Jungfrau.

We finally reached the Kleine Scheidegg, the only one of our alpine passes with its own railroad station. The Hotel Bellevue des Alpes has sat under the Eiger since 1840. This hotel features in Nordwand, though we couldn’t match movie viewing locations with the reality, since the big terrace is on the far side of the building from the Eiger.

To celebrate our encounter with the Eiger, we shared a bottle of prosecco on the terrace.

On some future trip, it might be fun to spend a night up there on the Kleine Scheidegg. Hotel Bellevue is a little spendy and it’s hard to get reservations, but it’s a real historic site.

We were supposed to walk the rest of the way to Wengen, but it was after 3, Wengen was still long way off, and the clouds were closing in, as they always do in the afternoon. We boarded the cog railroad in the direction of Wengen and left the station just as a thunderstorm arrived. We passed several hikers on our putative route as the train descended through the forest – poor bastards!

In Wengen, we walked through the rain to an outdoor shop, where bought a pair of sunglasses for me and an On baseball cap for Chris – he’d been jealous of mine.