Wednesday July 27: Meiringen to Gindelwald
Today we discovered the Bernese Oberland! There is nothing like it.
Today’s stage was supposed to start with another stiff climb up to the Reichenbach Falls, apparently famous from Sherlock Holmes stories. But we’d learned bad habits, and decided to take the post bus up the hill to skip the climb – and the falls, but we saw lots of waterfalls.
This was another cloudy morning. Once we’d used an internal combustion engine to ascend, we could enjoy the most lovely flat walk next to a little stream continuing into a primordial forest.
I was feeling strong today! Climbing had become easy, and remained easy thereafter.
Coming out of the forest, we saw our first really big mountains. That gave us an inkling of what lay ahead.
We climbed up and up to the Grosse Scheidegg (big watershed) pass – and there lay the Bernese Oberland, with the Eiger just as big as life.
There’s a hotel restaurant at the top of the Grosse Scheidegg, but the place was slammed with tourists and service seemed unlikely. We sat on the grass to eat our snacks while gazing on the Eiger. Picnic Eier remained a solid choice! (Some places sell their boiled eggs dyed bright orange, I suppose to prevent people from accidentally mixing them up with raw eggs.)
Our route was supposed to take us down into the valley toward Grindelwald, but it seemed a shame to squander our elevation when there was a lovely balcony trail (really a gravel/paved road) curving around the high right side of the valley, with glorious views across to the Eiger the whole way.
We took this road to First, where a gondola runs down the mountainside to Grindelwald. The gondola was outrageously expensive, but then it covered a LOT of distance, which made the price worthwhile.
A note on cutting distances: today’s stage was supposed to be about 23 kilometers with 1390 m ascent and 950 m descent. That is too much for us. We were much, much happier starting and finishing with transporation assistance!
Grindelwald was a shock. It’s extremely touristic, much more so than Engelberg was. We stopped in the Montbell store, where I coveted many things but purchased nothing; we were packed very light. Chris did buy a wool t-shirt with an ibex on it. Montbell is funny – the name suggests a Swiss company, but it’s actually a Japanese outdoor company that specializes in super lightweight gear.
Paragliders wafted in and out of the gaps between peaks.
We despaired of finding a restaurant to our liking for dinner. Our hotel room had a balcony facing the Eiger, and it seemed perverse to squander the sunset hours anywhere else. We stopped in a Migros to buy groceries and had a private balcony party that evening.
We watched the tourist crowds in the street below, playing mini golf and drinking beer and listening to a live band doing an open-air street concert. All that evening, not one of them looked up to see the peak that makes Grindelwald famous.
Whatever other tourists want to do, we weren’t going to skip a moment of Eiger-watching. We had a perfect view of the mountains at sunset. We watched for hours as the Eiger peeked in and out of the ubiquitous clouds and finally became almost clear at nightfall.
