Spectacular landscapes in the Bernese Oberland, especially Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau from Kleine Scheidegg.
This is a fabulous walk high above Grindelwald which we've done a couple of times. Taking the cable car from Grindelwald to First and then less than an hour to the lake, though it can take longer if you like to take lots of photographs.
On the return we usually have at least a drink, if not a meal, at First, before going back down.
In September 2020 we returned to Kleine Scheidegg to spend a few days at the Hotel Bellevue des Alpes. The hotel is in an absolutely wonderful location looking from the front down the valley with Mönch and Jungfrau and the wall of mountains to the south. On the other side another magnificent view down the valley to Wetterhorn and Grindelwald. Just to the side of the hotel is the Eiger.
The Eiger is absolutely my favourite mountain in Switzerland. The Matterhorn is the most beautiful, but the story of the Eiger, and particularly the climbers who attempted its North Face, is an amazing tale, full of heroism and tragedy on this most forbidding and difficult of climbs. The face is almost vertical, with three ice fields (or there were in the early part of the twentieth century) and at times avalanches of stones cascaded off the mountain onto the climbers, who at that time had no hard helmets.
The early attempts on the face were watched through telescopes on the terrace of the Bellevue des Alpes. Tragedy struck both of the first two attempts. Two men dying in the first and four in the second. The death of Tony Kurtz, suspended from a rope just metres away from the guides trying to save him, is particularly poignant. He endured for many hours, overnight, in appalling conditions, to be thwarted by a knotted rope, too large to go through a carabiner.
In 1990 we were staying in Wengen and took the cable car to Männlichen to walk back down to the town. We reprised part of that walk in 2020, walking from Kleine Scheidegg to Männlichen and back, easily done in a morning and with magnificent views.
We first did this hike in August 2016, we'd been planning on doing it for years. From Lauterbrunnen we took the train to Eigergletscher and walked down to Alpiglen, much of the way below the north face of the Eiger. This was the closest we'd been and it looks incredibly steep.
Many lives have been lost on the North Face and it was only in 1938 that two German climbers, Anderl Heckmair and Ludwig Vorg, and two Austrians, Fritz Kasparek and Heinrich Harrer, succeeded in climbing it.
At the base of the rock face are a number of handprint plaques and photos of those who have scaled the North Face, including the Swiss climber Ueli Steck who first climbed it at he age of 18 and, together with Stephan Siegrist, opened the route called "Young Spider" in 2001. In 2008 he, knocked 58 minutes off his own record for speed climbing the North Face of the Eiger set the previous year: he got to the top in an unbelievable 2 hours and 47 minutes. That year he was the first recipient of the Eiger Award for his climbing achievements. Sadly Ueli Steck died in April 2017 while climbing Nuptse, acclimatising for an attempt on Everest without supplementary oxygen.
In September 2020 we returned to stay at the Bellevue des Alpes. We again did the Eiger Trail and it is still a great hike but they have rather spoilt the start and are in the process of spoiling the whole valley with a vast new cable car system designed specifically to whisk as many tourists up from Grindelwald to the Jungfraujoch as fast as possible and without them having to go outside at all. This, apparently, appeals particularly to visitors from the far east. They obviously have no wish to experience the wonderful landscape, they simply have a list of sights to tick off before hurrying to the next one.
After months cooped up with the Covid-19 restrictions we weren't particularly fit so took the train from Kleine Scheidegg to Eigergletscher which cuts out a steep start to the hike. The hike is now diverted away from the mountains, down closer to the blue lake we'd seen on our first time here. This turns out to be a man-made reservoir for snow-making on the ski slopes, especially the lower ones. It's a sign of global warming that the need to make artificial snow in winter is increasing in the mountains, and we were to see several of these reservoirs on our hikes this time.
We again had lunch at Alpiglen but they weren't doing the fried egg, rösti and mountain cheese option. Instead we had the melted cheese, bacon and rösti which was also very good.
Afterwards it's a short train ride back to Kleine Scheidegg.
My absolute favourite place to ski is from Kleine Scheidegg in the shadow of the Eiger. The Matterhorn may be more beautiful, and skiing beneath it is certainly wonderful, but there's something about the Eiger.
Most recently in 2018 I skied while Andrew was off taking photographs - another glorious day. I had the little Sony with me, though, to take photos on the slopes.
