Grindewald and First to Shineger Platte

View of the Eiger from the start of the walk

We spent a week in the Swiss Alps on a pure walking holiday.  The idea being that you walk between hotels whilst your bags are transferred for you via train.  Meaning you never have to carry a heavy pack on your back and can just enjoy the scenery.  That didn't mean the days were easy, I didn't truly appreciate how steep these mountains were.  A 1 in 10 gradient would be considered a gentle slope in these parts.  And since most days involved some sort of 1000m ascent followed by a similar descent at the end of the day, it got kind of tough during the middle portion.

The wonderful Swiss infrastructure

We went over the snow covered pass up ahead

We spent two nights in Grindelwald, which is this little village at the base of the Eiger.  I've never been somewhere where you would have been majorly out of place if you weren't in outdoors gear.  Nor a town where 95% of the shops were selling hiking gear.  Normally I'm the one looking massively out of place, covered in mud and wearing hiking boots.  And whilst there wasn't much mud around, there were an awful lot of hiking boots.  There were also a lot of big tour buses, this was definitely the most touristy spot we stayed at.  And I have to say I've never been somewhere with such large concentrations of both tour buses and hiking gear.  I always thought they were the antithesis of each other.

Bachalpsee, easy part done

Our first taste of snow heading up from Bachalpsee

The trip there from Zurich airport was unbelievable smooth.  I thought we had been booked on some pretty tight connections with the trains, it was 3 trains in the end to Grindewald.  In most cases it was something like a 6 minute change.  You would never attempt that in the UK, I would think at least a 20 minute buffer is required here.  But the trains were seriously like clockwork.  Perhaps that's why they need such good watches, it's to keep the trains on their precision timing, accurate to the millisecond!

The lunch spot at Faulhorn ahead - hot soup at 2681m!

Our first afternoon in Grindelwald was spent admiring the view and having beers in the shadow of the Eiger, you can't get much better than that.  I was all inspired to read the White Spider again, but then it got a bit too scary for me, so I read Into Thin Air instead.  They are both really good books though, and if you have ever wanted to climb Everest read Into Thin Air first, it's really put me off that mountain.  And when you summit a mountain do you think you have to get back alive in order to claim it?  In The White Spider there were a lot of attempts made on the north face of the Eiger, and not a great success rate and I always wonder if you die on the way down can you really claim it?

The Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau, don't think you can get a better view than that! Unbelievable

Our first proper day of walking was a loop from Grindelwald, up to First and then across to Schynige Platte with a rack railway down and train to Grindelwald.  I have to say the infrastructure in Switzerland is amazing.  Not only are the trains accurate to within a second, but you can get so high up the mountains without walking a step.  It means you can live in the valleys where there are still trees, and cows can survive but go walking in the mountains in the afternoons.  It also saved my knees from a pounding on many occasions, which was much appreciated.

Looking down to Lake Brienz in the distance - it's at 560m elevation, we are at 2600m, that's quite a fall!

More photos at Bachalpsee

The trip to First was in a cable car, and not just a ski lift where it's just a little seat with a bar that comes down, but a proper capsule with automatically closing doors and walls all around you.  It certainly helped to overcome my cable car fear.  I hate the feeling when they go over the poles, and it feels like it's deciding whether it wants to stay on the cable or plummet hundreds of metres.  Grindelwald is only at 1000m, but First was at 2100m, now that's a cable car ride.  So without walking a step we were already nearly at the height of Australia's highest mountain.  There are going to be a lot of mentions of elevations over the next few posts, apologies if that isn't interesting to you.

From the cable car we came across our first and only experience of tour groups in the mountains. There were a whole bunch of elderly people doing a variety of rather strange stretching routines, I'm not 100% sure why you need to be stretching your triceps before a walk in the mountains.  It was then an easy walk up to Bachalpsee, this alpine lake.  Along the way you just had constant mountain vistas all around.  The part to Bachalpsee was definitely the easiest part. And I think it was also where most people turned round.

The afternoon clouds gathering

We kept going, and this is where it started to get snowy.  It was unusual to spend so much time walking in the snow, growing up in the tropics and all.  It was really a function of the surroundings, which way the slope was facing or the mountain structure as to whether the snow would gather.  Much more than elevation.  We were at 2500m at some points and the path was total dirt, with hardly any snow, but then further on at 2300m and you would be in metres of snow.

The snow in earnest

I'm glad it was a Sunday and there were quite a few people out walking about, since it was a bit dicey in some parts. It was reassuring to know that if anything went wrong there were other people around with the ability to speak German and mobile phones.

We had lunch at Faulhorn, which at 2681m was the highest point of the day, and already higher than Kossie.  In fact over the week I think we ended up higher than the highest point in Oz on three days.

I like how the Swiss decided that rather than putting the hut at the junction of tracks, at maybe 2500m, they went all the way to the top of the mountain.  And when I say hut, it was much more than that, more of a settlement, with a restaurant and terrace, really quite civilised.  We were still rather early in the season, so the restaurant was closed, but the kitchen was still making hot soup.  It was more of a stew really, nice and thick and warm.

It was at that point that we find out that the rest of the route is officially closed.  But the guys at the hut said it wasn't so bad, and that we should be fine.  And in the end we were fine, but there was one really scary point.  Basically the next 3kms or so were all completely covered in snow.  And when you are following contours it's much more scary than if you are going uphill, since to one side of you is just an incredibly sharp drop, hundreds of metres below.  Most of the time it wasn't so bad, you could see that you would slide for awhile but then come to rest in a valley.  But at one point we had to go round the end of a ridge, and the land just dropped away, that was white knuckle stuff, I did not enjoy that at all.  The sad part was that the views would have been great, but I could not look.  It was head down and just make sure you were firm in every footstep.

And yet another - it was a pretty spot

What made it easier was that quite a few people had been through before us, so there was always an obvious path to follow.  But I would have hated to be the first person cutting the trail at some points.  It was also lucky that the snow was generally pretty soft, it wasn't the ice fields that we've had before, where you can't get any grip with your boots.  But it was still a good introduction to walking in the alps.

The terrain on the last section, quite different from the snow covered portion

The last 2kms of the walk were a bit of a grind.  We were out of the snow, but the trail hadn't been maintained (probably because it was still closed), so now it was just eroded dirt slopes.  It was still as steep as before, but this time there wouldn't be any snow to cushion your fall.  The density of other walkers really dropped off at this point.  I'm not sure where they all disappeared to since there didn't seem to be many ways off the mountains.  Maybe they got lost in the snow.

There aren't many photos from this section, since I was seriously flagging at this point.  After slogging along all day, with intermittent fears of death, we ended up at Schynige Platte at 2100m and is a rack railway trip from Interlaken.  So there were serious amounts of people there.  It was a bit of a shock to the system after a day basically spent alone.  Everyone else looked so fresh and clean, and I felt gritty from the sweat and dirt.  And then we all had to pack into the railway cars to get back down.  I feel for those people stuck in our car, I hope we didn't smell too bad.  But if this was a taste of walks to come, we were in for a serious treat.

The days walk - 18kms, 600m elevation gain, 600m descent.