Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The name of the album by The Who just popped into my head when putting this together. Here are some more which are fun, but didn’t make the previous posts.
Also, here are some videos of Mt. Blanc (they are about half a minute each). There’s no voice over or anything, just views.
Views around the lower section of Aiguille du Midi. You can see some climbers coming off the snow and rocks back to where we less intrepid folks are. Embiggen
And we’re off – if you look closely, Mürren is across the valley (we walked around there the day before – it’s lovely! But I didn’t take many pictures there.) Embiggen
Before I continue, I have to note that traveling from Chamonix to Grindelwald, we took six trains. We only had to wait between 5 and 20 minutes for each one.
Männlichen is a mountain that separates Grindelwald from Lauterbrunnen. It has excellent views all around, especially of the mountains that dwarf it, the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. At a pass between here and the higher mountains is Kleine Scheidegg, where a cog railway connects the 2 valleys.
For this hike we took a gondola up from Grindelwald to Männlichen. From there we would walk a short spur trail called the Royal Walk, then turn around and head towards Kleine Scheidegg, then up to where the Eiger Express from Grindelwald drops off people off to get on the train to the Jungfraujoch (a spectacular viewpoint like Aiguille du Midi, but we didn’t go to this one), or to hike or climb or see the Eiger Glacier. After having lunch up there, we continued down to Wengen, a lovely town perched about 1,500 feet above Lauterbrunnen. From there we took a gondola back up to Männlichen and another back down to Grindelwald.
Today we’ll cover up to lunch time.
Views to the peaks behind Lauterbrunnen valley. Embiggen
Continuing on to Schynige Platte. We weren’t exactly sure when the last cog train down was, so we booked it through some beautiful terrain. It would’ve been nice to take our time a bit more, but sometimes the end of a long hike can get to be a slog, so having something to push for helped in a way.
I couldn’t help a selfie here, leaving Bachalpsee, with a window to Wetterhorn. Embiggen
A longish, but super wonderful hike from First (pronounced feersht), to Bachalpsee (that’s a lake), to Faulhorn (a high point with dramatic views), and ending up at Schynige Platte (pronounced Schynige Platte ;-) ), which is serviced by a cog train bringing you back down to the valley near Interlaken, where we could take the regular train back to Grindelwald.
We were going to do a different hike (which we did the next day), but after waiting for a bus for 30 minutes, we realized we totally misread the schedule and it only comes every hour and we had almost another 30 minutes to wait. But about 20 yards away (for that whole 30 minutes) was the gondola up to First, so we improvised, called an audible, and jumped right on the gondola.
This is the First Cliff Walk, to give tourists a rush by walking over emptiness. We didn’t bother, but it probably would’ve been at least kinda fun. We just headed straight out. Embiggen
It did rain on us a little bit on this hike, but nothing serious. But the clouds were changing all the time, with some striking results. Then we have a couple of shots back in town, of our hotel and St. Michel Church.
From left to right, les aiguilles de Chamonix, with Aiguille du Midi having some clouds shouldering up to it, and Mt. Blanc blanketed.
