Switzerland 2014: A day in the Lauterbrunnen Valley

Posted on by Juliet Frost

Over the Christmas break, I reorganised this blog a bit – added clickable maps to the travel stuff and made the adventures into a page rather than an endless warren of nested menus – and in the process, I discovered where I had blank spaces. Enough blank spaces to occupy a full quarter of the year’s posts, actually. So this is me filling one of them, my day in the Lauterbrunnen Valley.

It was on my County trip there in the summer of 2014. We were there for ten days – well, we were in Switzerland for six days; it took two days in the minibus in each direction – and we got quite a lot packed in. I’ve blogged already about Tuesday, when we went to Our Chalet, and about Anita’s B&B which is where we ended up staying but that still leaves plenty to cover.

Because it’s been a long time, more than five years since I last wrote about this trip, let me remind you of the players:

Group photo of the 2014 county group standing on the stone back steps of Our Chalet. We're in "uniform", which ranges from white to dark blue via light blue and red and no two people are dressed alike.

I (top step) was 29 at the time. The youngest was Kate (fourth from bottom), who was 24 and the daughter of the organiser (second from top). The next youngest was 52 (third from bottom) and then we had seven other ladies whose ages went upwards very sharply from there, finishing in the late 70s. Seven? I thought we were twelve in total but I don’t remember anyone opting out of Our Chalet. It was a Girlguiding trip and one just for adults. Us three youngest were leaders and so were a couple of the older ladies – I see seven things that might be meant for adult uniform in the group photo at Our Chalet – but the rest were Trefoil Guild, which is what I describe as “Brownies for adults”. It’s for anyone 18 or over who wants to uphold Guiding values and do fun stuff but in practice the majority of them are retired and a lot of them will insist it’s only for retired Guiders over 65, which isn’t true.

We had a minibus and driver and I know there are rules and regulations around driving hours but for the amount we were paying, it seemed a bit daft that we weren’t allowed to use him for two out of our six days in Switzerland. Those were our two days “off”, when we either stayed at home or used our own initiative to get out and about. I’ll do them at some point. And finally, when you’re representing Guiding abroad, you’re supposed to wear your uniform for travel and for formal events, so we wore it to Our Chalet (well, I disagree strongly with the definition of “uniform” some of them applied that day, as you might have gathered) and you’re supposed to wear your international neckerchief with your normal clothes the rest of the time, which I did with enthusiasm. It was my first international Guiding trip! In fact, I wore it every day on my second as well. But when you see selfies in this post, you’ll see me in a red scarf with blue and white edges and that’s what it is and why I’m wearing it. You can’t make out the details but I also wore my county fleece that day. It’s not uniform but we were offered them during booking and it’s been my most-complimented piece of Guiding-wear ever since. It has the county emblem on the sleeve and the ugly corporate county version of the Girlguiding logo on the front. The yellow long-sleeved t-shirt is merely something I spotted and liked in Grindelwald on Sunday and it’s still in regular rotation now.

So, scene set and wardrobe explained.

Our B&B in Lutschetal, a traditional Swiss chalet in a rolling green meadow leading up to sheer mountain cliffs. It's a bit cloudy today.

We were staying in a hamlet called Lütschental which is on the way up to Grindelwald from Interlaken. It’s a fifteen minute minibus ride out to our first stop, which was the Trümmelbach Falls. Our leader had attempted to explain them to us and I hadn’t been able to fathom what she was talking about.

A signpost at the bottom of Trummelbach Falls explaining how the levels and waterfalls worked. It's a black zigzag line on a grey background, the waterfalls marked with white numbers 1 to 10.

The falls are sealed up inside the mountain. I’ve walked through gorges and canyons in the Alps many times and that’s exactly what this was like, only turned vertical. It’s a waterfall 140m tall, says Wikipedia, that falls in ten drops through a system of caves. There are stairs between the levels and the best way to do it is to take the funicular-lift-thing up to the level between the sixth and seventh falls. You walk up to the top to see numbers seven to ten and then you walk down to visit the rest, popping out at the resurgence where all that churning white water suddenly calms and turns an incredible shade of turquoise.

Selfie at the resurgence. I'm wearing a blue striped buff around my head, my international neckerchief and a yellow top. Behind and below me is a shallow turquoise river with a gravelly bottom running off into the woods.

I lived in Switzerland for an entire academic year. I came to the Oberland at least twice but somehow I’d never even heard of Trümmelbach. In a move that already surprised absolutely no one and would become a feature of the trip, a couple of the ladies refused to go “all the way up there” and stayed at the cafe at the bottom. I admit, there are worse valley views but this was included in what we’d paid and are you really going to travel two whole days in a minibus to then decline to see the cool stuff?

A blue waterfalls spraying into a round plunge pool within the rocks. The water runs out through a narrow gap in the side of the pool, down through the rock to another smaller, more sloshy pool.

A waterfall from above. Most of the picture is of rock carved into rounded shapes by violent water over thousands of years. At the bottom, the water is seen gushing out from the left and running away into another carved tube somewhere.

A waterfall inside the rock. It's dark, like being in a cave. People are walking over a walkway to the right. To the left and below, a thin waterfall pours in and rushes away almost under their feet.

I declined nothing. I bounded up to that funicular. Given how far it goes inside a mountain, my memory is telling me about a lift but the few pictures I’ve found do indeed suggest a single-car funicular, which runs steeply but diagonally rather than vertically. Although they’re within the mountain, some of the falls are open-air, where the ceiling has presumably collapsed and you can see the mass of water in natural light. In other places you walk through natural caves dug out by the water thousands of years ago and occasionally you walk through unnatural tunnels and up concrete steps. There are viewing platforms and railing placed whenever possible, shafts of light coming from steep twisting vertical canyons forming natural skylights, round pools weathered away by swirling water and misshapen boulders possible torn out by long-ago flash floods. I’m a caver. I’m endlessly fascinated by the power of water to shape the Earth and this is just a very active wet cave. Ok, most of the wet caves in the UK are pretty horizontal because the formation of our limestone doesn’t lend itself to forming deep and sudden drops, but this is just a cave and if it’s a bit short on decorative features, there are plenty of water-formed features that I recognise.

To the right, a walkway vanishes into the rock. In the middle is a large dent in the rock, almost perfectly spherical, carved out by swirling water. To the left, you can just make out a vertical undulating canyon.

I'm not sure if this is a ceiling or an overhead canyon. The rock has swirling marks from where a rushing river once carved it out.

Once we’d regrouped, having got separated during the Falls, we got back in the minibus and drove the five minutes further up the road to the bottom of the cable car system that would take us up to the Schilthorn. Now, if I was planning this trip, I’d eat the packed lunch at the top, where I could see the view. Right? Oh, we had our packed lunch sitting on a rock in the car park. Not even the option of collecting the tickets and going “see you later!” No, we all went up together.

Watching a paraglider land as we wait for the rest of the group. It has an orange and white wing and is about to land in a field. In the background there are dark green pine trees and behind that, steep mountain cliffs. I think you can also see Murren up on its shelf on the left.

Looking down into the valley from the cable car. There's a river wending its way through the bottom but from here you can see how narrow it is, with steep rock walls on all sides.

This is a multi-stage cable car that takes 32 minutes to get to the top. There are four stages but I can’t for the life of me remember how many times we had to stop and change. Probably a separate cable car for all four but the timetable currently isn’t working, so I’ll update this later in the week when I’m hoping it will. I know for certain that we had to change at Mürren because – who’s surprised? – we left some of our party behind. I don’t want to go all the way up there, why would I want to do that, there’s nothing to do at the top anyway, I want a cup of tea. At this late stage, I can’t remember if this was the same people who didn’t bother with the Trümmelbach but I really hope it wasn’t. We definitely changed at Birg, the end of the third leg because I remember it, I remember queuing for the new cable car and I have a photo of slabs of cheese the size of paving slabs on a trolley waiting to be loaded into it.

Four large square slabs of vacuum-packed cheese in a trolley.

Distrusting face selfie in the cable car. I'm wearing the same as earlier except now you can see my navy fleece. There are a lot of people wedged into a dangling box behind me.

A view from the top station down to the Birg station. In between is a lot of steep scree and thin grass clinging to the slopes. There's a footpath just visible to the left.

I like a cable car and I trust them but I have got more cautious about heights in my old age and at this last leg, you’re really flying over a deep cirque, a bowl-shaped hollow carved by a glacier into the top of the mountain. Lauterbrunnen’s quite green from the bottom but this was all very…. desolate. I guess at 2,970m (9,700ft) we’re above the treeline here and just below the snowline and the bit in the middle is grey and craggy and the mountain top is the rough brown well-ground gravel deposited under a glacier. The views are pretty spectacular. I spent a lot of childhood and teenage holidays in the Austrian Alps, where the mountains tend to be lower, rounder and greener and the Oberland takes me by surprise by how steep, high and bare the mountains are. Somewhere I have a spectacular picture taken from Grindelwald where one of them looks like the rock wall the bird sharpens its beak on in Good Omens.

This is my favourite picture because it makes me look like I've climbed the mountain. I've added huge square blue mirrored sunglasses - please ignore them, I don't wear them anymore. I'm standing on the top of the mountain and as there's nothing human-built behind me and I'm wearing a fairly large backpack, I look like a mountaineer.

View from the top - a panorama of grey craggy snow-topped mountains on the other side of the valley with that grey and green scree glacial landscape on this side of the valley. Not that the perspective lets you know that there's a chasm between the foreground and the background.

A selfie with Bond. I've taken off my blue sunglasses. Bond is a kind of thick acrylic cardboard cut-out, pointing a gun off into the distance.

But as for “nothing to do”, these ladies have clearly never been up a mountain. There are views! 360° views of stark terrifying mountain. But this is also where scenes were filmed for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I hadn’t seen at the time and still haven’t. You can walk across from Piz Gloria, the big summit centre, out to the Skyline View platform and there was a cardboard cutout of Bond there, so naturally I took some selfies with him.

A panorama with the skyline walk to the left and a desolate grey and green mountain scene to the right. Behind, you can make out one of the lakes at Interlaken.

Me, posing in a shiny orange bobsled, pointing a fake gun and looking very happy about it.

Then there’s the revolving restaurant. We’d already eaten and I suspect it would be out of my budget anyway but I feel like a revolving restaurant might be a bit dizzying, even though it does move pretty slowly. I made a trip into Bond World and the Cinema. Most of it didn’t mean much to me but they had a bobsleigh and simulator so I had a go at that. I’m sure I must have a video somewhere but all I can find is the blurry photos someone else took of me shooting the baddies from it.

The badges I collected from the trip, including a black one with gold border. In gold letters it says "Schilthorn - Piz Gloria" and it has the 007 logo and a silhouette of presumably James Bond.

Nothing to do! I even did a little shopping in the souvenir shop. I’m on a Guide trip, it’s vital to collect as many badges as possible and the Schilthorn does a souvenir badge. I got seven out of this trip. The lady who organises it does little name tape commemorative badges for every event, something I’ve tried to replicate with my own unit camps. I have the official Our Chalet badge and our leader bought us all the Our Chalet ribbon badge. There’s a Grindelwald shield for where we stayed – or didn’t. At the bottom is a UK international badge, the same crossed flags as on the back of the international neckerchief and the Edmonton Hike for Plenty is a swap I picked up at Our Chalet. Finally, there’s my Schilthorn badge right in the middle.

On the way down the cable car to Birg. You can see that I'm behind a glass window. The view is of those craggy mountains and we're sailing over the glacial desolate bit.

Walking through Murren. It's a pretty Alpine village, all traditional chalets and flowers but it's narrow and the pavement has rails to keep you from falling into gardens on a slightly lower tier.

But the day wasn’t over. Our merry band met up at the cable car and we descended. Down the steep first stage, down the second to Mürren, down… hang on, no. We weren’t going back the way we came up. We met our lost sheep and ambled our way through Mürren. I’ve heard of mountain shelves but this really is a town on a shelf. The mountain rises up behind it and on the other side, it just drops down the sheer cliffs to the valley below. Someone had built a tennis court sticking out of the edge – I bet whoever lives underneath has more tennis balls dropping into their garden than they could ever use.

A tennis court on the edge of the mountain shelf. Below, the hillside drops away steeply. Behind is the other side of the valley, all craggy snow-topped mountains.

At the far end of Mürren, we boarded a small train which wends its way, very slowly and gently, along the edge of the shelf, stopping at all the small ski resorts – did it do that in the summer? It did when I went there over New Year 2020 – to Grütschalp where there’s another cable car taking you down to Lauterbrunnen village where the minibus was waiting. I hadn’t been expecting any of this when we set off. I don’t know that I’d even expected a mountain when we departed the chalet in the morning.

On the little train from Murren to the cable car. I'm so close to the front that I can see out of the front window. The train is driving past a restaurant and there are mountain and pine trees ahead.

And the day wasn’t even done! We returned to the chalet for dinner and then the group proposed an evening of gossiping and singing. Now, I like singing but one of our number had brought a guitar and I do tend to flee once the guitar comes out. Besides, this was Monday, our third night at the chalet and I’d already experienced the singing and lack of tunefulness. And also, our guitarist was the sort of person who sings even campfire songs with her eyes closed and a strained expression as if she’s on X Factor and trying to get by on a sob story rather than talent. So I pleaded to be allowed to hop-skip-jump down the road, get the train up to Grindelwald and go for a swim. I’ll never forget the combination of the odd look I got for this, along with the over-earnest “good for you!”. Good for me? It’s a ten minute walk along the river to the train stop and then sit on a small train for fifteen minutes before arriving opposite the pool. I used to live here, I can handle a little journey like this with my eyes closed.

The little mountain train in the station at Grindelwald. The mountains above it are blue with the evening light and the street lights of the village glow brightly behind the train.

But it was good for me. The pool at Grindelwald is pleasant, wandering through the village as it gets dark is pleasant and having a couple of hours away from the group is very pleasant.

The pool at Lauterbrunnen, seen from a walkway above the pool. It's dark. The lane pool is illuminated in blue and it's reflecting on the wall. This was actually taken on a similar evening swim in early 2017.

Next month: Well, we’ve already covered Tuesday at Our Chalet so I guess we’ll skip to Wednesday, my day off.