Hut to Murren

We woke up this morning to a perfectly clear day and a perfectly tasty breakfast (complete with the bread, cheese, and some sort of meat – thankfully there was also quark, chocolate croissants, a nutella-like spread, coffee and fruit juice to round things out). We stayed at the hut just long enough to get fed, watered, and otherwise ready for the day, and I grabbed some pictures since the Grindelwald valley and Eiger/Monch/Jungfrau were right off the restaurant’s porch. It took us a couple of minutes to figure out how to take the trail near the L-horn ski race, but once we did, we started heading up the ridge (opposite the 3 famous mountains). Though it was a little steep and windy for the first thing in the morning, the views were beautiful, and there were wildflowers covering the meadow. (Come to think of it, wildflowers covered pretty much everything today.) The ski race (super-G, for those interested) is 4.5km, and it takes the skiers approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds to get to the bottom (155km/h speeds, with one 9m-wide tunnel that slows the racers down to 90km/h). It took us a bit longer, and instead of worrying about gates, we were worrying about herds of cows grazing all over portions of the trail. (I managed to make friends with one by petting her nose and scaring the flies off.)

The ski trail ended in Wegner, so we took an incredibly switchback-y gravel path through a very pleasant pine forest to the gondola in Lauterbrunnen (a town that’s home to one nice waterfall). The gondola was survivable, though I oddly still prefer chair lifts to gondolas (and small gondolas are a little better than large gondolas). The gondola took us up the far range of mountains to Griesalp(?) – the first place all three mountains fit into the frame of my camera. We hopped on the Mountain View Trail, which certainly lived up to its name. The trail started in pine forest, but quickly climbed out of the forest into alpine meadows of grassy peaks. Opposite us, you could just see the area where we had started our day (and, of course, some impressive views of the glacier-covered mountains). We spent a couple of hours winding up and around the faces of the mountains opposite the Eiger/Monch/Jungfrau chain and then hoofed it down to the train station in Murren. We probably spent 6-7 hours out. I’m somewhat confident that I could spend 6-7 years wandering around the area and staring at the mountains.

As soon as we headed out of the Jungfrau’s shadow (in a train), we hit a giant patch of rain that all seemed to be squeezing into one of the narrow routes toward Lauterbrunnen. We got out of that patch almost as suddenly as we had gotten into it, though, and weather stayed clear enough until we were home in Munster. Everybody’s pretty content after showers and pasta (minus some blisters and stiff joints among us). Tomorrow we’ll have something of a break.