Day 13 – Exploring Engelberg

Engelberg sits on the floor of a glacial valley and is surrounded by high mountains, most notably the 10,623 foot Mount Titlis. This resort is only a 75-minute drive from the major metro areas of Basel, Berne and Zurich, so I’m sure that there’s a lot of pressure from local skiers on powder days. For whatever reason it’s been mostly a destination for Swiss and Germans over the years and has only recently started to get visibility from American skiers even though, to our eyes, it looks like there’s plenty of good terrain for all skier levels. It’s just doesn’t have the logo recognition of towns like Zermatt, St. Moritz, Gstaad, and Grindelwald.

Engelberg’s most important landmark is arguably the Kloster Engelberg, a Benedictine monastery that was founded 1120. The monastery got its name (Engelberg, German for “angel mountain”) when two monks saw a host of angels while walking in the nearby meadows. The village that grew up around the monastery later adopted this same name, which explains why there’s an angel in the town’s coat of arms. The original monastery burned in 1729 and was rebuilt in the baroque style popular in that era. The “new” monastery, still home to some forty monks, houses a blacksmith shop, a florist, an extensive library, and a cheese-making business – they even have their own signature cheese called Engelberger Klosterglocke.

The day started out with clear skies and the gentle light of alpenglow in the east. We knew that this was going to be a long travel day (about 2-1/2 hours each way) so we started early with the 7:25 AM train from Brienz. We retraced much of our path back to Zurich from that bleary-eyed Saturday two weeks earlier when we arrived, but this time we could actually enjoy the scenery. This part of the country is a more pastoral than the Berner Oberland but is still very pretty, especially the area between Lungern and Sarnen. Because of the topography we had to go north almost all the way to Lucerne before changing trains in the quaint town of Hergiswil and then turning south down the next valley to reach Engelberg. We arrived a bit before 10:00 AM.

After getting off the train we visited the tourist office in the bahnhof to grab some trail maps – these maps are a great resource and almost always free, so be sure to check in the tourist office before going buying anything equivalent in a retail store. After reviewing our options we quickly headed out of town (i.e. away from the tour buses) to find our trail for the day. As usual once we got more than 25 feet from pavement the tourists simply disappeared.

We headed east up a fairly steady incline to a small farming community called Unter Trübsee. From here we started the real grind up to Trübsee, about 2,500 feet above the valley floor in Engelberg. Many of the trails that we walked above Unter Trübsee were actually ski runs just a few weeks prior, but unfortunately we were going up them in a pair of Merrells instead of down them on a pair of Nordicas. We saw plenty of snow on the ground, especially in the wooded areas, and even had to walk through some of it occasionally to stay on the trail. It wasn’t a big deal, though, as there had been enough traffic from other hikers to make the trail obvious in the snowy areas.

Trübsee literally means “cloudy lake” in German, but we’ll have to take their word for it as the lake was still frozen solid and covered in snow when we got there. The Trübsee lies in a huge cirque at the foot of Mount Titlis and is a popular place for skiing in the winter and hiking, fishing, and picnics in the summer – we just happened to be there during the shoulder season between winter and summer and quite literally had the place to ourselves except for a few confused ducks. By the time we stopped for lunch on a bench overlooking the cirque we had completed a 2500′ vertical climb almost non-stop.

There is a large gondola station at Trübsee, part of a three segment, 45 minute excursion that connects the base station at Engelberg to Trübsee, Trübsee to Stand, and Stand to the Klein Titlis station at roughly 10,000 feet. The last leg is made on a revolving gondola, the first one of its kind in the world. We didn’t take the gondola (it’s just not our thing) but it was interesting to see the infrastructure. We reached the Trübsee station shortly after lunch and had a wonderful view overlooking the valley. We had hoped to make a circuit hike via an alternate route back to Engelberg, but we could see from the overlook that parts of the trail were still covered in many feet of snow. It was obvious that no one had taken this trail yet this season and probably wouldn’t be for days or even weeks. We decided to turn around and go back the way we came, which as usual gave us a different perspective on the terrain that we had just passed on the way up. I would argue that the view was even better because we weren’t hypoxic from the climb!

As we approached Engelberg we realized that we might make the next train if we picked up the pace. So rather than wait another hour for the next train back to Hergiswil we cranked it up and arrived with time to spare, if not a bit over-heated given the sunshine and relatively warm temperatures. Note to self : check to see if 1st Class cars on the regional trains have air-conditioning, because we can tell you that the older 2nd class cars don’t! By the time we made it to Hergiswil we were ready for cold drinks from the Kiosk store in the bahnhof and ice cream from the Coop store across the street. Somewhat cooled off (but not completely), we boarded the connecting train for Brienz having added another eight miles to our hiking log.

Map

Photos

Weather

Meals