Day 14 – The Eiger, The Mönch, and The Jungfrau

With a full-time population of only 450 and over 2,000 hotel beds it’s obvious that tourism is important to Mürren’s local economy. Aside from a wide variety of winter and summer sports to keep enthusiasts coming back year after year, the village enjoys an incredible view of three towering mountains just across the valley : the Eiger (13,025 ft), the Mönch (13,448 ft), and the Jungfrau (13,642 ft). If the name Eiger sounds familiar that’s because it was the setting for “The Eiger Sanction”, a 1975 film with Clint Eastwood and George Kennedy. Eiger is translated, commonly although not necessarily correctly, as “ogre”, Mönch translates as “monk”, and Jungfrau means “virgin”, so with a little artistic license this mountainous trio tells the tale of a monk defending a virgin’s virtue from the evil ogre. The truth is that eiger doesn’t really have a literal translation in German, but I’m sure that the local tourist offices are flooding Wikipedia with suggestions to the contrary in support of this oft-repeated tale. No matter, the views are still stunning on sunny days like today.

Tourists who visit Mürren need to be a bit creative in terms of transportation because this mile-high destination is not reachable by any public roads. The village sits on a relatively narrow ledge atop a sheer 1,000 foot tall cliff, the same wall of rock that launches so many waterfalls into the rather dramatic Lauterbrunnen valley (see Day 11). Even the usually crafty Swiss haven’t figured out how to build any sort of conventional road from the valley below, which means that the only way to get to Mürren, at least with a heavily-laden roller bag in tow, is via aerial tramway. You can ascend directly from Stechelberg via the Luftseilbahn Stechelberg-Mürren-Schilthorn (LSMS) or take the Bergbahn Lauterbrunnen-Mürren (BLM), which consists of an aerial tramway from Lauterbrunnen to Grütschalp and then a narrow gauge railway along the plateau from Grütschalp to Mürren. The BLM is more of trolley than anything else given that it’s just a single car and simply cycles back and forth between the two end points, but when you think that it probably had to be lifted in pieces by helicopter and assembled in place you can understand why there’s not a lot of rolling stock on this particular railroad.

Speaking of railroads, for today’s outing we left Brienz on the 8:38 AM InterRegional to Interlaken Ost where we caught a Regional train that delivered us to the bahnhof in Lauterbrunnen at 9:25 AM. We walked across the parking lot to the base station for the BLM aerial tramway with perfect timing for the next tram to Grütschalp. This tram, which only take about five minutes in each direction, runs up and down between Lauterbrunnen and Grütschalp every 15 minutes during the prime part of the day, backing off to every 30 minutes in the early morning and late afternoon.

From the Grütschalp station we decided to follow the aptly-named Mountain View Trail, a dirt single-track that branched off the main paved wanderweg only a few yards from the Grütschalp station. This trail cut back up the hill rather sharply and wandered through the woods before bringing us out into an open pasture above the treeline, at which point it turned south and headed more-or-less towards Mürren. Needless to say it was the road less traveled. The added elevation gave us views across the Lauterbrunnen Valley that stayed with us for the entire hike even if our vantage point was constantly changing as we followed the contour line. The trail was well-blazed with the usual red and white painted bergweg marks until we ran into a series of very substantial snowfields, easily the largest of the trip and quite a bit more challenging than what we saw at Hochmoor (see Day 4).

Once we entered the snowfields most of the trail markings were buried so we were stuck following the footsteps of those brave souls that had ventured through before us. For the most part they were spot on and we exited the other side of those fields exactly where we needed to be but a couple of times we had to get creative and slog our way through some fairly deep and rather wet snow to get back on track. The sun made these segments especially challenging and I was wishing for a pair of glacier glasses by the time we were finally through the worst of the snow.

The trail brought us out in a farming area high above Mürren where the trails were well-marked and in much better shape for the descent. Confident in our ultimate survival, we finally stopped to have our picnic lunch on a bench just a bit above town with yet another memorable view across the valley to the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau.

Walking through all of the snow reminded us an earlier visit to Mürren when we enjoyed one of our all-time-favorite ski days on these very same slopes, an outing that what we now refer to simply as “brats, bread, and beer”. We were on a trip with the Wintergreen Alpine Ski Club to nearby Wengen about 20 years ago and a small group of us had wandered over to Mürren. The sun was bright, the skies were clear, and the slopes more than a little challenging so when it came time to eat we gathered for a well-earned lunch at a rather unconventional eatery. I say unconventional because it consisted primarily of an open wood fire for cooking, a bar built from snow (with embedded beer kegs), and a few picnic tables with spectacular mountain views. The menu was a bit limited, namely just grilled bratwurst, crusty bread, and very cold beer – but you’d probably already guessed that. It was definitely a special day, and even though we’ve skied literally hundreds of days at resorts in the US, Canada, and Europe this particular day remains firmly planted in the Top 5.

We arrived back in Mürren a bit after 1:00 PM and made a quick lap of the main street checking out the various sonnenterrasse (sun terraces). We liked what we saw at the Hotel Eiger and paused to enjoy one of the local Rugenbräu. The view was stellar and the service typically Swiss – both impeccable and unobtrusive.

After our beer we walked the paved trail back along the BLM track to the Grütschalp station and caught the aerial tram back down to Lauterbrunnen a bit after 3 PM. Our train left Lauterbrunnen around 3:30 and after the usual connection in Interlaken we arrived in Brienz less than an hour later.

We thought that today’s 10 miles and 1700 feet of vertical would be our last entry in the log for this wonderful vacation but it turns out that we’d add some more miles to our total the following day while exploring the quaint Altstadt in Zurich – see Day 15.

Map

Photos

Weather

Meals