The Bernese Oberland

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At the suggestion of our friend Hal, we are trying something new: stuff Phil writes will be in this purple color, and Juliet's will be in this red color. This way we won't have to keep saying things like "I (Phil) thought this was interesting..."

I know we can't expect sympathy for this, but we are having trouble finding the time to update this blog! We don't want to sit indoors blogging on a beautiful morning, so we get up, have breakfast, and go out to do things. Then there are logistics of traveling: packing and unpacking, trying to find ways to clean and dry some clothes, getting hiking maps, etc. And we've been so lucky with the weather --- I'm writing this on only our second rainy morning in almost a month --- that we have had hardly any days or indeed hours where we haven't wanted to be out and about. And by the time we get back to the room in the evening we are too exhausted to do anything more than critical emails and phone calls. We're busy people! Pity us!

Nevertheless, here we are with another update, and this one is a type that we have decided not to do very often: a "first we did this, then we did that" kind of post.  But we've gotta catch up a bit, so this post is just an account of our several days in the "Bernese Oberland" area of Switzerland. (We're writing it while in France, though, having been in Italy for five days in the mean time!)

Catching the train from Lauterbrunnen to Wengen

The gradient is much too steep for conventional trains, so these are "cog railways": the train has a toothed wheel/gear on the bottom that engages the cogs in the middle of the track. 

The area is spectacularly beautiful, and they go to great lengths to protect it. All of the parking at the train station is covered, and the parking garage has a grass-covered roof so you don't notice it from way up high. It really does make a difference, as we saw later in some towns with big parking lots.

To continue a refrain that you have heard already many times in our posts (we will likely become completely unbearable on this point, but nevertheless we will repeat it endlessly):  these countries really really value car-free areas, and promote fantastic train and bike and pedestrian transportation options, so you can get to and around nearly every area without a car (and easily.  On time.  Brilliantly coordinated connections. You get the idea).  In the Bernese Oberland, we stayed partway up a gorgeous mountain below the Jungfrau, in a ski town called Wengen (site of a notoriously difficult World Cup ski event every January - more about that below).  The town is entirely car-free, with the exception of little golf-cart-like vehicles and a few jeeps that year-round residents use for hauling stuff. Across the valley, there's another town just like it (Murren); in both cases, you take the cog train or a gondola up, and then you are blessedly free of car noise, fumes, parking lots, etc. - and left instead with glorious green meadows, wildflowers, and trails to explore and enjoy.  Bliss.

Told you it's spectacularly beautiful! The whole area is a UN Natural Heritage Site, a designation that we've found to guarantee that it's a great place to visit. (We could never do this in the U.S. because, by law, we don't allow anyplace to be a UN Heritage Site of any kind unless 100% of affected property owners agree to the designation. The only Heritage Sites in the U.S. are government-owned, such as National Parks.)

The railways go right up to the high mountains, far above the tree line. That mountain in the back is the "Jungfrau" (The Virgin). It's right next to the Eiger ("The Ogre") which is far more famous in the U.S., but in Switzerland it's Jungfrau this and Jungfrau that. 

You can take the train right up into the very high mountains; you can also bike (as Phil did) or hike (as Juliet did). 

We met up at the mountaintop ski area of Kleine Scheidegg, just a half mile from the base of the famous North Wall of the Eiger.  I posted a photo of the Eiger on Facebook and jokingly commented that Juliet and I were about to attempt to climb it...and some of my friends believed it! Click the "Eiger" link in the previous sentence to see how unlikely that is, even if we were climbers!

Hiking in the Swiss Alps (and then the Italian Alps this past week) has highlighted some key things about Europe.  

First, trail-routing is based on the "shortest feasible distance from A to B" approach.  So the whole idea of designing gentle switchbacks to ascend and descend mountains is not seen as a necessity in any way.  Convenient if it happens to exist naturally, but definitely not an obligatory trail construction goal.  This is excellent both for aerobic conditioning overall (critically important when juxtaposed with the nutritional/dietary choices prevalent in this region, as you will see below), and for maintaining a very very tight tush.  In laymen's terms, the mountains below the peaks of the Jungfrau (Swiss), Gran Paradiso National Park (Italian), and Matterhorn (Italian side), have kicked our booties into prime shape.  Speaking from a woman's perspective, this is the achievement of a lifelong dream.  I think many of you know what I'm talking about.

Second, hiking poles rock.  We're now addicts.  Why we never used these before on a regular basis is beyond me (perhaps because in the US we do employ gentle switchbacks), but the Swiss and Italians really know their stuff on this score (Phil's mother, Mary, gave us some terrific ones a number of years back, but they were stolen when our car was broken into eat a state park in the Bay Area.  Never replaced them.  Until now.).

In Wengen, where I purchased my pair, I received a detailed instructional lecture by the salesperson on exactly how to use the poles (proper positioning, hand entry, weight distribution...seriously), including required practice of these various techniques, until he was certain that I was adequately capable in employing them (potentially somewhat frightening in his rigor on all this; he was genuinely earnest about ensuring my proficiency, but at moments his face registered grave concern at my lack of basic hiking pole knowledge.  I'm thinking, "What if I don't get it?  Will he refuse to sell me the poles?  Will he keep me here until I meet Swiss standards?"...probably more pressure than I've ever felt in a sales transaction).  

Finally, (and maybe most important): hiking up and down vertical alpine trails has tremendous caloric benefits. Which is good because for starters, the Swiss and Italians eat (and serve) more cheese and chocolate than we would have imagined possible.  Might I venture to say that rich food in general is highly prized in this region.

This is a big pan of "Rosti" being cooked. At this point in its preparation it's just like hash browns.

...And here's the finished product: browned potatoes covered with cheese and fried eggs. Under other circumstances it might be kind of gross, but after climbing from Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg it's absolutely awesome.

Hills never look steep in photographs, it seems. This is a spot on a famous downhill ski race route,  the Lauberhorn. Or at least it's supposed to be famous if you follow downhill ski racing. Anyway, trust me, it's very steep indeed...and the route goes through that 15-foot-wide arched bridge off to the left. Supposedly this bit is terrifying even to the professionals.

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can show you the "ideal line" for the skiers.  Well, actually it's not modern technology at all: Ten or fifteen years ago an artist named Daniel Zimmerman laid out thousands of wooden slats along the ideal line, and photographed them from various locations. You can now stand at some of those spots and look through a viewer at his photos --- or, in this case, you can stick your camera into one of the viewers and take a picture. Actually you should check out his web site about it, it has much better photos and you can see how steep it is.

The area is a popular one for all kinds of thrilling sports, such as whitewater rafting, climbing, and "paragliding".  This pilot is laying out his wing, getting ready for launch. In fact, he's about to take me for a ride!

And here we are soaring over the cliff. Remember the James Bond film in which Bond is on skis, being chased by enemies with machine guns, and he skis off a cliff and parachutes to safety? That was here. Very popular spot for BASE jumpers. 

We took a gondola almost all the way up to the paraglider launch point, then hiked up from there (with the pilot carrying the gear, a good workout for him, which he does 4 to 8 times per day).  On the way up, he told me about a client he'd had two days before. The guy was rather nervous, and kept reiterating that he wanted a safe, quiet ride with no tricks. Fine. As they were about to get on the gondola to go up, the pilot looked up and saw a BASE jumper in a wingsuit jump off the cliff. The pilot pointed him out to his client: "look, look, he just launched".  Then client looks up and sees the guy come zooming down the cliff, then use the wingsuit to angle himself out in the valley to where he'll deploy his chute...except his chute doesn't deploy, he just disappears into the trees. The client freaks out. The pilot, thinking fast, says "No worries, no worries, that guy was an expert, went into the big airbag they have over there." The client is somewhat mollified but still shaken. They get on the gondola to go up for the ride up to their launch point, and while they're on the way up a helicopter comes flying up the valley and lands near where the jumper had disappeared. Client freaks out again: "You said he went into an airbag, why did they send a helicopter?"  Pilot says "Oh, these rich guys, they don't like having to wait 45 minutes for the gondola, they have a chopper pick them up down below and bring them back up. They'll do it all day." They eventually got to the top and did their nice, safe paraglide. The pilot doesn't know if the client later heard that yes, the jumper had died. 


(I know, it's a bit macabre to tell this as a funny story, when it involves someone dying. Sorry.  They don't know what went wrong. Best guess is that his drogue chute was caught in a bit of turbulence behind his body so it didn't do its job in time; the drogue chute was deployed but the main chute wasn't). 


Other than the one paragliding adventure, we stuck to hiking and biking. Lots of hikes with great scenery, and we even saw some chamois.

Lots of hiking and biking routes too. The signs all give time estimates rather than distances, which makes some sense because "5 km" wouldn't tell you all that much: it can take two hours to go that far if you're going up a staircase-like trail such as the ones Juliet mentioned above! In fact, one of the "2 hour 30 minute climbs" goes to the upper end of a gondola ride, and if you do it in under 1:30 you get to ride down for free instead of having to pay $25. 

And here's Juliet on the steep climb mentioned above, although not at the really really steep part yet. We did not try to do it in 1:30, and would not have made it if we tried.  

Although this doesn't fit with the narrative above very well, I just had to include it. This is not a bear, it's a dog. He's waiting for the train, like us.