Earning My Keep

The Swiss Alps is enchanting and dreamy beyond imagination. It had a fictitious quality about it - the towering mountain ranges, peering down on the lush valleys of sharp steeples, grazing cows, raging glacier-fed rivers, and pricey postcards (I mean, 3 euros for a postcard - seriously?).

We were to spend a few days in the Jungfrau region of the Bernese Oberland hiking. We had just come from Chamonix-Mont Blanc and it was glaring how different these two Alpine regions are. Switzerland was more sparse and less dense. We planted ourselves in Stechelberg, an incredibly small town in the Lauterbrunnen Valley, where we fell asleep to the sound of waterfalls and the nearby gushing river every single night.

We would spend one entire morning hiking up from a town called Grindelwald up to a mountain ccalled Waldspitz and then on to one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life, Bachalpsee. From Bachalpsee, we planned on taking the cable car back down to Grindelwald to save our knees.

It began with negotiating immediately steep inclines in a shadowed forest, until we get to the Waldspitz Berggasthaus. It was above tree line from there and that's when the heat got intense. A few more miles and we would reach a crossing to take us to the back end of Bachalpsee by way of the greenest and longest stretch of meadows I've ever seen. The mountains got bigger and I got smaller. It was marvelous.

The hike was pure climbing and although I would feel pompous that I would have accomplished hiking to the top of a mountain in the Swiss Alps, it was a very hot day and that anxiety and impatience of where the heck this lake would be would see me whine at every turn in the last mile: "Are we there yet?"

But the reward was just pure and utter bliss. Finally, after 4,000 feet of climbing (plus a spectacular traditional Swiss lunch and strudel at a mountain hut), our jaws dropped and breaths taken away by two clear, glassy lakes mirroring the mountains that surround and feed it. Behind us was a sublime backdrop of the Swiss Alps, including the highest peaks this side of the Swiss Alps - the Eiger (13,024 ft.), Monch (13,474 ft.), and Jungfrau (13,651 ft.). The air, although thin, was crisp and fresh. In the distance, one could hear cowbells.

It was straight out of a storybook.

#switzerland #adventure #europe #hiking