Gimmelwald and Above

On the morning of Monday, July 20th, we said goodbye to our apartment in Unterseen and headed for the mountains. We have now stayed three times at one of the apartments over Frau Eggimann's shop. It is very comfortable and pleasant, and very well located, while our hostess is very nice. At times it can be a little noisy, as it faces the Bahnhofstrasse, the busiest street in Unterseen, but it's a five-minute walk from the West train station. It is across the street from the Coop supermarket and a few blocks from the Michel bakery.

We took the train from West to Ost, then the train to Lauterbrunnen. The normal way to Gimmelwald is to take the bus up the valley of the White Luetschine from Lauterbrunnen to Stechelberg, then the Schilthornbahn cable car up to its first stop. However, the Rick Steves book suggested, as more scenic, a slightly more roundabout route: go up the cable car from Lauterbrunnen to Gruetschalp, take the train along the rim above the valley, to Muerren, then go down the Schilthornbahn one stop to Gimmelwald. As I presented my ticket to the man at the cable car turnstile, he refused it, saying that the way to Gimmelwald was to take the bus to Stechelberg, but I insisted, pointing to the "VIA MUERREN" on my ticket, so he let us through.

The last time we were on this cable car, I don't know how many years ago, it wasn't a cable car but a funicular. We had gone the opposite direction, taking the train from Muerren to Gruetschalp, then went down the funicular, sharing a car with a group of people with northern English accents, who laughed at us for having watched "Hetty Wainthropp Investigates," a British TV series about a detective in northern England, on PBS. But some years ago, an avalanche wiped out the funicular, so it had been replaced by this cable car.

As we herded int the large car, we were almost bumped up against a woman who looked at Mary Joy and said: "I know you. Aren't you Mary Joy?" Mary Joy immediately recognized her as a fellow organist from the Twin Cities, a former student of our good friend Steve. Steve had played at our wedding, and just a few weeks ago had helped Mary Joy prepare for her recital at Wayzata Community Church, then turned pages and pulled stops for her during the recital itself. This woman, Karen, took a picture of Mary Joy with her phone and said: "I'll send this to Steve right away. He'll bust a gut!" She and her husband had taken a river cruise and were finishing up by visiting Switzerland, and were now, I think, on their way to the Schilthorn. The odds against their choosing this particular route at the exact same time that we were taking this particular way to Gimmelwald must be astronomical. It is, indeed, a small world.

The short train ride was less scenic for us than it might have been, since we were late getting aboard and had to sit on the right side of the train, away from the view across the valley to the Eiger, Moench and Jungfrau. After leaving the train, we walked for what seemed like ages through the elongated village of Muerren, from the train station at its north end to the cable car at its south end. Muerren became a ski resort back in the 1920s, mostly frequented by the British.

We caught the next cable car down to Gimmelwald, and walked up the street to the Pension Gimmelwald.

Gimmelwald is one of Rick Steves's "back doors": theoretically, a small, untouristed place that allows you to get in touch with the real essence of a European country. Sometimes one of his "back doors" is discovered by Europeans and becomes a mainstream tourist center: Steves "found" the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, and now it's a national park and thronged with hikers and people who just like to hang out in a picturesque Italian coastal town, like Vernazza, that doesn't have a beach and so isn't wall-to-wall with tanning bodies.

Gimmelwald, on the other hand, has not been "discovered"--except by Americans wandering the village streets with their blue-and-orange Rick Steves guidebooks. Every single person that we saw and heard at the Pension Gimmelwald, one of the two restaurants in town, during the three meals that we ate there, was an American.

Gimmelwald is a cute little village, is more authentic than a resort like Muerren or Grindelwald, and it provides a decent base for doing some hikes (though Muerren may be better), but it is not exactly exciting.

The Pension is an old, rustic, three-story building run by a group of young Brits. Most rooms don't have their own bathrooms, but ours, Room 6 on the second floor (third floor, as Americans would count them), is one of the exceptions. The room was comfortable and pleasant. European windows almost never have screens, so you learn to live with an occasional fly or mosquito. The WiFi there wasn't exactly high-bandwidth, but was good enough for e-mail and a little browsing--not for downloading or uploading anything.

After checking in, we decided to have lunch at Almendhubel and come back down to Gimmelwald via the North Face Trail. We took the cable car back to Muerren, then another up to Almendhubel. There is a restaurant there with a good reputation, so that's where we had lunch. I must admit that as I write this, two weeks later, I can't remember what we ate or even whether we liked it.

I will not describe the North Face Trail in detail, since I have done that before--this was the third time that we have walked it.

The trail gets its name from a series of boards along it pointing out all the individual peaks whose north faces were visible, and showing how those north faces were conquered by mountain climbers. It is longer (about two-and-half hours long) than the trail from Maennlichen to Kleine Steidegg and a little more difficult. It starts by going down a little, then gradually up, up, up, then gradually down again, a lot.

Rick Steves got us mixed up at the beginning of the trail the previous time we walked it, and he still hasn't gotten it right in the latest book. Instead of beginning down below Almendhubel, at Sonnenberg, it begins at the end of the Flower Trail, up behind Almendhubel. It then goes down the hill, not even going to Sonnenberg,but passing at a slight distance. Sonnenberg is one of the three farm-restaurants along the route, the others being Suppenalp, where the trail starts going up, and Schiltalp, just after it starts coming down again. An "alp" is a place where farmers stay during the summer to graze cattle in the high mountain meadows. They may also make cheese there--Bergkaese (mountain cheese).

At Schiltalp we bought some cheese, and also some homemade apricot jam.

We tried to take the alternate route down to Gimmelwald, but lost it somehow, trying to avoid the trail that passes behind the Sprutz waterfall--a slippery path--and found ourselves back on the regular North Face Trail, as it came around to Muerren. At this point we met a Scottish family--father, mother, daughter and son--who were resting before taking on what looked to be a rather steep path down to Gimmelwald. In recent years they had spent their vacation in Virginia and Florida, but today they were celebrating the son's twelfth birthday by having taken the cable car up to the Schilthorn, then, because the weather up there wasn't great, taking it back down a little way to Birg, walking all the way down to Almendhubel, then around to here on the North Face Trail! The mother, by the way, had bad knees, so she was using walking sticks! This made us feel old and out of shape, especially since we decided not to go down that steep-looking path with them to Gimmelwald, but to go into Muerren and take the cable car down.

We had dinner on the very scenic terrace at the Pension. They had a menu limited to soup, a pasta-and-meat dish, I forget exactly what, and dessert. I had their house.beer, "Schwartz Moench" ("Black Monk"), named after the huge rock outcrop at the base of the Moench and Jungfrau, immediately across the Lauterbrunnen valley. Not bad.