The Kilchbalm and Some Tight Connections

We had considered going up the Schilthorn the next morning, Tuesday, July 21st, and the weather was beautiful,but we had done that several times before, and it's very expensive. Instead, after the buffet breakfast at the Pension, we tried a trail that was new to us: from Gimmelwald up the valley of the Sefinen creek to a meadow, surrounded by rock walls, called the Kilchbalm--or Chilchbalm.

Either spelling was used on the signage and in the guidebook materials. Rick Steves says that it is an easy hike, two hours out, and then back over the same route, with an increase in altitude of only 800 feet. This is misleading. There is a net increase of 800 feet: 450 feet down, followed by 1250 feet up, in some places fairly steep. At one point near the end there is a very short but steep climb on loose gravel. The last hour of the hour-and-a-half outward hike is, in some places, like climbing a series of stairs. Much of the walk is through a pine forest. Eventually, the view back down the valley becomes a panorama of the standard local threesome, Ogre, Monk and Maiden.

We were on a fairly tight schedule, since we needed to catch a train at Interlaken Ost at 3:04 and therefore should catch the 12:30 cable car down to Stechelberg. Given the uphillness of the trail, we felt that we were going more slowly than the signage-predicted hour-and-a-half. Our turn-back time of 10:30 was fast approaching, and we came to the conclusion that it was unlikely that we would get to the Kilchbalm soon enough. We reached a bench and rested. I was in favor of turning around immediately, but Mary Joy wanted to go on a little farther, even though we couldn't see anything other than more pine trees. Shortly after starting out, she met an elderly woman coming, alone, from the other direction. This woman assured her that the Kilchbalm was only five or ten minutes farther. So we went on, and we're glad that we did, not so much because the place was spectacular (it was nice but not overwhelming--on the scenery scale not quite up to the level of Crater Lake, at the end of the Maroon Bells walk near Aspen, Colorado), but because we would have wondered what we had missed.

The walk back was a little faster, and we got back to Pension Gimmelwald before noon, so we had a quick lunch on the terrace. Then we picked up our luggage and went to the cable car. However, the ticket booth was closed until 2:30, the next cable car was in ten minutes and we didn't have our tickets! I didn't have enough change for the ticket machine, so Mary Joy went back to the Pension to get some. I goofed up my first try at getting tickets out of the machine, but instead of giving me my money back, the machine gave me a printed voucher. When I used the coins Mary Joy had gotten, it gave me our tickets, but another voucher instead of change.

We caught the cable car down, and when I had explained things at the ticket booth there, the man very nicely, instead of merely cashing our vouchers, recalculated our fares to make use of the half-fare cards, printed our bus tickets to Lauterbrunnen and gave us ten francs (a little more than ten dollars) change. By then, however, we had missed the bus, whose schedule is synchronized with the arrival of the cable car. We had to wait half an hour for the next bus. By the time we arrived in Lauterbrunnen, there were less than ten minutes until the train to Interlaken that we needed to catch in order to catch the train to Zug that would get us there at 5:30, as we had told Mary Joy's cousin Eva.

There was a line in the ticket office: two groups ahead of us, and the first one apparently had a complicated issue to deal with. Then another clerk appeared and opened up another line. We were closest to him, and Mary Joy immediately went to him and started to ask for tickets to Zug, although one of the two guys in the group immediately ahead of us in the first line grumbled about it. We picked up our tickets and caught the train to Interlaken Ost, still a little worried that we might not get there in time. However, when the conductor came around, we discovered that we had another problem: our tickets were not from Lauterbrunnen to Zug but from Interlaken Ost to Zug! I had visions of us being tossed of the train in Zweiluetschinen, but, in the end, the conductor allowed us to buy tickets on the spot, for three francs and eighty cents apiece.

We were indeed in time to catch the next train to Lucerne, where we picked up a train to Zug: total time, nearly two-and-a-half hours. Eva was there to greet us and drove us to the apartment she shares with her husband Andreas. That evening, Andreas, as usual, cooked a wonderful dinner, which we shared with them and Eva's sister and brother-in-law, Sylvia and Kurt--a very pleasant evening.

Eva and Sylvia, Albert's daughters, are Mary Joy's third cousins once removed--Mary Joy's great-great-grandfather, Karl, was an older brother of Sylvia and Eva's great-grandfather, Fritz. Karl, you may remember, was somehow involved with the Unterseen Stadthaus, while Fritz became a successful businessman. Their brother Robert went to Wisconsin to make cheese, where he was later joined by Karl's son, also named Robert--Mary Joy's great-grandfather.