July 3rd: North Face Trail to Stechelberg

 After breakfast, we piled into the car (which after paying for parking would still be cheaper than a bus ticket for all of us) and drove to Stechelberg, where the cable car stations for Gimmelwald and Murren would be. Xiaoqin and I were planning on doing the North Face walk, which we had happy memories of doing during past visits to Murren. Once in Murren, however, Boen decided that he’d had enough hiking, and elected to wait at Murren for us.

The North Face trail doesn’t go over the North Face of any mountain. What it does is to give you a view of all the North Face peaks that are visible from the Murren/Gimmelwald ridgeline. In the past when staying at Murren, we’d just hop onto the Almendhubel Funicular to get to the start, but since we weren’t actually staying at Murren, and none of us had a half tax card except for Mark, that funicular wasn’t free so we opted to hike.

Leaving the village (which at this point was big enough to really be called a town—so furious is the construction of new hotels), we walked along a steep road that advertised real Murren based beef and milk and cheese, and then once above the village successfully navigated the signs towards the playground, passing a couple with kids who admitted after chatting with us that they had thought the hike to the playground was supposed to be easy. I told them that the hiking times indicated on the Swiss trails were based on a fit 25 year old park ranger that never stopped for photos, didn’t need food or water, and was fully acclimated to the altitude. Arturo, Mark, or I if we were determined and well equipped (i.e., camelback) could probably match or beat those times, but if the scenery was any good at all we wouldn’t be motivated to.

At the playground, we took some pictures and reminisced about how Bowen had use to sit in those kiddie swings and we had to push him. Now he was too much of a teenager to even want to swing!

With that, we started on the hike proper, which on a sunny day was glorious, even in drought-stricken Switzerland. Every so often there would be a placard explaining what peak was in front of you, who first climbed it, how many attempts were made, and a short write up. But to be honest you weren’t doing the hike for the placards. The views were simply amazing.

The trail had plenty of people, but it was never enough to be bothersome, and there were plenty of mountain inns where you could stop for refreshments or breaks, but we were early enough that some of them were closed and we didn’t feel the need to stop for snacks—the weather and views were too nice not to take photo breaks!

After the Schiltbach crossing, we turned off the North Face trail, following signs for Sprutz. This was Xiaoqin and Mark’s first time visiting Sprutz, which I had taken Bowen to back in 2012. Of course, he wasn’t even a year old at that time so he would have no memories of the hike or waterfall, but I remember enjoying the waterfall. The approach was a pain, since it would go down steeply on to come back up, but I wanted a photo of Bowen at the same waterfall I had carried him to when he was 1!

This visit was a far cry from the 2012 visit—not only was it sunny and warm (though in the forest surrounding the waterfall, but the shade also provided plenty of protection from the sun). Of course, those conditions also meant that the waterfall drew a lot more visitors than just Bowen and I! In fact, some of them even brought towels and swim gear and proceeded to take a shower at the waterfall! What makes Sprutz special is that just like the Staubbach falls in Lauterbrunnen, the hiking trail takes you behind the waterfall!

Past the waterfall, we had a choice—hike to Gimmelwald, or hike to Murren. I wanted to hike to Gimmelwald, since I’d never actually been to Gimmelwald, but Xiaoqin was worried about Boen being all alone at Murren, so she elected to hike to Murren to pick him up. The two villages are connected by a cable car so it would have been a short ride by cable car anyway.

The hike down to Gimmelwald was steep but manageable, though once out of the tree and exposed to the full sun it became a lot less pleasant than the waterfall hike had been. I worried that there wouldn’t be any food, since Google didn’t identify any restaurants or supermarket there, but I figured that Murren would have food even as a last resort.

I needn’t have worried. While heading towards the cable car station we spied The Honesty Shop. Next to it was Pension Gimmelwald, which advertised a lunch and also bragged about its unique Schwarz Monch beer. The backyard terrace where meals were served also had fantastic views. We sat down, ordered, and texted a picture to Xiaoqin, who had met up with Boen and after seeing the photo, talked Boen into walking from Murren to Gimmelwald! I ordered the beer, breaking my “no alcohol” rule. I reasoned that by the time I went to bed, the alcohol would have been metabolized and I would have rehydrated enough to the point where I wouldn’t be awake at 2am. I wasn’t confident enough to order the flight of beers as a tasting platter, but Mark did, and reported that all the beers were good!

Boen and Xiaoqin arrived (I’d ordered food for them while they were enroute), and had their meal. Boen refused to hike back down to Stechelberg, which the rest of us were planning to do, so we walked him to the cable car station, bought a download ticket for him, and sent him off.

We then hiked down to Stechelberg following the signs. I had low expectations for this hike, but to my surprise after an initial boring wooded section the hike walked us past waterfall after waterfall along the Lutschine river (which gave the train station ZweiLutschinen its name!), more than justifying the effort.  Mark was still frisky, and went on ahead. At the bottom, we followed signs for the Schilthorn Bahn, which was the name for the Stechelberg cable car, but I had neglected to tell Mark about this and so he missed the turn and ended up walking on the main road back to the cable car station.

The trail then gave us one last waterfall before crossing the bridge and then had us hike on the shadowed side of the valley, shielding us from the sun. At this point, the trail became wide and paved, and there were plenty of people on rented bicycles, some of whom asked us to take photos of them.

When we got back to the car, Mark and Boen were there and it was only 4:00pm. On the way back to the AirBnB, I spotted Staubbach falls and decided we should stop there and walk up. There was quite a bit of drama figuring out how to pay for parking, but pay I did, and then when I walked up I was shocked. The drought had diminished the water flow on Staubbach falls to the point where at the end of the trail where you normally looked out onto the valley through a veil of streaming water, you saw the entire village free and clear, not a drop of water to be seen. The drought had taken its toll on the most iconic of Lauterbrunnen’s attractions.

After that disappointment, we drove to the Coop to buy dinner and breakfast, but the parking lot was full. We dropped off Xiaoqin and Bowen and then parked next to the train station, and then went back to pick them up when they were done shopping.

We had dinner and did a final round of laundry before going for our after dinner walk, hiking up the road that the car was parked at which would lead to the Winteregg train station. That train line was closed for infrastructure upgrades until July 10^th, which meant we couldn’t use it, which was why we were forced into the Schilthorn cable car instead. Evening in Lauterbrunnen cooled down quickly from the afternoon heat, but we could see high up on the opposite wall Mannlichen was still bathed in sunshine.

July 2nd: Hotel Rosenlaui to Lauterbrunnen

 It was sunny when we had breakfast in the morning. Because of the rain, the staff had moved all our bikes into the hotel’s cellar from the furnace room, since they actually had to run the furnace for some of the cooler parts of the hotel. We loaded up the car with our luggage, said goodbye to everyone who was around, and checked out.

Mark was inspired to ride back to the start of Rosenlaui valley, but Boen was having none of that. We rode up to Schwarzwaldalp, took off our jackets, and proceeded to climb. 2 years prior, we’d almost immediately hit the steep section which forced us to walk. Without a load, however, this wasn’t a problem and we easily kept riding up at a slow enough pace that Mark caught us before long.

Unfortunately, about a mile from the top we got a flat tire. I found a thorn in the rear tire, removed it, replaced the inner tube, and kept going. 500m from the top we flatted again. This time I could find no foreign matter, and assumed that one of the patches on my replacement tube had failed. The back tire was looking worn, so I made a note to replace it after we got to Lauterbrunnen.

At the summit, we stopped for photos, and then proceeded to descend after putting on our jackets. The post bus was running so every once in a while we’d have to stop to let the bus through, but it was still cool enough that I was unworried about our dual pivot calipers failing or causing a tire blowoff.

Once we got to Grindelwald, we could speed up since now there was a lane in each direction. In the center of town, we stopped at the playground to refill our water bottles, which had been depleted on the climb. From there, we took the car highway all the way down to Zweilutschinen, where instead of turning left onto the main road, we took the signed bike path towards Lauterbrunnen.

It didn’t take long, however, for that signed bike path to degenerate into a dirt road and then into a single track. In retrospect, what we should have done was to leave the bike path just before the road steepened. The traffic wasn’t that bad, and it would have saved us some tight corners and tandem unfriendly bike tunnels. Regardless, we made it to Lauterbrunnen by 11:00am, where Xiaoqin and Bowen had already parked the car. I thought we were too early to checkin, so I changed in the parking lot only to be surprised by the owner. The AirBnB manager then texted me to tell me that we could indeed move in, so we did! We hadn’t done laundry for the 3 days we were at Rosenlaui, so that was the first order of business—the AirBnB had a washing machine that also did drying, and the hostess quickly supplied us with detergent pods!

We ate a quick lunch from various leftover foods. I was down to the spare tube Stephan had given me prior to his departure from the tour (boy did that seem like a long time ago!), so we walked down to the local bike shop and bought a new tube. Surprisingly enough they didn’t have any cycling food that was worth buying.

Boen was striking against doing more hiking after having already climbed half of Grosse Scheidegg, so he opted to stay in the AirBnB while Mark, Xiaoqin, Bowen and I took the train from Lauterbrunnen to Wengen. Wengen’s supermarket was much bigger than Lauterbrunnen, so we bought ice cream there and then walked over to the Mannlichen cable car to buy one way tickets up to Mannlichen to do the Royal Walk.

The Royal Walk was built and promoted in 2015, and the last time I was up at Mannlichen was 2011, just a few months before Bowen was born. That meant it was my first time on the Royal Walk, which was promoted through posters, pamphlets, etc. Whatever else you can say about the Swiss, they know how to do marketing for their hiking trails, no matter how short it is.

To say that it was a hiking trail was perhaps an overstatement. Short of paving it, there was no way to make it any tamer. The presence of the cable car also made it incredibly accessible and crowded, though given the width of the trail and panorama the area was superbly engineered to handle the crowds, with lots of stations to engage kids. Of course, the views were superb, this being a clear and sunny day. It was a short walk and we were acclimated to altitude, so making it to the viewpoint was no big deal. The views from the royal walk are very similar to those from the top of Grosse Scheidegg: the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau as well as Kleine Scheidegg. We could see Grosse Scheidegg as well Thunersee off in the instance, though Interlaken was occluded by the preceding ridges. My eyes couldn’t make out Schynnige Platte even though in theory I should have been able to see it.

We had our fill of the scenery, taking our time, and then walked past the Mannlichen cable car station to see the other side of the ridge before heading for the hiking trail that would take us down to Wengen. I’d only ever climbed this trail so was worried that it would be a tough descent. Fortunately, I’d brought hiking sticks from the car, which helps a lot when you have to do a lot of descending by taking some of the load off your knees onto your shoulders.

The hiking trail is a series of switchbacks and turns around the various avalanche protection devices that are essential to keeping Wengen from being buried in snow in winter by avalanches. Once in a while, there will be a placard or information notice board telling you how the avalanche protection worked, how much stress each type can stand (wooden vs steel vs just planting trees) and how they interact with the ecosystem. All this served to distract us from how completely exposed the trail was. Good thing we were all wearing sunscreen!

When we got down into the treeline the vitamin D exposure was replaced with more bugs. There was a family that was ahead of us, and at one point they stopped and were looking through binoculars. We would later figure out that they were looking at a woodpecker. It’s noteworthy that European forests are so devoid of wildlife that woodpeckers are remarkable—you certainly don’t hear them as often as in the Redwood forests of California.

By the time we arrived at Wengen, my knees weren’t too happy and it was 5:00pm. There was no question that we were going to take the train back down to Lauterbrunnen rather than walk another hour. The mistake we made was not using the time waiting for the next train to buy groceries for dinner. When we got off the train in Lauterbrunnen and visited the Co-Op it was this huge crowd. They were running out of stuff and what was left wasn’t in great condition. We nevertheless managed to buy enough for both dinner and breakfast, and walked back to the AirBnB where Boen was still waiting for us.

After dinner, instead of an after dinner walk, I did an after dinner bike tire swap. I took out our spare Rene Herse Bon Jon Pass tire, installed it on the front, and moved the front tire to the back. I then folded up the back tire and packed it back into the spares bag. “I’m highly amused by an engineering director trying to save a tire that probably has less than 100 miles on it!” said Mark. “Well, it might only last 100 miles more on the tandem, but if I put it on the single I could probably get at least 500 miles on it!” was my retort.

The shower felt great, and we got the AirBnB hostess to help us figure out how to use the dryer (they had apparently never had anyone ask to use it before). With that, we had a full set of clean clothes and could do more hiking tomorrow!

We also had to strategize about our return to Geneva. I had originally booked a mobile home on AirBnB on top of Juan pass, but noticed that while lodging was sparse and expensive on the Swiss side of the border (which also had never heard of air conditioning as a concept), it was cheaper and plentiful and more importantly had AC on the French side of the lake. A bit of research noted that the biggest objection to using the French side of Lake Geneva was a section with lots of traffic right after crossing into France. But if you were willing to do a little bit of climbing, it was only a 3-4km section.

The best route to France was not through Juan pass, but through Col Mosses, a climb I had done in 2003 and forgotten about, but that meant it wasn’t memorably difficult. There was a hotel on top of Col Mosses, and it offered free cancellation so I cancelled out Juan pass lodging and booked it.

July 1st: St Beatus Caves and Trummelbach Falls

 It was raining and gloomy as we had breakfast, but the kids were happy, since that meant having the day off from cycling and hiking. Our plan was to drive to St Beatus caves, which Boen had visited in 2024, but had no memory of! One of my friends Pengtoh always said that there’s no point bringing kids anywhere, because they forget everything by the time their adults anyway. My take is that even travel that you don’t remember changes you, and changing who you are is the whole point of travel.

Driving down the Rosenlaui road towards Interlaken and St Beatus, I was reminded at how low the speed limits were in Switzerland. Stephan once told me that the German joke is that Switzerland makes its trains slow so that the country looks bigger. That same joke would apply to Swiss roads as well.

Arriving at the St Beatus caves, we had no issues parking. This should have been an ominous warning, but instead we congratulated ourselves and parked, paying the parking fee without complaint (no matter what, it was cheaper than taking the train from Meiringen for 5 people!).

Just the approach to the caves is a sight worth seeing, with many TripAdvisor commentators comparing it to Rivendell in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Ring movies. They’re not far off, as the waterfalls coming out of the caves are neatly presented as part of the approach, diverging and converging, with stairs and ramps to take you up slowly.

At the entrance, we were shocked to find a sign that said: “Because of excessive water, the caves are closed!” Well, we were already here, so we went to take a peek. It turned out that as a result of the caves being closed, there was no entrance fee and we were allowed into the caves all the way until there was a locked gate preventing further egress for safety reasons. So not only did we get to see a part of the caves for free, we also got to see for ourselves why they didn’t consider further entry safe.

Having gotten our parking lot money’s worth, we then decided to go hike down to the lake (Thunersee), since the rain up till now was minimal. The hike down was forested and then we had to walk all the stairs to lake level, where the ferries ran. By the time we got down to the lake level, however, it started raining heavily! We sheltered inside the ferry terminal with a couple of students who were traveling around Europe on a shoe-string. Most European train, transit, and museum systems have some sort of youth discount, and these two guys were making the most of it. Of course, one side effect of being young is that you often prioritize getting a good deal on transportation over actually having a good time, so they described nightmare scenarios like spending a night in Paris in 40C weather in a youth hostel without even a fan. There are times when I think about how most of my youth was spent working on school or working for money because I had so little money, and I didn’t have time or money to travel until I’d aged out of those special discount programs. These two guys reminded me that maybe it was a good thing that my relative poverty had steered me towards bicycle touring where you were by nature prevented from those “It’s Tuesday so we must be in Paris” travel schedules.

The rain eased up a bit so we hiked back over to the car. It was still early, so when I asked if folks wanted lunch before going to Trummelbach falls they said no. So it was we drove over to Trummelbach falls. Unfortunately, a lot of people were thinking like I did, which was that a rainy day meant the waterfall would be even bigger! As a result, the line for tickets was long. I wondered why they had so few people manning the ticket counters and then realized that the bottleneck for the falls was the elevator that takes you up to where the main attractions were. Since those handle about 60 people at a time, there’s no point having a ticket flow rate that’s faster!

The rain jackets might have kept us dry, but what I didn’t anticipate was that the rain and lack of movement while standing in line made us cold! So by the time we got out of the ticket line and into the elevator line, Bowen, Boen, and even Mark was shivering. Naturally, going up the mountain in the elevator doesn’t warm you up, and once inside the mountain and viewing waterfalls the cold got worse! By the time we had finished viewing 5 waterfalls the kids and Mark had chattering teeth and were telling us they weren’t going to view the last few waterfalls outside and would just take the elevator down and exit.

Xiaoqin and I viewed the last few elevators outside, and it turned out that just by walking around outside and descending stairs you warmed up naturally. Nevertheless, when we were done everyone was hungry and we were ready to find a supermarket with a charging station nearby. Off the car’s navigation system I picked the Agrola Charging Station which was near an ALDI. Getting there, I let the family out and then plugged the car in but then could not figure out for the life of me how to charge! After failing to download the app I gave up and switched to one of the Ionity charging stations nearby. This was the first and only time I’d failed to charge the car at a station, and of course it had to happen when it was raining heavily.

We had lunch while the car charged, and since it was only 2pm, we decided to drop by Meiringen for a coffee shop. Meiringen normally charges for parking but we found an EV charging spot which doubled as a parking spot for very little money (it was a slow charger and the car would draw even less power because it was already at 80% charge!). The coffee shop was a bust, however, so we gave up and drove up the Grosse Scheidegg back to Rosenlaui.

We were subdued at dinner, fully absorbed in making the best of our last dinner at Rosenlaui. The forecast for tomorrow was sunny, and it was a short traverse to Lauterbrunnen. After dinner, Mark wanted to see the glaciers of Rosenlaui again, so we walked down the road to the bridge. We were nonplussed when there was only one glacier to be seen, but then I realized that the other glacier was covered up by the clouds. It  had stopped raining but it was still cloudy!

On the way back to the hotel, Mark showed us the power generator for the hotel, which generates power from the stream next to the hotel running down from Rosenlaui gorge. There was a clever mechanism where there’s a drainage into a reservoir that effectively maintains the same flow rate no matter how high the stream was, which then drives the dynamo with water from the reservoir. Mark had figured it all out while exploring the area on foot and looking through the window in the generator building.

June 30: Engleshorn Hutte

 A Rosenlaui breakfast buffet is always a delight. You get proper coffee (for whatever reason, Europeans don’t really know how to make coffee the way I like it), fresh baked breads of all sorts, a selection of yogurt (today included Hazelnut yogurt, which I would get 3 bowls of), and then there’s a good selection of meats, cheeses, and fruits to top it off. We ate as though we wouldn’t get lunch.

I got out Xiaoqin’s bike, all prepped for riding, and Mark and her went up the Grosse Scheidegg road. Bowen, Boen and I then walked over to the Rosenlaui Schlutz entrance, but rather than entering the Schlutz, which wasn’t open yet, we walked up the trail that would exit. The trail turned out to be ideally sited for a hot day. The initial section runs next to the Rosenlaui gorge waterfalls, so you got natural cooling from the icy cold water. Even after we split off from the gorge waterfall, we were almost entirely in shadow for the climb, which eventually gave us a great view of the Rosenlaui glacier, which we were told is no longer close enough to touch even if we went for the Dossenhutte (2663m).

We encountered a few hikers, even at this early hour, and as we rose in elevation we saw the Wildgarst, Scwarzhorn, and Tschingel peaks across the valley. In one spot, we could even peek down and through the trees saw Hotel Rosenlaui, looking like a doll’s house from so far away. When we finally got to the Englehornhutte, it was only 10:15am and no one was there, even though we’d just seen some hikers go the other way. Well, the hut was open anyway, so we ordered a couple of quick snacks and a drink before refilling our water bottles from the water fountain and heading on the way.

On the descent, we followed the signs to Kalterbrunnen, passing a dirt parking lot way up there where I recognized the logo for the Englehornhut. “Wow,” said Boen, “They have to hike half an hour to get to their car!” Such is life in the mountains.

At Kalterbrunnen once again Andreas was not there, but they had a hazelnut cake so Boen, Bowen, and I decided to eat there. Bowen couldn’t have the hazelnut cake, so he ordered the Quiche. It was warm enough that I ordered a non alcoholic beer and Boen ordered a Rivella, which had become the default drink for the kids for the rest of the trip.

After that stop, we walked out and headed on the official hiking trail to Rosenlaui, which took us along Rosenlaui creek and then into a shaded section just before bursting out into Rosenlaui valley for the grand view of the two glaciers and the valley. From there it was a short walk to Hotel Rosenlaui, where the kids immediately retreated into their room to play video games (electronic devices are banned in public areas of the hotel), and I proceeded to process photos before heading down for ice cream and to wait for Xiaoqin and Mark, who had successfully started climbing the Grosse Scheidegg from Meiringen.

Mark was the first to arrive, and when he told me about the ride up I immediately knew that they’d taken the mountain bike path up instead of the car road. The mountain bike path is a lot steeper, but has the benefit that it doesn’t have car traffic and no chance of running into the post bus until it joins the Grosse Scheidegg road just before the Reichenbach Falls upper trailhead.

Then he dropped the bombshell: “You know the waterfall you can walk behind, the Giessbach Fall?” he said as I nodded. For me, it was always one of the highlights of the classic Rosenlaui loop. “There’s a fancy hotel just below it, The Grandhotel Giessbach. I’ve stayed there before with my sisters!” “Oh, that means you’ve walked behind that waterfall before?!” “We must have, since we probably didn’t spend all our time in the room. But I honestly don’t remember.” Xiaoqin showed up and ordered an ice cream as well, and we chatted about the ride. I told them that Isetwald had become a major tourist attraction because of a Korean drama, which was why it’s now so crowded over there.

After that, I asked if anyone else wanted to see Rosenlaui Gorge, since it was still open and we get a discount for being hotel guests. I’d done it plenty of time but it never got old. Mark and Bowen both volunteered so we went and paid the gorge a visit. There are two gorges in this area, the Aare gorge and the Rosenlaui gorge, but by far the better one was the Rosenlaui one. It’s wilder, more natural, and always had plenty of water. It’s a bit of a duplicated hike since we’re coming down the trail we did in the morning, but it was still worth it.

Tuesdays are traditional Swiss music days at Rosenlaui. There’s a dinner reception at 6:30pm, where you get appetizers, and then at 7:00pm, you adjourn to the dining hall. There, the Swiss band performs music. One song, then the soup, then another song, the salad, and so forth. The kids were not impressed, and could barely keep themselves from laughing. There was a moment of excitement when one of the singers fainted during the song and had to be revived and sat down. “Wow,” said I in a moment of naivete, “He over-strained himself singing and fainted?” “More like he drank himself into a stupor,” declared Mark. “Those guys have been drinking non stop since the reception!”

It had started raining as predicted, so we didn’t go for an after dinner walk. In fact, it was raining so much that we were going to do a rain plan for the next day, using the car to do touristy things and giving everyone a break.