June 24th: Devil's Bridge Hike and Natschen Hikes

Arturo left so early that I didn’t have time to say goodbye to him. But his plan worked and his ride went well. We ate breakfast and then drove down to what we thought was one of only 2 chargers in Andermatt only to discover that it was occupied and in use. No matter, we’d just drive down to the public parking lot next to the train station and do our hike first.

The parking lot charged 5 Francs for all day parking, so we paid. After we parked we walked towards where I thought the hike would start, but there were no obvious signs. Fortunately, the tourist information center was right there, so we walked in and asked for both directions to the hike and the availability of charging stations for the car.

It turned out that it was more a tourist attraction than a hike, but the tourist information had no trouble telling us how to walk there. There were multiple charging stations inside the huge parking lot underground at the Reuss shopping center/mall right at the edge of town. However, the tourist information employee confusingly told us it was at the Blu Hotel parking lot when it would later turn out that it had nothing to do with the hotel. The penalty was that the parking lot charged money as well, so we’d be paying twice: once for parking, and once for the charger.

Well, we’d already paid for parking at the train station, so we just opted to walk the extra 500m to get to the start of the walk to the Teufelsbrucke. The story behind the devil’s bridge was that bridging the Reuss river was considered so hard that apparently only the devil could do it. In the legend, the devil promised to do it at the cost of the soul of the first to cross the bridge. The villagers agreed to this and then tricked the devil by sending a goat to cross the bridge.

The hiking approach to the bridge first takes you on top of the gallery that the main road would follow. I’d ridden that gallery a few times and always called it the corkscrew tunnel for the way it weaved and turned as it made its way down to Goschenen. Once the hiking trail got to the bridge, it would descend under the main road through a staircase gated by iron doors. Once there you got as good a view of the bridge as anyone who’d driven or taken the train there, and could walk both up and down the bike path as well! Despite having ridden the road many times this was the first time I’d seen the bike path. While it was still unpleasant (you would still share the gallery with cars once in a while), the bike path did a good job of making the ride up from Goschenen to Andermatt reasonable, as opposed to something only a masochist would do. Riding down, of course you’re as fast as car traffic and would never use the bike path!

When we’d gotten our fill, we walked back the way we came to the car, and then drove the car into the Reuss mall to get the car charged. Once we figured it out it wasn’t bad, and we walked back up only to see a performance of Swiss flag hurling or Fahnenschwingen. It was cool and we made a video before walking down to the supermarket/coop to buy lunch.

After lunch, we started our second hike, which was to go from Andermatt to Natschen, the first train station on the Oberalp. It was warm, a bit too much for Boen in combination with the steepness, so he threw a temper tantrum and started hiking down. Xiaoqin and Bowen would join him and have ice cream at the main train station, but Mark and I would do the rest of the hike, which ironically started being shaded as soon as Boen left!

Once at the top, it was just a few minutes wait before the train picked us up and reunited us with everyone else in Andermatt. Ironically, the reason it was such a short wait was because the train was late!

Reunited with everyone, we went back to the car and drove it over to the supermarket to shop for supplies for dinner as well as breakfasts. We then drove back to our AirBnB, had showers, made dinner and ate it.

After dinner, Xiaoqin thought it was a good idea to see the sunset from Oberalp pass, and since the car was charged we drove up and saw the only lighthouse on top of an alpine pass in Europe, as well as the beautiful reservoir and did small sections of what would be multi-day hikes. By the time we got back to our AirBnB it was 9:00pm. We debated what to do. Mark said he could stand another hiking day to get more rest in. Xiaoqin wanted to ride Furka and possibly Grimsel pass as well.

I did a bunch of research and it turned out that Triftbrucke was not possible because the cable car was down. ChatGPT suggested Gelmerbahn and the attendant Gelmersee hike. The downward Funicular was booked up in the afternoon, but I checked and the descent was quite doable by hiking, so we just booked just the upwards ticket on the steepest open Funicular in Europe and went to bed.