By a miracle, Boen, Mark and I all managed to get up, eat breakfast, pack up the car, get the bikes out, and get rolling by 6:17am. It was still cool enough to wear a jacket and descend the gallery from Andermatt to Goschenen, but by the time we got to Goschenen I need to take off my jacket.
The climb starts from Wassen at 800m, and immediately hits an 8% grade, which we were grateful to be climbing in 75F weather rather than 80F. It was overcast at the start but the sky quickly cleared. However, the surrounding mountains were high enough that we were in shadows all the way until about 5km from the summit, at which point the heat danger was minimal.
The thing about Sustens is that unlike many other passes in Europe, there are next to no services on the road. In fact, once past the village of Meien, there’s not even a water fountain to be seen until you get to Sustenbruggli, where the house before the restaurant is owned by a mountain club and has a freely accessible tap outside for you to refill your water bottles.
Boen and I got a steady climbing pace, and with two of us I could have Boen open up food packages and feed me while climbing. We also both consumed significantly less water than Mark. When we got to Sustenbruggli, the amount of water we had left was so much that we eschewed the stop while Mark stopped to refill and ended up also buying a snack. Because of the lack of need to stop for water, the coolness of the morning, and the deliberate resting we did the day before, my Strava entries said that this was the fastest climb of Sustens for many segments that I’d ever done—it’s also a testament to how strong Boen is that we were beating previous times when I was riding the single bike!
At the summit tunnel entrance, Boen and I stopped for a photo, waited a few minutes and realized we couldn’t see Mark anywhere, so we elected to wait at the other end of the tunnel. On the other side, we rode to the summit sign for a photo. A woman stopped and took a picture of us and said: “Are you riding the alps on that tandem?” I told her yes. “I was just hear last week riding my bicycle but never thought that it would be possible to do it with kids. I had her send herself e-mail from my phone so I could send her a link to my blog with trip reports of all the trips my two kids have been on on a bicycle.” Mark rode up just in time to make it into the picture.
We then descended the Sustens highway. The Sustens highway is one of the most spectacular descents from the summit down to Meiringen. There are multiple straightaways for maximal speed, but the corners are frequent enough to give you changes in perspective. On a wet year, the roaring waters going over the tunnels give the descent a feeling like a driving video game, except of course bicycling is way more fun than any video game.
With Mark’s agreement, we decided this time to eschew trying to take photos but instead to enjoy the descent maximally in a flow state. The dangerous part for us would be missing the hotel by having too much fun and riding past it! Indeed, the descent was as much fun as we expected. The corners were exciting, and the road was actually very recently paved. In addition, because we had started so early and was descending at 9:00am, the expected headwind did not arise and therefore we were not slowed down! We easily set a Strava PR for the top part of the descent but since we didn’t descend to Innerkirchen there were no other segments that we covered.
Arriving at the Nessental Terrace hotel, we realized that it wasn’t even 10:00am. We obviously couldn’t check in, and besides the car wasn’t here yet! Nevertheless, the owner made us feel welcome, told us where to park the bikes, and we ordered coffee. He then bragged about how good his Rosti was, and we asked him when the kitchen was going to open. “11:00am!”
Xiaoqin and Bowen arrived 15 minutes before the kitchen opened, and when they opened we ordered the Rosti as recommended. The Rosti was amazing. I could believe him that when he says the Rosti is the best in the world, he might actually be right! When lunch was over, our rooms were ready and we moved in. I realized that since the hour was so early, we could drive to Hotel Engstlenalp and hike part of the famed Jobst high country adventure path that he started his tours with every year. I had already hyped up the ride to Mark, but knew that it would not be feasible with the tandem even if the cable car could take it, since the section where you had to carry the bike over the electrified cattle fence would not work.
The drive up the Gental was amazing, passing a group of cyclists on a one lane highway, and seeing waterfalls and beautiful pastoral farmland. I pointed out to Mark where there was cow-poop on the road that would make the road slippery. By the time we got to the Engstlenalp Hotel parking lot, paid the parking fee, and got out the hiking sticks for the hike it was 12:40am.
Rather than opt to go the reverse of the Jobst route, which is optimized more for downhill cycling than for hiking, we decided to go around the Engstlensee, which I mistakenly thought that I had never seen, despite having ridden that adventure route thrice, once in the wrong direction. The hike around the lake was pretty, though rather crowded. It being a Sunday, folks were picnicking around the shoreline, some swimming, some merely dipping their feet in the water.
Since I hadn’t even planned on doing this hike, I had no route in mind, and pretty soon we ran out of trail and ended up at a cable car station that told us the cable car went up to Jochpass. Now this was truly territory I’d never seen, so we took the cable car to the top. Jochpass was a really happening place, with cable cars running up both from Engelberg/Obwalden, Jochstock, and Engstlensee. The ski area had dining, hotel, and plenty of places to sit and look at the scenery, which we proceeded to do.
We looked at the map, and realized that we really only had one route back to the hotel if we didn’t want to take the cable car back down, so off we went. Boen was unhappy that we’d tricked him into taking a hike in addition to climbing Sustens pass, but the entire thing was only 4.85km.
The hike back was very pretty, and necessitated many stops for photographs, starting high on a ridgeline and then climbing some more so we would have views of the Tannensee and Melchsee, across the Canton border! Mark would later say that he had to go do the Jobst high adventure path having seen the scenery on this hike.
By the time we started heading down towards the hotel the skies had clouded up and we’d started feeling drops of rain on us. This sped us up quite a bit, but when we’d caught up to Mark and the kids it had already started raining. There was a little bit of drama where we found the bus stop where you would take the bus down if you were on a hike, but then when we went back to the car we’d lost Xiaoqin, so we turned around and looked for her. By then it had really started pouring and the parking lot was noticeably much emptier than when we had arrived.
Once everyone was in the car the pressure was off. With the rain, it was unlikely that there would be any traffic up the mountain, and we knew the last postbus had already left ahead of us, so we could take our time and stop for pictures here and there.
We got back to the Nessental Terrace hotel at around 5:00pm and here in Gadmental it was still sunny and had been the entire time! The bad news was that this meant the room was incredibly hot. In fact, so much so that Xiaoqin sent me off to spend the night with Mark rather than having so many people crowded into one room.
We had dinner at the Nessental Terrace, since nobody felt like driving somewhere else to get food. The after dinner walk was a walk along the Nessental backroad to the Triftblick B&B. It was nothing special despite being “top rated” on Google maps. We made plans for the next day. Boen and I would beeline it for Hotel Rosenlaui, but Mark would take advantage of his Swiss Half-tax card to ride to Meiringen, hop on the train to Sarnen, and then ride to Stockalp where he would again use his half-tax cut to take the cablecar to Tannalp, and then come back down the Gental. The hotel would serve breakfast at 7:30am, but that was plenty early enough for him to catch the 9:30am train.
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