We came across what has become a favourite walk at Grindelwald a few years back, after I’d decided to get to know the slopes on the eastern end of the valley a little better. I’d parked at the car park at the end of the public road heading towards Grosse Scheidegg when I hiked the Ischpfad to the old Enge cable car station back in 2020, and had realised that I didn’t really know that part of the region.
In contrast to the challenging hike along the cliff-faces high above the car park, the walk down from the Hotel Wetterhorn to the village offered us a secluded downhill alternative during the coronavirus restrictions. To this day, we rarely see more than one or two people along the route before reaching the lower part of the valley.
There are a few different options to choose from, but we’ve settled on the path which takes a route straight into the woods from the car park, across the meadows and down a steep track at Schärersgaden, before following the Schwarze Lütschine river and the plunging down another narrow lane from Sulzweid.
There are benches placed conveniently along the route at surprisingly quiet spots. I write “surprisingly” quiet because of the ever-increasing number of tourists and skiers in the area; the lower parts of the valley away from the village are rarely visited by tourists, and the snow is, these days, most often constrained to the higher peaks and ski pistes.
We search for peace and quiet when we go for walks and enjoy the ability to visit places like Grindelwald to enjoy the mountain scenery, the wind in the trees, and the small birds darting amongst the fields and forests. Heading up on a cable-car takes us into more dramatic territory, but that’s the draw for most visitors and so the prospect of being surrounded by hundreds of other visitors isn’t appealing these days.
From Sulzweid, the lane drops thigh-testingly downward towards the valley floor at Grund, where the first signs of spring are in evidence. This time, the weak sunshine fell on a freshly-felled tree being prepared for logging and on more general tree pruning along the road past the tennis club and golf course.
Instead of continuing along the tarmacked road, we turn off onto a small footpath along the Weisse Lütschine, which pours down a boulder-strewn riverbed from the Lower Grindelwald Glacier to join its darker namesake nearby. This last leg of the walk takes us through a birch and young beech wood to the expansive car parks and transportation hub of the Grindelwald Terminal. From here, we usually take the short train ride back up to the village and onto the bus which will return us the four kilometres to the car.
This time, we chose to extend our walk and come part-way back along the route we’d taken to walk up the stiff hill to the church: mainly with the goal of a coffee and slice of cake before heading home.
Route map on Outdoor Active
View the route map for this walk on the Outdoor Active website.
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