As you will know if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, or if you know me personally, experiences (which I sometimes call “adventures”) are very important to me. That’s why, when Jo and I celebrate our birthdays, my personal preference is that we try to have an experience we can share—something memorable to look back on and remember the time we’ve enjoyed together.
After a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing while trying to decide what I wanted to do on my birthday back in January, I finally hit on the idea of going up to the Eigergletscher mountain station, high above Grindelwald and below the peaks of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. Although there are plenty of summits to visit in this region, Eigergletscher is particularly special for historic reasons. It’s the point at which a tunnel begins, driving its way through the sheer rock of the cliffs above and ending up at the Jungfraujoch.
There have been buildings on this spot for more than a century—visiting the old train station building here was one of my first experiences of being completely alone in the Alps in temperatures below −20 °C, when I was there to photograph the winter landscape at sunset. Jo and I also visited several times over the years, including a visit to the old husky station in 2009. (The dogs are sadly long since gone.)
In 2020, a massive concrete complex of cable-car and more modern and capable train station, part of the project connecting Grindelwald directly with Männlichen and Eigergletscher with large and fast cable-cars, was completed and opened to the public. The construction has taken away some of the historic Alpine feeling, but it’s definitely a much better experience to be able to choose the Eiger Express over the train and get to the high mountain stations in 15 minutes from the valley. However, the original mountain restaurant—a small space in one of the old buildings—remains largely traditional, with a wood-panel interior and a wonderful smell of cooking cheese.
That’s just as it should be for me in the Alps, although I appreciate the fact that a terminus like this, which sees many thousands of people every year heading up and down the mountain, must be modern and able to accommodate so many visitors. It’s still incredibly sad when practicalities outweigh the traditional experience of being in a space that reflects the history of Alpine exploration.
This is a very long way of saying that I chose, for my birthday, to take the cable car up to the Eigergletscher restaurant to have a very fine cordon bleu followed with an Eigerspitzli (small chocolate mountain confection, filled with praline), while Jo enjoyed a Graubünden speciality: capuns. After enjoying both our lunch and the experience of being there, we put on our spikes and walked down the sledge track to Kleine Scheidegg.
For some reason there were very few people on the mountain that mid-afternoon, which made the experience even nicer for me. As we reached Kleine Scheidegg to catch the train back down to the valley, we arrived with the last of the sun, and Jo slid down the final section of path using the slipperiness of her winter hiking trousers instead of a sledge. I managed to fly the drone while we were on the mountain to capture some photographs and a short film sequence of both mountain stations.
This was a perfect day out for me: exercise, a little bit of Swiss Alpine history, wonderful company, and some photography to look at on grey days when I’m stuck in the office.
