To the Mountains!

We started our day with croissants and coffee, then headed towards the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the smaller villages. Our ride to the valley was peaceful and scenic and we enjoyed our daily lunch of bread and cheese before heading out for another ride.

The town of Lauterbrunnen.







The Lauterbrunnen Valley boasts 291 waterfalls and we certainly saw a lot of them on our ride up to Murren, which is perhaps the most beautiful village in the Bernese Oberland. The village is perched high up above the Lauterbrunnen valley at 5400 feet above sea level. It's way up on a cliff essentially. From the Murren side of the valley, the view of the famous Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau is simply the best. Above Murren rises the great peak of the Schilthorn at 9600 feet. Thisaccessiblebile by the spectacular cable car from the village. At its summit is the superb revolving restaurant with its magnificent 360 degree panorama. This was James Bonds Piz Gloria in the film On Her Majesty Secret Service.

Our ride started innocently enough with a paved little path out of the village. It promptly turned to a dirt road and the climb was on. It switchbacked up and up and then turned steeply upward. I'm fairly certain we took a wrong turn because from the looks of the topo map it should have been a gradual climb and this was nowhere near gradual. The trail was beautiful and the scenery was spectacular with waterfall after waterfall. We climbed for another 2 hours before we reached Murren. We rode straight to the little market and bought a giant hazelnut milk chocolate candy bar to refuel before the descent. The descent was a fast furious little piece of trail that dropped us back by our hostel. Tough, tough riding was followed by a giant helping of genuine alpenmacaroni, apple struedel, and beers. AHHH, what a day.

You think they get a lot of snow in the surrounding mountains? I'm sure the handful of avalanche shelters we passed can attest to that.





The cog train that takes people up to Wengen.



I know picture never do gradients justice, but notice the fenceline climbing up towards the right in the background...we're headed up that on a tiny singletrack.



Waterfalls everywhere











How everyone else gets to Murren.




Hahaha - again, check out the fencelines in the background, this path was STEEEEEEP!


We started out down there about 3 hours ago.