Notable Times: Switzerland 6: Lauterbrunnen

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023, we checked out of our AirBnB in Lucerne and drove towards Interlaken, Switzerland.

Along the way, we stopped for a moment at a pretty lake called Lake Lungern (Lungerersee. "See" means "lake" in German).

Interlaken is a city between ("inter") two lakes ("laken"). This diagram shows an overview of the area, looking south (so it's upside-down compared to maps you'd normally see).

Zooming in a bit, I've underlined the places we ended up going. Our AirBnB was at the "bottom" in Ringgenberg. We stopped there for just a minute to drop our bags so they wouldn't be sitting in our car all day. Then we drove back through Interlaken and up the main valley to Lauterbrunnen, which is a town in a valley surrounded by cliffs on both sides. That day we also visited Müren (up to the right), and Wengen (up to the left), both of which look down on Lauterbrunnen.

On the way up the valley, we were passed by one of the trains that goes up there regularly. Meanwhile, Katelyn was taking pictures of the canyon out the sunroof.

Lauterbrunnen is a magical place.

It has 1000-foot cliffs on the right, and then slopes down towards a river on the left, where there are more cliffs and a few more waterfalls as well. Meanwhile, the Alps sit in the distance with the snow showing how much taller they are than even these impressive cliffs.

The stars of the show, though, are the waterfalls. It is said to have 72 waterfalls, and we saw several of them.

This waterfall is Staubbach Falls, and it is 279 meters (974 feet) tall. It provides a very nice view from this cemetery and many other places in town.

Here is a short video showing a close-up of Staubbach Falls. It is the third tallest waterfall in Switzerland.

This is one of those cases where the scale is so massive that it's hard for the pictures to do it justice.

And then, as if it wasn't impressive enough, we walked up the path and came upon these beautiful green fields speckled with yellow flowers, and inhabited by cows with jingling cowbells. Here's a short video that looks at that waterfall again, but also a jingling, mooing cow from that little barn above.

It was breathtaking, and I just kept staring in wonder. Over here to the left a bit is Spissbach Falls.

Turning around from there, we could see Staubbach Falls again.

Meanwhile, Sienna decided to make a crown of flowers.

There it is!

When the wind blew, the falls would almost disappear in the air and then reform on the rocks below.

Jared caught this great zoom shot of this cow.

Things are often done in a traditional way in Switzerland. We saw these big piles of manure, and I was curious what they did with them. (At the end of the day, we found out: A tractor drove along and shot this stuff into the air in order to fertilize a field, and it made the whole town smell pretty rank for a little while there. We were glad we weren't eating in town when that happened! :)

And while we're on that lovely subject, we thought it was funny that the outhouses were called "Toi Toi", and that the restroom symbol people looked like they were feeling some urgency.

The valley slopes towards a river, and on the opposite side are more sheer cliffs and associated waterfalls.

In this little video, you can hear the cowbells from the cows above, as we look at the waterfalls on both sides of the valley.

As we walked down towards the river, we could get a wider overview of the falls.

While Linette and I were walking along, I looked up and suddenly saw a man flying through the sky in a "squirrel suit". Suddenly he pulled a parachute and started drifting down. Here's a little video of him coming in for a landing.

Jared was able to zoom in on him just as he landed.

What a beautiful day!

There was a shady path by the river.

After walking along the river, we crossed a little covered bridge there.

I'm pretty sure this cow is Swiss.

One thing that kept impressing me was the extreme care that the Swiss take in stacking their wood perfectly.

There were paragliders overhead fairly often. What an amazing view they must have!

We had fun walking around and exploring the town, with waterfalls everywhere we looked.

As we walked back towards town, we saw the squirrel suit guy walking along.

From the middle of town, we could see the cute houses and fields in the valley.

As you can see here, people stay and even live within sight of Staubbach Falls.

We watched this paraglider come in for a landing.

We decided to do another quick, cheap lunch at the "Coop" grocery store.

I found a Biscoff ice cream bar there, so that finished lunch off nicely.

We found a very helpful gal at the tourist office, and decided to each spring for the $200 (190 CHF) to buy the "Jungfrau Travel Pass" (YOONG-frow), which let us ride almost all of the gondolas, trains, busses and even boats in the area for free for 3 days.

Our first such journey was to take a cable car from Lauterbrunnen up the mountain to Grütschalp, and then a train from there over to Mürren, which the tourist lady recommended.

So we packed onto the gondola and traveled up the mountain.

We could see the town and the waterfall as we started up.

Here's a 6-second video clip to get a feel for what that was like.

As we rose higher, we got a good view of little town of Wengen (VENG-gehn), which rests on a ledge on the opposite side of the valley, looking down upon Lauterbrunnen.

As we rode the train, we could see a massive mountain. In the middle is Jungfrau (YOONG-frow), and the dip to its left is Junfraujoch (YOONG-frow-yoke), which is a famous destination that boasts the highest train station in Europe. Our travel pass didn't include the last leg there, and all the seats were booked by the time we checked anyway, so we didn't make it that high. But it was impressive even from here.

Here is a short video clip showing Wengen nestled on its ledge, Jungfraujoch, and the kids on the train.

Once in Mürren, we found a wall where we could sit and dangle our feet for a minute.

The view of the mountains from there was something. We were looking across the Lauterbrunnen valley to the mountains on the opposite side.

As in other places in Switzerland, there were fountains of fresh, clean water available, thanks to the abundant water provided by the Alps.

As we walked through town, I noticed that this lady's house had a retaining wall where every other brick stuck out and provided a small flower box that they could grow things in.

There was a big chess board there, but only a handful of pieces.

This tree provided a natural seat.

Linette noticed that this building was called "Chalet Erika".

Speaking of cute Swiss buildings, they sure know how to do it.

It had been a long day already, and in spite of the altitude (and the patch of snow on the grass over there), the sun made it a little warm. So we sat down to rest for a minute.

There was a cogwheel train that went up into the mountain to another town, but it wasn't yet open at this time of year.

Since we were wanting a little rest, we decided to go into the little church there.

As a reformed church, it had simple decorations. But I still appreciated the "loaves" and "fishes" stained glass windows.

It may have been simple, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

Linette added a pin to show that we visited from Utah.

Jared zoomed in on the glacier across the valley.

Finally, we took the train back to the gondola, enjoying the views along the way. In this shot, the mountains remind me of Utah mountains. In fact, when we were in Zermatt, someone asked where we were from, and Linette said, "Utah." The person said, "...but they have mountains in Utah!" It's true, the Rockies are formidable, and the skiing is world class. I think what they're missing is the gondolas to get up into them, and the glowing green fields below.

Here's another time lapse video of the descent via cable car from Grütschalp back down to Lauterbrunnen. Half of Lauterbrunnen was in the shadow of the cliffs by this time (5:46pm). Note how the little town of Wengen starts out in the top of the frame, but disappears as we get too low.

I think Lauterbrunnen might have been my favorite place in Switzerland.

But our day wasn't over yet! (Did we really start out in Lucerne that morning?) We next took the cogwheel train from Lauterbrunnen up to Wengen, which gave us the opportunity to look down on those 1000-foot-tall waterfalls!

Wengen is located at an altitude of 1274m (4180 feet, so about the same as Salt Lake City). There are about 1300 people who live there year-round, but 5,000 people are there in the summer and 10,000 in the winter. The town has been around since at least 1268.

Here's a funny wooden carving and a beautiful hotel.

People do actually live there in these little "neighborhoods" on the steep hill.

However, we were there during the "shoulder season" (after winter, but not yet summer), so the town seemed almost abandoned. There is apparently a great hike you can get to via gondola from Wengen a few weeks later, but it wasn't opened yet at that time of year.

The restaurants all seemed to be closed, but fortunately, we found an Italian place that was open, so we got some pizza and pasta and shared it around a bit.

Here is Jared's very artistic shot of our dinner with the Alps in the distance.

It got a little chilly, so we went inside to have some dessert. It was very good and didn't last long.

We were very glad that we found a great place that was open.

As the sun set, the valley looked incredible from above.

We got different views as the cogwheel train worked its way down the mountain.

Jared wondered if the government just put cute buildings around to make it look fun. There doesn't seem to be any sort of path to this one. (Maybe it's like a storage building or something).

Plus...sheep! (With "sheep-bells").

There's something delightful about riding on a train.

The side windows rolled down and we took advantage of that.

But we had to watch out for the narrow tunnels.

Finally, we were back in the valley.

SO...CUTE!!

On the far side of the valley from Lauterbrunnen is a waterfall that has a hike that goes into the rock and is supposed to be cool. We wondered about coming back to try that hike later.