TRAINS AND TUNNELS AT KLEINE SCHEIDEGG PASS
VIA ALPINA DAY 47 – FRIDAY 7 AUGUST 2026
FERIENHEIM LAUCHBÜHL –> LAUTERBRUNNEN
DISTANCE HIKED: 28.75 km
ELEVATION GAIN: 1,487 m
TOTAL DISTANCE HIKED: 1,193.30 km
TOTAL ELEVATION GAIN: 61,797 m
This morning I was moved by the beauty and simplicity of a shared meal prepared with love and kindness.
Breakfast started with a communal hymn, sung from a Bible handed out to each guest, including us. The private lodge where we stayed is owned by a German Christian organisation, and most of the guests are German. After a lovely breakfast, we said goodbye to the eight other guests and the staff and were on our way at 9am.
It was an easy 5km downhill to Grindelwald on a well-formed trail. It was a beautiful blue-sky morning, with sunlight illuminating the glaciated mountain tops. The highlight was walking through the forest, where there were art installations on the theme of nature. From what we could understand, the intention is to leave the artworks in the forest and allow them to blend into their surroundings over time.
We arrived in town about an hour after leaving the lodge. From the peaceful grace of the start of our day to total madness in town.
The trail passes through the main street. The pavement was crowded and the road was busy with through traffic. There was a very long line of people waiting for chairlift tickets.
We stopped at the supermarket to get a drink before leaving the busyness behind and beginning our long morning of ascending to Kleine Scheidegg Pass at 2,061m.
We crossed the cog railway line on our way out of town. We were surprised, although perhaps we shouldn’t have been considering the busyness of Grindelwald, to find groups of girls dressed in their finest having their photos taken with the mountain backdrop or beside the passing train.
One girl even had shoes and a handbag in a colour matching the cog railway carriages. When the train passed, she would launch into a series of well-rehearsed ‘spontaneous’ poses, all captured on her phone by her friend.
With the sun at our backs, we left the town behind to begin a 4+ hour ascent.
I was annoyed with myself because I had paused my watch while we were in the supermarket and forgotten to turn it back on. We were 3km into the ascent before I realised.
Today we both struggled with the uphill grind. The trail was fully exposed to the sun and very steep, with no switchbacks. We were sweating buckets. It felt as though kilos had been added to my pack. Hammer has one gear and quietly just puts one foot in front of the other.
We could see the cog railway and the cable car carrying people from town up towards the summit. For some reason, that didn’t bother us today.
We made it to Berghaus Alpiglen, a restaurant roughly midway up. From here, the trail seemed so much easier. We were in the shadow of the mountains, and the switchbacks made the gradient feel far more manageable. We were seeing lots of day hikers coming towards us.
We passed huge waterfalls of glacial meltwater thundering down vertical rock faces. Such an enormous volume of water, with tremendous power, scouring the rocks to a beautiful, sinuous smoothness.
We got to the top in the end.
Except the ‘top’ was the base of the Eiger, not Kleine Scheidegg Pass.
It seems we had taken the Eiger Trail by mistake back at the Alpiglen restaurant. That explained the number of people coming back down this trail. The Via Alpina trail at the pass was about 2km to the west.
The Eiger was totally shrouded in dense fog, but we got to see its base. We took another trail towards the pass, stopping for a late lunch beside a water reservoir that looked like an alpine lake. It was an incredible arctic blue.
While we ate lunch, the fog shrouding the summits drifted, revealing the most extensive glaciers we’ve seen so far. They were thick, with icy blue edges, and stretched across several mountain peaks.
Raw and natural beauty.
Yet I couldn’t help feeling that I was in an over-engineered environment. There was a gondola running up the mountainside, a cog train disappearing into mountain tunnels, a cog railway station behind us connecting Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen at Kleine Scheidegg, and people everywhere.
I did pause to wonder: why did we walk to see all this natural majesty when we could have done what hundreds of people here had done and simply caught the train or the gondola?
Did we appreciate it more because we had sweated for nearly five hours to get here?
I’m not sure.
But what hiking the passes we’ve completed so far has done is give us an appreciation of their differences — differences in their morphology, their landscapes and the ways people access and appreciate them.
We finished lunch and headed down towards Lauterbrunnen. We were on our own for the descent. Following a gravel access road gave us a chance to relax and process the mixed emotions of the day so far.
We had planned to camp at a commercial campground in Lauterbrunnen. It was going to be late by the time we arrived and, being a Friday night, probably very busy.
Halfway down to the village, we decided to leave the Via Alpina and take what, on the map, looked like a more direct route to the campground.
In hindsight, this was a big mistake.
Lauterbrunnen village is located in a narrow valley flanked by sheer walls of rock. We ended up on a hair-raisingly steep goat track that required steel cables and steel steps drilled into the rock walls to descend.
My throat was constricted and my mouth was dry by the time we finally made it down to the valley floor.
And the whole time we were descending, there was the sound of guns being fired somewhere below us. Hammer thought it was coming from a gun range somewhere in the valley.
A nerve-wracking experience that left me shaken and Hammer completely unruffled.
We finally reached the well-packed and very busy campground, found a site, rolled out the tent and relaxed.
It was almost 10.30pm before the campground quietened, and I soon fell asleep.
Hammer had no trouble drifting off to sleep as soon as he was horizontal.
