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March 2002

Jungfrau Region

David Aaronson
2005-09-27 20:09:48

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branch of the Y which contains the well-known resorts of Wengen and Murren. This is the town of Lauterbrunnen (8) which most people visit to park their cars (Wengen and Murren are both car-free). The cliffs around Lauterbrunnen feature hundreds of waterfalls, this is Staubbach Falls which is much more dramatic later in the Spring when there is more water.

Sledding in Switzerland is taken well beyond the level of a plastic disc in the park. There are several monumentally long sled runs in the Jungfrau area. Due to lack of snow at lower elevations, the Faulhorn sled run was only 8km (5 miles) long. Only. We rented sleds and took a gondola up three stages to First (the name of the mountain). From there we had to hike about an hour up to the beginning of the sled run. Dragging a sled uphill in the snow for an hour means that the downhill section had really better be worth it, and it is. We're still not entirely sure how you steer a sled, especially at high speeds in slushy snow but it doesn't really matter. It took us about four hours of sledding to get back to the lowest gondola station. There was quite a lot of falling off. There's also a fair bit of hiking on the flat parts but it's mostly downhill and it's tremendous fun.

Back to the main town in the area: Interlaken. The town is so named because it occupies a narrow strip of land between two lakes, Brienz and Thun. Lake Thun features several impressive castles. This is the castle of Spiez in the town of the same name (9).

This one is Schloss Oberhofen which can be visited although we did not go inside it (10). The town of Thun at the end of the lake has a very nice medieval center and an impressive castle above it, although we have no idea how you get to it. We spent about ten minutes circling the area before half destroying the clutch of our rental car at a terribly placed pedestrian-filled rotary. After that we gave up and continued on to Bern.

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