“Good morning pilgrims” is a phrase you’ve likely heard us say most mornings as we do our morning update. This is because in many ways we count you as pilgrims with us on this journey. But today, more than ever, I wish you all could have been with us in person. Today’s walk was superb in so many ways.

We woke up in our tents early. It’s just hard to sleep long tent camping. As the twilight dawned we ate a small breakfast of yogurt and packed up our bags with the minimum number of things we’d need for the day and left the rest behind in our tents.

You see the place we were going was intended to be our lodging site but they were completely booked. So we’d decided a day ago to spend two nights camping and just bus back down to our tents for a second night and bust back up to today’s end point tomorrow morning. It wasn’t a perfect plan but we figured we’d also save a bucket of money tent camping instead of paying for a higher price place up in the hills.

(Hold on to that thought)

It also had the benefit of allowing us to do the most strenuous climb to date with lighter pack weights.

So we headed off for the day with excitement and a little anxiety over the elevation we needed to conquer today.

The first cool sighting was Reichenbach Falls. If you are a mystery buff perhaps that name is familiar to you. This was the sight of the final and fatal battle between Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty. Our trail, Via Alpina, took us directly to the falls after a steep climb. The falls were unique with a window of rock acting like a jet nozzle. It was a beautiful sight.

The trail basically climbed steeply, winding through the forest until we reached the Reichenbach River. The river is a rushing torrent of frigid water that is fed from the glaciers above. It was amazing to walk that portion of the trail.

And then this happened…

About 10am we turned a corner and gasped at the first sight of the snow capped peak of the Eiger. “WOW” was all that Nadine could repeat.

Most of the morning we walked alone, but at one point we came out of the woods, crossed a road, and came to the Hotel Rosenlaui. There is also a bus stop at that location and a full load of other hikers had recently disembarked. From that point on, as the trail flattened for a time, we had others in sight for a good bit of the rest of the day. One of those hikers was Markum from Wisconsin. It was fun to chat with another American for a while.

Of course the roads were also filled with bikers of all types slowly climbing the mountain along the road path. Most of them travelled in packs but there were also solo cyclists.

The last mile was pretty strenuous and having tired legs didn’t help, but we made it to our target destination of Grosse Scheidegg after a whopping 4482ft of ascent.

There we had our lunch after putting on an additional layer of clothes that we needed after the strenuous work was over, and the alpine air chilled us to the bones.

Sometimes when you are climbing you have to concentrate so much on your footing that it’s easy to miss the scenery.  My favorite part today was being able to stop walking and spend almost an hour just looking at what was around us.  It was a forced pause as we waited for the bus but the best pause in our day!

We’d gone on-line and saw the cost of a bus ticket was supposed to be between 4 and 8 US Dollars. Clearly something is wrong with the app we were using because the actual cost of the bus ride down the mountain was a shocking 165 Swiss Francs ($207 US dollars) for a 30min ride down the mountain. Worse than that, we have to pay that again tomorrow!! It kind of put a sour note to what was an amazing day.

A short walk to the grocery

and campsite, showers and a cold dinner and we are ready for bed.

Short closing funnies

1) On the way to the campsite we passed a herd of cows just Cruisin down the street, just like cows do I guess.

2). We met some guys from Afghanistan who were setting up camp. After a few conversations, one of the young men reached in his bag and sprayed me with his cologne. He said “do you like it? I make it myself”. He was proud of this scent apparently.

It’s really strong and I’ve already apologized to Allison for how I smell when I come to the tent in a few minutes.