Cycling in the Alps

It's one thing to have a mountain bike, but it's another to climb a mountain on it. We’re both over 50 and one of us is over 60, so when we considered biking in the Alps, we looked seriously at the route’s elevation profile. The profile chart is often made available by the local biking association or tourist office just for our purposes, to ensure we get on a trail that suits our physical and technical abilities. We also considered whether it’s a road or trail and the trail surface. We avoid roads where we can, for safety.

Originally, we had 2 routes planned. The one to Brienz was on a road that would have taken us around the glacial lake by the same name. The profile was good and we anticipated the scenery would be interesting, but it was on a relatively busy road. So we took the train instead, and hiked the adventure we wrote about in our last posting.

The other route was up the Lauterbrunnen valley. We picked up the bikes the evening before, and were riding out of Interlaken by 8 AM or so. We rode a little over 20 kms up the valley on mainly packed gravel trails, climbing about 300 meters or 1000 feet. We went through the town of Lauterbrunnen to the smaller town of Stetchelberg. For the most part, it was an easy steady climb, all the time realizing we would have an even easier decent.

We followed the fast flowing glacier fed river all the way up the valley. The west side of the valley was sheer rock with waterfalls. The water was freefalling a couple of hundred feet down to our level. There was lots of parasailing from some of the mountain ridges accessible by cable car.

The valley narrowed to the point there were avalanche huts every couple of hundred meters along the trail. We were hoping they were primarily for snow avalanches in the winter rather than for rock avalanches in the summer. For the most part, the rock looked more stable than what we had seen elsewhere in the past 2 weeks.

Eventually, we couldn’t cycle any further without going into serious climbing mode. At that point, we stopped beside the river and ate lunch.  We didn’t waste any time though, as apparently the glacial rivers are unpredictable due to ice dams getting formed, breaking and causing instant flooding downstream. After what turned out to be an uneventful and enjoyable lunch, we headed back.

We got back to Interlaken with sore butts and a host of pictures from the Lauterbrunnen valley, its sheer mountainous cliffs, and waterfalls.

Our vacation ended with a scenic bus ride back to Zurich to catch our flight. We flew home on fond memories of the Swiss Alps, our quaint apartment in Grindelwald, hiking, biking, beautiful mountain scenery, snow capped peaks, waterfalls, glacial rivers and lakes. Truly, we had a Swiss adventure of a lifetime.

Thank you for joining us in Switzerland, and please join us again. The other night I looked over Marlene’s shoulder while she was on the internet. She was researching Africa.