Welcome back to the second half of our Swiss adventure trip! After an incredible first day hike at First, Sam and I were ready to take on another challenge for our final day in this beautiful place.
We had done a bit of research in the hotel the night before, and decided to hike to the Glecksteinhütte. This is a typical mountain hut maintained by the Swiss Alpine Club, and is open in the summer season for overnight stays. With its proximity to several notable mountains in the area, it is especially popular with those making an ascent of the Wetterhorn.
During our October visit it had already closed for the winter, but the trail itself remained open. It is a T3 route – described as “challenging mountain hiking“. This was ideal for us, as these routes do not require specialist alpine experience but still offer an interesting challenge. And after the previous day’s ventures on a short T4 route, we were keen to avoid getting ourselves in over our heads!
Day Three
We started by taking a local bus to the trailhead, which sits at an altitude of 1557m. We got lucky with this as it was actually the last day of operation for this bus route before it closed down for the winter. There were only a couple of other hikers that joined us at the start of the trail, and we soon separated out, having the trail to ourselves for the vast majority of the day.
As the sign states, the ascent to the hut should take around 2h 40min, though this is very much dependent on individual fitness, hiking pace and whether you like to make lots of photo stops along the way – which I definitely do.
We started our hike still below the treeline, although barely, with the path getting increasingly narrow and rocky as we climbed. In many parts there was protective steel rope in place, as well as Via Ferrata-style attachments such as metal rungs and staples for greater assistance. It was a sharp contrast to the well-groomed Bachalpsee tourist trail that we had done the day before, and I enjoyed the feeling of a more “serious” hike.
In this first section, there are wonderful views of the famous Eiger as well as down towards the village of Grindelwald. The weather wasn’t quite as kind to us on this day, but we still had excellent visibility for the time of year and really couldn’t complain.
The most interesting feature of the trail can be found once you start turning in towards the mountains. And it’s something I’ve never seen on a hike before – a little waterfall right above the path! It requires you to go right under the water to get by, using the provided metal steps for much-needed grip.
Though the total elevation gain on this hike is relatively modest at 760m, it is not an easy route by any means. There are several sketchy sections, where there is barely a path cut into the steeply sloping rock face – and it’s safe to say that we were very thankful for the steel rope throughout! This trail is maybe one to avoid if you don’t have sure feet and a head for heights – but we thrived on the experience, and really enjoyed the physical and mental challenge.
By far the best part of this route is that it passes by the Upper Grindelwald Glacier. This one is not visible from the village, so we didn’t know what to expect, but were hoping for a closer look at some glacial ice. And we certainly were not disappointed! As we climbed a particularly steep section of the trail and rounded a corner, we were greeted with this wonderful view:
Even in the cloudy conditions, the bright blue of the glacial ice was clear to see. Sam had never seen a glacier before this trip, and I had only seen them on an organised school trip in Iceland. So it was great to have the experience of hiking up to a glacier ourselves and being rewarded with this view.
Sadly, due to rising global temperatures the glacier has retreated massively from what it once was. But to us, it was still amazing. It’s not every day you can casually hike up to a glacier!
From here we continued on, hiking above the scree-covered lower part of the glacier up towards the Glecksteinhütte. After the challenges of the trail, we were pretty glad to see the hut perched high up to our left as we rounded a corner. And we were even happier when we reached it to find that it wasn’t locked – allowing us to use the bathroom and have a peek at the accommodation there.
We then sat outside on a bench and admired the view whilst eating our picnic lunch.
Whilst we were sat here looking down towards Grindelwald, we heard a distant noise and turned around just in time to witness a small part of the glacier carving off behind us! This doesn’t happen all that often so we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time to witness it.
After some time up here the weather began to turn chilly, so we put on a few extra layers and started heading back. It was a relatively straightforward hike retracing our steps down to the trailhead, but after that things got a little more interesting…
The Travel Chaos
Now it goes without saying that better pre-planning could have avoided these next issues completely, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. And it all stemmed from us not wanting to pay for phone data in Switzerland (we both have free roaming in the EU, but Switzerland is not included).
So, we had a train booked for that evening out of Interlaken back to Stuttgart. And to reach it from the trailhead, all we needed to do was catch a return bus to Grindelwald and then get the cogwheel train back down to the valley. But without data we couldn’t check the train timetable – and it turned out that we had underestimated how long the cogwheel train would take.
This possibility did begin to dawn on us as we got back to the trailhead and so we decided to walk from there down the valley to the Hotel Wetterhorn bus stop. This location is more frequently served by buses than the trailhead stop, though we still had to wait longer than we would have liked.
Once we made it into Grindelwald we could already see the cogwheel train at the platform – so we sprinted from the bus to the ticket machines, frantically booked ourselves two tickets and managed to make it onto the train with a few minutes to spare. Unfortunately though this did not solve our second problem, which was that we were running low on food. With the local shops closed on Sundays, we had been unable to resupply that morning – and so we had already eaten most of what we had on the hike.
All that to say, we did make it onto our planned train, but without a chance to buy food or water anywhere. After a full day of hiking we were pretty hungry and this definitely wasn’t our ideal scenario! We decided that we’d stretch the budget to buy some drinks on the train itself, but food would have to wait.
After a bit of discussion we decided to intentionally miss our connection in Basel, as we knew we could get cheap local trains from there back to Stuttgart and it gave us time to get some much-needed food at the station. We were still without data, so whilst Sam went to check out the train station food options, I tried to connect to any free WiFi to check the timetables. When I finally managed it, I discovered that there was only one more viable route that would get us back to Stuttgart that day – and it left from a different train station in Basel!
So from there it was another frantic mission as we quickly grabbed food from a supermarket, took a tram across town to the other train station, sprinted to find a ticket machine and rushed through the station to the correct platform. But we made it!
Unfortunately the travel drama didn’t end there. Due to overhead wire problems we were soon dropped off at a random station in the middle of the German countryside and told another train would pick us up. Which it later did, but all that resulted in us missing the final connection to Stuttgart and having to taxi the 88km back home (thankfully paid for by Deutsche Bahn!)
It was certainly a whirlwind day full of highs and lows, but they make the best stories to tell I think. And overall our Swiss trip was a huge success and one of my favourite trips I’ve done!
