by Diccon Bewes
From Kleine Scheidegg you can no longer see any trace of the glaciers, nor do they appear on the half-hour train ride down to Grindelwald, so far have they retreated. The train line skirts along the bottom of the Eiger so that the mountain towers ominously over the panoramic glass windows. Miss Jemima followed roughly the same route, although for her it was a three-hour walk down:
“The footpath was very rough and stony and in some parts steep; nevertheless we scampered down over the stones, after the manner of the goats, leaping rents and clearing the ground at a famous speed.”
And she wasn’t wearing shorts and trainers. By the time they reached their hotel they had begun “to feel very tired”. I’m not surprised. We are staying in the same place, or at least its modern incarnation; of the original, there is nothing left. In fact, the story of the village’s two historic hotels, the Adler and the Bär (Eagle and Bear respectively), is the history of Grindelwald tourism in miniature.
The Adler came first, in around 1800, and then the Bär, both built to cope with the steady influx of tourists. Old pictures show them as typically Swiss wooden buildings, like overgrown chalets, and they would eventually be run by the same family, the Boss brothers. They are the only Grindelwald hotels mentioned by Murray (“both tolerable, prices rather high”) and Miss Jemima stayed in the Adler for one night. That burnt down in 1897, but rose again, only to be demolished in 1982, having been bought by the Sunstar group. In its place stand two modern concrete buildings, one in 1980s chalet style and less horrendous than the other, in classic 1970s multi-storey car-park style. Both sore thumbs are easily visible from far away, but from the inside looking out, it’s not nearly as bad. There are views of the Eiger and also a tasteful interior that is plush, modern and almost characterful. All that remains of the Adler, once the oldest hotel in town, is the name of one of the hotel restaurants, Adlerstube.
Hotel stationery from the old Aigle Noir, or Schwarzer Adler
The Bär had an equally traumatic history. It was the first hotel to open for a winter season, starting a trend that made Grindelwald a must-do for snow-seekers. Fire destroyed that old Bär in 1892, along with half the village and the English church; it was rebuilt on a far larger scale as the Grand Hotel Bear, a true palace hotel with three wings, three hundred beds, a ballroom, and three ice rinks purely for its guests. It became the place to stay during the summer or winter season, but also met a fiery end (thanks to a carelessly discarded cigarette in 1941) and the age of grand hotels in Grindelwald was over. Today there is no trace of the Bear; its location now hosts the community sports centre and tourist information.
These two hotels were part of Grindelwald’s transformation from village to resort, witnessing the growth from local hardship into international recognition. It has probably changed more than any place this tour has taken us so far. Back in the 1860s it was still a village “consisting of picturesque wooden cottages, widely scattered over the valley”, while the inhabitants were “chiefly employed in rearing cattle, of which 6000 head are fed on the neighbouring pastures”, according to Murray. For centuries this had been a fairly isolated spot, up at 1034m, with very independently minded people who had revolted against being ruled by Interlaken and resisted the Reformation. Then the first tourists and mountaineers, mainly British, “discovered” it, forcing the valley to connect with the outside world and cater for the visitors.
Grindelwald with the Wetterhorn and Upper Glacier
It didn’t change much at first: in 1874 the Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook to Switzerland was still describing it as “a romantic village, inhabited principally by herdsmen; the cottages are very Swiss, and the villagers very civil”. It was the arrival of the steam train that changed Grindelwald for ever. The BOB line opened in 1890 and the mountain village was almost instantly turned into an international resort. By 1900 there were 18 hotels (with 1250 beds); six years later there were 30. Today there are 48, making Grindelwald the fourth-largest resort in Switzerland (in terms of number of hotel beds); tourism accounts for 92 per cent of the local income. Now the cows are far outnumbered by tourists.
The two rivers of ice were Grindelwald’s main tourist attraction, so of course Miss Jemima got up early on that Tuesday and set off through the hayfields and fir trees to clamber across the Lower Glacier. That would be impossible today – not just because of the far greater distance involved, but also the greater attention to safety. No one these days would attempt what they did:
“The surface of the glacier was less shattered into forms and spires, but more crevassed than the Mer de Glace. … Due provision for descent has been made – namely, a couple of fir planks, with bars nailed across to serve as steps, on which explorers are to hop down, regardless of the yawning crevasse beneath. True, there is a handrail, which when compared to the massive surroundings was more like a lucifer match than a balustrade. We afterwards learnt that this handrail was more a guide to steady the eye than the hand. But it was only a mountain ladder, and here was a splendid chance for the Club and kindred travellers to display their courage and ability. Some of the ladies, however, thought it better to contemplate its wonders from a distance rather than a gain a mournful notoriety.”
She ends by remarking that the greatest wonder was that the gentlemen all managed a “safe descent and ascent of that glacial hen-roost ladder”. I have to say I would have voted with the ladies on this one and admired the ice at surface level, rather than end up like Monsieur Mouron, a pastor from Vevey. While surveying a glacial crevasse in 1821 he leant on his alpenstock, which promptly split and he fell 250m down into the depths. It took 12 days to find his broken body, although his watch was retrieved intact. Then there’s the tale of Mrs Arbuthnot who was walking up to Schilthorn, a mountain above Mürren, when she sat on a rock for a rest during a storm. Sadly the rock was composed mainly of iron, which attracted a lightning bolt and electrocuted the poor woman on the spot.
The ice is no longer an hour’s walk away but more like a day’s hike, and even then it’s very inaccessible. Instead, modern tourists can stroll along the deep gorge carved by the glacier, either following it from above and looking down into the depths, or walking through it at ground level. Neither is quite the same as hiking over the top, but each is spectacular in its own way, so I decide to do both – although not on the same day. This time we’ll take the low road through the gorge and I’ll come back to do the high road along the top, which requires more time and better weather. Today’s cloud and sporadic drizzle are no hindrance to walking along a path already dripping wet and partly underground.
The Junior United Alpine Club hiked out to a glacier
Whereas Victorian visitors could hike out across the glacier, we can do something they never could: walk beneath where the ice once slid and ground its way down into the valley. The Glacier Gorge is testament to the power of ice in motion; water running underneath the glacier, carrying heavy loads of moraine, eroded its way down into the bedrock, creating this ravine. Its 100m high walls are littered with striations and potholes gouged out by hurtling stones and rushing water. Giant boulders of alien rock sit stranded after being carried and dumped far from home, while pink and green Grindelwald marble, quarried locally until 1903, adds a splash of colour here and there.
Our route is along a slippery boardwalk anchored into the cliff face about two metres above a churning torrent of filthy water that crashes and splashes beneath our feet – the meltwater from the remnant of the glacier. The ravine is so narrow in places that the walls seem to touch and the boardwalk has to disappear into drip-infested tunnels, where the echo of thundering water drowns out our voices. It might be summer outside, but down here it’s still the ice age; another great example of nature’s air-conditioning. After one kilometre the gorge widens out but comes to a dead end, and there’s still no sign of the glacier. Nevertheless, through a dark of rocks, we can glimpse the bright white of a mountain before we have to turn around and retrace our steps.
After the dark,
damp low road, the high road is all sunshine and fresh air – and much more taxing on the legs. Many months after being at the bottom, I pretend I’m Swiss and take a Sunday walk along the top of the gorge, roughly level with where the surface of the glacier once was. A little red cable car whisks us up to the Pfinstegg restaurant perched 360m above Grindelwald on the side of the Mettenberg mountain. From here on, we must pretend to be mountain goats and scamper along a stony path at the edge of the cliff. Vertigo sufferers need not put this on their must-see list, as Murray made clear:
It is not good for timid persons, as the path skirts some formidable precipices; but it is taken by ladies, who may ride on horseback for the first three quarters of an hour, and be conveyed the rest of the way in a chaise à porteur.
There’s no chance of anyone carrying me today and no chance either of seeing “a most interesting view of the bristling minarets of ice, rising in the most various and fantastic shapes”. They have long since melted away into the river of dirty dishwater far below. Instead, there is a giant cleft in the rock with our path on one side and the eastern flank of the Eiger on the other. It’s not a place to miss your step, so I keep stopping so that I can safely inspect the tortured rock formations and deep grooves that scour the cliff face. At one point the rock on the opposite side of the ravine looks much newer and paler, with no scars scratched across it. This part has only been exposed to the elements for a few years: in 2006 a whole section of the cliff crashed to the ground, sending two million cubic metres of rock into the gorge. With the ice gone, there is nothing to hold back the walls; and with the permafrost melting, that cliff collapse won’t be the last.
On our side of the gorge we pass a strange formation in the rock: a double-sided depression that looks spookily like a giant sat down heavily, leaving his bottom imprinted in the stone. Directly opposite us, in the eastern wall of the Eiger, is a small hole through which we can see blue sky. Twice a year the sun shines exactly through that hole, known as Martinsloch, and down onto the church in Grindelwald. The local legend is that there was once no gap between the mountains here, and so no proper outlet for the glacial meltwater. That regularly built up to such a degree that it crashed down into the valley below, destroying farms and lives. A local man named Martin, who happened to be rather large, came to the rescue. He sat with his back against the Mettenberg, placed his feet and staff against the Eiger, and pushed with all his might. Not only did he separate the mountains to create a safe passage for the water, he left his imprint on both sides of the new valley. These days things are more practical: a tunnel was recently built to relieve the water pressure from the melting glacier and prevent a sudden flood that would devastate Grindelwald. I think I prefer the story of a giant bottom and a hole made by a stick.
Ninety minutes later we reach our goal, the restaurant at Bäregg, 388m higher than the start of the path at Pfinstegg. It’s time for lunch in the sun, at tables with red-and-white checked cloths, sitting beneath a fluttering Swiss flag and with a view of the end of the glacier. As at Mer de Glace, it’s not a particularly pretty sight. It’s dramatic, yes, with its cradle of jagged mountains and folds of snow-covered rock, but there’s no sparkling ice or sculpted pinnacles. This is the dirty end of things, more grey moraine than white ice.
The footpath carries on up to the Schreckhorn Hut, another three hours (and 800m in altitude) further on. That route is marked in the blue and white denoting an Alpine path, or one for serious hikers and climbers only. I’m happy to stay where we are, especially once I notice where the path has had to be moved up and back away from the encroaching cliff edge. It’s bad enough that the restaurant, itself new after the last one succumbed to the changing landscape, seems to teeter on the edge of nothingness. All this is because the glacier has retreated 1.6km from its peak in the 1850s; once there was ice 200m thick, now there is nothing. In 1861 it seemed that “both the Mer de Glace, under Mont Blanc, and the Grindelwald Glacier, appear to have shrunk, and sunk considerably below the level they once attained; but this may be merely temporary, or even only their dimensions in summer, when most reduced”. Lord Byron called the Alpine glaciers “frozen hurricanes”, but in some cases they are now merely a frozen summer breeze. And to think that men used to cut 100 tons of ice a day from the tongue of this glacier, transport it to Interlaken and sell it to customers as far away as Paris and Vienna; a trade killed by the First World War and the invention of artificial ice.
Ice was an important factor in Grindelwald’s growth, although not only in the shape of its two glaciers. It was the flat expanses of the white stuff that helped the resort become one of the main places for Brits to enjoy a winter break. In 1900 Grindelwald had 16 ice rinks for tourists. The Grand Hotel Bear had the largest (at 25,000ft2, or about a third of a football pitch) and was the headquarters of the Grindelwald Skating Club, an English creation that catered for the growing winter sports craze. By 1905 Thomas Cook was offering a 10-day skating tour to Switzerland for ten guineas, full board.
In resorts like Grindelwald there wasn’t just skating but also curling (with its own British-only club) and gymkhanas organised by the Amusements Committee. They were a jolly wheeze to keep the punters happy, with such pursuits as potato collecting (pick up the spuds and put them in a basket as you skate around) and egg blowing, where the men had to blow eggs across the ice and the women rolled them back with wooden paddles. There was also a winter version of a three-legged race, dubbed the Rennen der Lahmen or Race of the Lame: one man and one woman, each with one skate and one snowshoe, racing hand in hand across the ice. Those Victorians certainly knew how to amuse themselves, although some were not amused by Continental skating practices.
In his entertaining book Switzerland and the English (1944), Sir Arnold Lunn recounts:
The English skater keeps his unemployed leg rigidly to his side, and sweeps over the ice in long sweeping curves. Not individual display but combined skating is the ideal of the English school. … It is a pity that four Englishmen skating a “combined” need more space than fifty foreigners waltzing in the degenerate Continental style. In the days of our Imperial power, nobody dared to question the English skater’s demand for Lebensraum.
He then catalogues the decline of standards on the rinks of Switzerland as if they were part of the British Empire: “The foreigners increased, and their latent opposition was fanned into open revolt by degenerate English traitors to the noble ideals of Anglican skating. They even asked for a band on the rink. On the rink!” It might as well have been the end of the world.
And of course, there was tobogganing and bobsleigh racing. For a while Grindelwald was home to the world’s longest bob run (4.2km) and three trains a day ran between the village and the upper start of the run. It eventually went the way of the ice rinks, dismantled during the Second World War as the fad faded, in contrast to Graubünden. There it lives on, fittingly enough as it was in St Moritz that the Brits invented the bobsleigh, allegedly by tying two sleds together before sliding down a mountain. And it was the British who created the famous Cresta Run in the winter of 1884–85. No one else would have had the crazy idea of hurtling head first down a tube of ice at 120km/h while lying on a flimsy toboggan.
In fact, St Moritz was where winter holidays were born in 1864. The story goes that hotelier Johannes Badrutt bet four of his English summer guests that they would enjoy St Moritz in winter as well. If they came and didn’t like it, he would refund their travel costs; but if they liked it, they could stay for as long as they wished as his guests. The four returned to St Moritz at Christmas – and ended up staying until Easter. So began the annual winter British invasion of the Alps.
Grindelwald was proclaimed “one of the best known Swiss centres for invigorating winter sports” in Sunshine and Snow, Thomas Cook’s very first winter sports brochure. That 1908 pamphlet featured eight Swiss resorts, including Adelboden, which was then a two-hour sleigh ride from Frutigen, for those who wanted to escape “England’s dullest months”. Winte
r sports were sold on their health benefits rather than simple fun, as if there was still something decadent about taking a non-summer holiday:
Winter sport exhilarates and rejuvenates; it generates a glow of pleasure in the mind, which acts powerfully upon the whole physical organisation, while all the time the nerves and muscles are directly braced up by the keen, dry air, tempered by bright, genial sunshine.
There was also a skiing programme, such as the run down from Männlichen: a four-hour ascent from Grindelwald for a 30-minute ski back down. That makes queuing for a ski lift seem not so bad after all. Or how about a three-hour ascent up to the Grosse Scheidegg, a two-hour ski run down the other side, a boat to Interlaken and a train back to Grindelwald?
However, there was no après-ski malarkey in those days – and definitely no sick people. “It should be noted that no visitors who are suffering from any form of tubercular complaint are received at places dealt with in this booklet”, the pamphlet warned. Instead, St Moritz tried to attract “the fair sex” with a ladies’ curling club (the sport not the hairstyle) and phrases such as “lovers of pretty shops will find much to tempt them”.
All the featured hotels were “specially fitted up for the comfort of guests during the winter, with central heating and everything of the most up-to-date character, including a good orchestra”. It’s nice to see that warmth came before waltzing. And they weren’t only dancing inside: the winter season in Grindelwald included a challenge cup for combined figure skating, two prizes for ice waltzing and one for ladies’ skating. It’s not clear if there was a band on the ice.