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Te Travel Guide


Promotional Content • Saturday 6th September 2025


Mountains high


Known as ‘Europe’s reservoir’, Switzerland’s Alpine lakes lead to glacier-fed rivers and waterfalls. Words: Orla Thomas


VIEW OVER BACHALPSEE AND THE WETTERHORN, SCHRECKHORN AND FINSTERAARHORN/KEVIN FAINGNAERT L


avaux wines are served aboard the GoldenPass Express. Te train is taking me from Montreux to the


Swiss Alps, on the hunt for some high-altitude H20. Soon after departure, its large windows start to frame the sort of scenery I last saw in the pages of a Heidi picture book: golf-course-green valleys, where wooden chalets are tucked into folds in the land. When we pull up at Zweisimmen, in the Bernese Oberland, a brass band in the village square just beyond the platform is playing Te Bare Necessities. Just over an hour later, we arrive in the town of Interlaken: the gateway for excursions in the region of Jungfrau. Another train and a cable-car


bring me to the top of First, a mountain 2,168 metres above sea level, where a wraparound footbridge offers knockout views over the valley and its busy resort town of Grindelwald. I’ll be one of a handful of people staying up here in the mountains, overnighting at a simple lodge. Once the day-trippers have departed, I’m hoping I’ll have the nearby Lake Bachalp, the so-called ‘Jewel of the Alps’ an hour’s hike away, all to myself. Te path ascends steeply through


banks of unmelted snow — I grab handfuls to cool my face — but soon levels out, allowing me to admire the moorlands. Te area was avoided by humans until the Middle Ages, as it was thought to be inhabited by witches and spirits. Criminals were thrown into glacier-formed pools and there were even human sacrifices made to appease the angry spirits. Today, I encounter nothing ghoulish — only the soothing sound of the Bachläger Waterfall.


Expanses of white Te sun is setting by the time I reach its source: Lake Bachalp. Not one lake, it turns out, but two. At the rear, it’s surrounded by snow- striped hills, creating a zebra-like reflection on its surface. Crouching to touch this mirage, I find the shallows teeming with real animal life: water striders bouncing on the viscous surface and, just below them, huge clumps of frogspawn. It’s only when I turn that I see its scene- stealing sister lake, with the peaks of the Wetterhorn, Schreckhorn and Finsteraarhorn mirrored in its surface. Sat between them, like a saddle on a camel, is the Grindelwald Glacier — a vast expanse of white, in this light indistinguishable from the surrounding snow. Te Aletsch Glacier, a few miles


south, is much more impressive — it’s the largest glacier in the Alps. I reach it via gondola from Grindelwald and then mountain railway to Jungfraujoch, Europe’s highest train station. Disembarking a mighty 3,454m


above sea level, my lungs are working hard even during the short walk to the glacier’s viewing platform. Emerging from an icy tunnel, I’m presented with the sight of an endless ridge of even-loftier peaks. In the distance, two ant-like hikers slowly make their way over what looks like a vast, frozen river — deviating from their path across the glacier could plunge them into a crevasse from which there would be no return. Te scene stretched out before me is so dazzlingly white, I start to fear snow blindness might set in and look away. It’s a discomforting metaphor for glacier tourism itself — increasing


in popularity as these vast bodies of dense, blue-tinged ice slowly melt away. Currently, the Aletsch Glacier shrinks about 165ft a year. It’s reassuring, then, to discover the trains that bring visitors here are run using renewable energy from a hydroelectric power plant in nearby Lütschental, and that the site also serves an important role in documenting climate change. With its silvery-domed observatory perched precipitously on a clifftop, Jungfraujoch Research Station looks a bit like a Bond villain’s lair. In fact, it houses a team of undeniable ‘goodies’: environmental scientists collecting meteorological and pollution data, sometimes used to prosecute factory owners who breach agreed emissions. “We learn a lot from the


SUNSET AT THE BACHALPSEE NEAR FIRST IN THE SWISS ALPS/KEVIN FAINGNAERT


researchers,” says curly haired and bespectacled Daniela Bissig, who — along with partner Erich Furrer — acts as the facility’s custodian, living and working there for 14 days before switching with another couple. Teir tasks include clearing any snowfall that’s built up overnight and maintaining the premises for visiting teams, who sometimes stay for weeks. “We say to them: ‘tell us what your aim is in the way you would to one of your grandchildren’, and I think they enjoy doing so.” Erich and Daniela are giving me a behind-the- scenes tour of their quarters and we’ve paused in her favourite spot, the library. It’s a cosy room with original 1930s wood-panelling and glass-fronted cabinets containing decades worth of data. A telescope is trained on a window currently framing mountains, ice and snow. Te landscape is an eternal source


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