Like millions of people in 2020, due to the pandemic, we worked from home, stayed away from crowded places, and stopped traveling. Before the arrival of winter and the possibility of another extended lockdown period, we decided to go on a short road trip within Switzerland in September.
Driving your own car is safer than public transportation. And we believe it was safer to go up to the mountains as the summer holiday season was winding down. Since we had never been to the sparsely populated, mountainous Eastern part of Switzerland, it was time to explore. To accompany this online trip, I chose a collaboration by two great musicians.
The easternmost point of this road trip was St. Moritz, the well-known, historical ski resort town in Kanton Graubunden. We took the scenic route from Lausanne via the Swiss Riviera, through the Rhône Valley and start ascending the Alps after Brig.
Starting at 9 am from home, we simply followed A9, mostly a motorway until Sierre. The drive was really easy up to here as this route was built to give quick access to all the major ski resorts in the Swiss Alps, such as Verbier, Crans-Montana and Zermatt.
Our first stop (not scheduled) was at a suspension bridge near Bellwald. It was a surprise discovery as the Hängebrücke appeared on our right after we left A9 to join Route 19. No longer in the French-speaking part of Canton Valais, these parts of Valais use a Germanic dialect.
Many suspension bridges in Switzerland are spectacular and themselves destinations, but they are not easy to reach. This footbridge is built to cross the Rhône River to connect Bellwald (1566 m) on the north bank to Mühlebach (1250 m) at Fürgangen (1188 m, not far from the small train station). Built next to a main road, it has to be the easiest suspension bridge to access for casual tourist like us.
After Oberwald, Route 19 becomes narrower and twisty as we slowly climb alongside the upper reaches of the Rhone River. Then we reached Gletsch where the mountain views become spectacular.
Gletsch at 1,757 m (5,764 ft) is a hamlet located 2.5 km (1.6 mi) below the edge of the Rhône Glacier. It is called Gletsch (derived from Gletscher, glacier in German), since the first building, the predecessor of the Hôtel Glacier du Rhône was built more or less next to the glacier’s mouth in 1830.
The glacier has been retreating from right to left in the above photo, leaving behind the a new section of the Rhône. Gletsch is just visible at the right edge of the photo below.
Gletsch lies at the crossroads of the Grimsel Pass (leading to the Bernese Oberland) and the Furka Pass (leading to Andermatt where we stayed the first night of this trip).
We drove up to our first pass – the Grimselpass (Passo del Grimsel) at an elevation of 2,164 metres (7,100 ft).
There is a small lake, a cheerful, rusty sculpture, a restaurant and a hotel at the pass.
The pass connects the upper valley of the river Aare, with the upper valley of the Rhône. As the Aare is a tributary of the Rhine, the Grimselpass stradles the continental divide between the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
On the other side from where we came, a paved road runs 38 kilometres (24 mi) from Gletsch to Meiringen. The road is normally closed between October and May, due to the high snowfall on the pass.
Slightly below the pass on the north side are two lakes, Totesee (Lake of the Dead) and Grimselsee. The latter is artificial, created by a dam built in 1932 to generate hydroelectric power (operated by Kraftwerke Oberhasli (KWO) which now uses its local transport network to support tourism).
We descended from the pass to Grimselsee. From a distance, the light-green glacial water was perfectly calm and looked oddly solid.
Across the dam on the other side is a hotel. One section of the dam allows vehicular traffic.
The hotel – the historic Grimsel Hospiz was our initial choice for lodging for the night, but its 28 rooms were all booked. There is quite a bit of history here – apparently, the first certified guesthouse of Switzerland was located at this exact spot, way back in 1142! In more recent times, the hotel became a sensation in 1932 as the first exclusively electrically-heated house in Europe (when the dam for hydroelectric power was completed and supplied the power). Really.
Renovated in 2010, the hotel is now open during the summer from June to October and in winter from December to April – “Silent Winter Oasis” – while the pass is closed to driving due to several feet of deep snow, the hotel can be accessed by gondola and tunnels of the KWO power plant. The gondola which traverses a part of the lake was not running unfortunately as the summer tourism seasons just finished (or did not open due to the pandemic).
What a place to spend a quiet cozy Christmas !