No progress on our End to End today, by design: we’re staying in Interlaken again tonight and did the Grosse Scheidegg loop, one of Switzerland’s best day rides. Central to its appeal is the middle eight miles over the 1960m / 6,440ft col between Schwarzhorn and Wetterhorn, which is car-, but not postbus- or horn-, free. When not under cloud, the views at the top are mindbending. Today it was under cloud. Minds remained unbent.
It was a grand day of cycling, though, with sunny spells and bright, decent weather almost all the time. Our clockwise circuit launched onto the main road along the north shore of Lake Brienz, one of the two lakes that Interlaken lies inter (the other being Thun).
The flat land east of Lake Brienz
East of Brienz, the cycle paths along the valley floor between mountains either side were very reminiscent of our recent Austrian End to End, except for the price of sandwiches.
Talking of which, we picked up lunch supplies at Meiringen station, and girded loins for the long ascent up the twisting, narrow road towards Scheidegg.
It passes the Reichenbach Falls, famous as the setting of The Final Problem of Arthur Conan Doyle – his problem being how to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead when he’d written him out in an encounter, right here in the falls, with the detective’s nemesis Moriarty.
Our main problem was not the gradient – a steady 8% for ten miles – but the busy tourist traffic. At Schwarzwaldalp, though, cars are turned back; the only traffic allowed to proceed over the pass and on to Grindelwald on the other side is bikes and the postbus.
The postbus is not like Postman Pat’s tiny red van, though. It’s a big yellow coach that hurls itself round hairpins with a blaring horn signal that sounds like a Wagnerian leitmotif of majestic entry. (Well, an A-major triad, anyway.) It also has bike racks on the back, so if you want, you can take a ride to the top and freewheel down.
We didn’t need that, because we got to the top under our own steam, and after many minutes of pushing the final hairpins in thick cloud, I was steaming a bit myself.
I’d had a few glimpses of the mountains on the way up (Matterhorn? Grossglockner? Mont Toblerone?) so wasn’t too disappointed that the vis at the summit stretched only as far as my disc brakes.
What a freewheel down, though! Within a couple of hairpins from the top, I’d ducked under the cloud like a plane coming in to land at Heathrow. A Heathrow, though, full of green alpine meadows, Swiss wooden chalets, and cows with merrily clanking bells against a mountain backdrop. So not Heathrow, then.
The run down to Grindelwald – where car traffic and hence tourist hordes resume – was something very exhilarating, very special.
From here it continued downhill almost all the twenty-odd k back to Interlaken, and we decided that whooshing along the main road was preferable to picking our way along the parallel gravelly bike route.
A memorable day’s ride up and down, even if the nearest we got to seeing a triangular peak at the top was the chocolate bar in my panniers.
Miles today: 50
Miles since Chancy: 168 still, obvs