Our time in Grindelwald has come to a close... unfortunately! We're off to do the Matterhorn... the highest mountain in Switzerland... and surrounded by some beautiful valleys. The place where we are staying is located high on a mountain ridge above the town of Brig... we are sitting on the front porch of our apartment gazing at the line of Swiss Alps running down the other side of the valley.
On our way, we took a detour up the valley next to Grindelwald... to see the Trummelbach Falls... a series of ten glacier-waterfalls inside the mountain made accessible by tunnel-lift and illuminated. (The tunnel lift is for geriatrics... we were made to climb through tunnel staircase cut into the rock. The Trummelbach drains the mighty glacier defiles of Eiger (3970 m), Mönch (4099 m) and Jungfrau (4158 m) and carries 20,200 tons of boulder debris down through subterranean waterfall each year. We couldn't see the weighing scales needed to verify such a claim... but if Wikipedia says so... it must be right. Wikipedia also claims that its drainage area is 24 km²... half of it covered by snow and glaciers. The falls carry up to 20,000 litres of water per second. I hope you are impressed by these facts and figures... we were certainly impressed by the power of large volume of water racing down inside a mountain. The noise was as impressive as the view of water out of control.
It's 43 years since our previous visit to Grindelwald.. with our next visit (43 years in the future)... we think we will stay in the Lauterbrunnen valley (where the Trummelbach Falls are located)... it is as pretty as Grindelwald... without the commercialisation.
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