Lauterbrunnen-Murren

 Mon 27/1/25

We woke up early this morning before 5am after a good night's early sleep and rest. Our breakfast at the hotel starts at 7.30am and the selection was good with croissant, cheese, bread, hard boiled eggs, yogurt, milk, coffee and juice.

breakfast at hotel

We headed out to Lauterbrunnen, part of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage site, taking the 8.40am train and arriving at 8.56am. We bought the return trip ticket from Wilderswil to Lauterbrunnen via the SBB app for CHF 6.40 (RM)  per person. 

From the Lauterbrunnen train station, we walked a bit at the main road and then took the small alley on the left down to the valley where we were greeted with a view of a church, river and Staubbachfall. We took a lot of pictures along the valley to Stechelberg cable car station, about 5km in distance. It was an easy, flat walk with crampons on as it would be slippery walking on some icy parts without them.

We took about 2 hours for the 5km walk with many stops for photographs. We tried to fly the drone here when we see there were nobody around. But not long after, a local passed by and said that drones are prohibited in the area, so we took it down before we managed to get any good footage.

view from Lauterbrunnen station

pretty view of Lauterbrunnen valley

flat route between Lauterbrunnen and Stechelberg

flat route between Lauterbrunnen and Stechelberg

pretty views between Lauterbrunnen and Stechelberg

icy route - wear crampons

some non icy parts 

back to icy route before reaching Stechelberg

We arrived at Stechelberg cable car station at 11.15 am and bought the cable car ticket to Murren via the SBB app for CHF 5.90 (RM) per person. We took the 11.45am cable car and it just took 6 minutes which somehow felt like a vertical lift up to Murren.

Murren is a quaint little mountain village and thick with snow compared to down in the valley. There is a piste for skiing here.

arrived at Murren

Since we were not skiing, we would just be hiking to Grutschalp, which is located above Lauterbrunnen. So we were doing a loop hiking starting from Lauterbrunnen walking in the valley to Stechelberg, then up the cable car to Murren, then hiking the mountain (almost flat) to Grutschalp, then take the cable car down back to Lauterbrunnen. The hike from Murren to Grutschalp also covers another 5km in distance and again we stopped for a lot of photo taking along the way. 

We could see the peaks of Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau for a bit before being covered by the clouds.

mountain peak views from Murren

mountain peak views from Murren

mountain peak views from Murren

another hour walk to Grutschalp

the route is parallel to the train track

mountain peak views along the route

mountain peak views along the route

beautiful views

We also stopped to have our packed lunch (yesterday's lamb briyani, palak panner and naan that we didn't manage to finish) at the bench somewhere in the middle of the route, surrounded by the mountains. 

packed lunch with moutain views

lunch stop

some wooded area

walking in the snow

We reached Grutschalp before 2pm, so we still have some time to spend at Lauterbrunnen. We bought the cable car ticket down to Lauterbrunnen via the SBB app for CHF 4.70 (RM 23.50) per person and it took only 4 mins.

Back at Lauterbrunnen, we walked to the Staubbachfall waterfall to take some pictures there, then went to Coop to buy Evian water for CHF 1.15. This is probably the only cheap item in Switzerland.

Staubbachfall 

We then took the train back to Wilderswil at 3.30pm and went back to our hotel to rest for the day. It has been a long day of walking today and we didn't feel like going out again so we had 2 packs of Big Kari Maggi for dinner tonight.