Ninety seconds on Schilthorn
Break the ride at Birg on the way down. The walkway there is pinned to the vertical face under the station and gives the drop that a summit terrace, being flat and at the top, can never quite deliver.
Twenty four minutes is the whole climb from the valley floor, through Gimmelwald, Murren and Birg, and the cars do all of the work. What to do at the top is a shorter question than the queue for it implies: a slow turn of the restaurant floor, the terrace outside, the film exhibit below. The stop that earns the day is the one underneath. Birg sits at two thousand six hundred and seventy seven metres and hangs a steel walkway off its own cliff, down into the vertical face rather than out over it, and the descent is the natural time to take it because the cars run every half hour and a missed one costs nothing at that height.
Explore the rest of Lauterbrunnen
Mürren sits on a terrace at about 1,650 metres on the western wall of the Lauterbrunnen valley, directly opposite the Eiger, Mönch and…
Wengen occupies a sunny shelf at about 1,270 metres on the eastern side of the Lauterbrunnen valley, reached by the Wengernalp cog railway…
Interlaken sits on the flat alluvial strip between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, the name meaning simply between the lakes. It began as an…