Tradition is swept away – but the snow is still magical
Minty Clinch returns to Grindelwald after 57 years to find a wealth of high-tech changes…
In 2022, ski holidays are dramatically different to what they once were – but has time been kind to our beloved winter pursuit? To find out, more than half a century after my first visit to the Swiss resort of Grindelwald, I went on a mission to assess the impact of time and technology on one of the world’s most historic ski areas.
Cog railways have chugged up the slopes in the shadow of the Eiger since the late 19th century; in the 21st, they are joined by state-of-the-art lifts and robots shifting cryogenically-chilled lunches to mountain restaurants. There’s plenty for a septuagenarian like myself to take in, and no reason not to.
A WHIRLWIND WELCOME THEN: January 1965
As a 22-year-old rookie skier, I drove out to Grindelwald from the UK to join the Ski Club of Great Britain’s off-piste adventure week. When I returned to the Belvedere Hotel one evening, Sir Arnold Lunn was blocking the front steps. The 76-year-old father of British ski racing leant heavily on a bamboo pole with reindeer hide lacing as he held court with pioneering lady skiers, Isobel “Soss” Roe and Maria Goldberger. My Triumph Herald, it’s bodywork a comical shade of green at the time, was buried up to the windows in snow outside the hotel. In the boot, a couple of rifles had been carelessly abandoned by Swiss servicemen when they had succumbed to the charms of my American roommate the night before. It had been a whirlwind arrival.
On a winter evening in the Bernese Oberland, the row of unforgettable peaks – Eiger, Monch, Jungfrau – glared down at me. None looked remotely benign in moonlight filtered through ragged cloud. Immortal, dangerous, ruthless: subsequently the ice would shrink, but the appetite for ski holidays in this charming outpost would expand way beyond my expectation.
NOW: January 2022
My sleek train from Interlaken slipped silently into the Grindelwald Terminal, a £377million complex on the outskirts of what I first knew as an Alpine village. In case I should misunderstand, the building, now in its first year of operation following a soft Covid opening in 2020, says TERMINAL in aggressive airport capitals. It has curved throughways supported on giant concrete hoops on several levels: bus stops, parking lots, a railway station, rental skis, a Top of Europe boutique, an Asian noodle bar, a basic hotel, e-lockers for equipment storage, e-credit card terminals jammed on contactless pay.
In the base level’s giant kitchens, I watched humans sprinkle parmesan on beef lasagne in steel vats. Soon the food would be vacuum packed and chilled before transfer by robot on to the new Eiger Express and Mannlichen cable cars to reach its final destination. Acres of pallets laden with food lay ready to be distributed to up-mountain restaurants. “Not haute cuisine,” our guide revealed cautiously, “but very palatable.”
Nostalgically, I recalled lunches of roesti with bacon and a fried egg made on site, fresh as the snow outside.
ON THE UP THEN: January 1965
I was one of many British skiers arriving in their favourite spots in Grindelwald, Wengen and Murren, the three resorts on the Jungfrau spectrum. At first light every morning I shivered as I joined the Ski Club group for the daily expedition into the backcountry. Goose pimples turned to rivers of sweat as we slogged up the designated mountain. At the top, we took the climbing skins off our skis for the descent – perilous, in my case, marked by snow holes on most turns. To their credit, Soss and Maria, my companions from the Belvedere, watched fairly patiently. They must have wondered why I had come and surely wished I hadn’t.
In the afternoons, I went piste skiing with my roommate, riding the cog railway for about an hour to Kleine Scheidegg to access the chairlifts and T-bars above Wengen. We stopped frequently for refreshments: mulled wine, cream cakes and hot chocolate with rum. Mary’s Cafe, still a hardy perennial at the base of the Lauberhorn downhill race track near Wengen, was our last pit stop before the cruise back to base.
As an eager-eyed youngster, I enjoyed the buzz in Murren over the proposed Schilthorn cable car, designed to extend a basic early 20th-century lift system into virgin snowfields at 2,970m (9,744ft). At that time it was sliding off the drawing board into bankruptcy, but it would open for business three years later, its finances salvaged by its role as Piz Gloria in the 1969 James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
NOW: January 2022
I boarded the imposingly safe tri-cable Eiger Express and sank into my seat in the luxury cabin for the 15-minute zip up to Eigergletscher (gone are the days of a long, leisurely ascent). Visitors bound for the Jungfraujoch – the region’s ultimate tourist honeypot – change back on to the dawdling train I once rode, but the icy way point also forms the top of a newly incorporated piste section shaped like a conical hat. Red and blue runs flow down towards the brim, segueing into the familiar favourites around Kleine Scheidegg below. I stopped to admire the north face of the Eiger in the sunshine, noting that the extra terrain increases the piste options without adding to the challenge: more blues and reds; blacks as disappointingly scarce as ever.
The gleaming Mannlichen gondola also operates out of Terminal, joining up with its sister gondola out of Wengen on top of the ridge between the two resorts. On the Wengen side, the ascent is over unskiable cliffs, so the familiar mellow descents fan out over Alpine pastures back towards Grindelwald. Who could resist the last mad dash into Terminal’s instant après zone? The last one to claim their high iron perch under an efficient outdoor heater buys the drinks – though they may need to apply for a second mortgage: in 1965, there were 12 Swiss francs to the pound sterling; now there are 1.9. Do the maths.
The Top of Europe, also known as the Jungfrau region, rewards the mileagehungry holidaymakers but, as I discovered back in 1965, its standout merit is as a hardcore playground for ski tourers. As an entry level adventurer, I discovered the rich variety of Grosse Scheidegg, accessed now, as then, from Oberjoch above First, Grindelwald’s second steeper lift area, on the other side of the highway. These snowfields and forests have changed little over a couple of millennia, let alone the past 57 years. Grindelwald has always had guides with the know-how to make skis sing in powder snow. A fool might miss out on this pristine wilderness.
STRENGTHENING APPEAL THEN: January 1965
As a 22-year-old, I would never have swapped the village pub crawl – tame though it was, half a century before the Folie Douce extravaganza hit the Alps – for the highest railway in Europe. On my debut in Grindelwald, this engineering marvel had been pulling the crowds since it opened in 1912. The 9km (5½ mile) track joins Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, the saddle at 3,454m between the Jungfrau and Monch mountains. Due to elevation and extreme weather, it runs through a tunnel behind the face of the Eiger. At the two stops en route, tourists, predominantly Japanese, queued to gawp into the ice-bound void through windows in the rock. At the top, they climbed to the viewing platform above the Aletsch Glacier, then a twisted ice river of crevasses and seracs.
NOW: January, 2022
Nowadays, three million visitors a year head up that mountain, their journey time reduced by riding the Eiger Express to Eigergletscher, then changing onto the historic train. The glacier ice is sadly reduced, but we joined them for the ritual shiver in the ice palace, the quick coffee and the stream of complaints about bitter winds. Back at Terminal, they sped off to rival local attractions: 007’s revolving restaurant at Piz Gloria in Murren and the Reichenbach Falls near Meiringen where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty fought.
Mass tourism makes Grindelwald rich, but no one is obliged to detrain at Terminal: the village station is three minutes away at the end of the line. From here, half way up the main drag lift, I revisited the Belvedere Hotel, founded by the Hauser family in 1909. No ghosts of 20th-century ski pioneers on the steps, no trace of popular cars in uncommercial shades buried in the car park, but welcome memories of back in the day. And, now, a wellness centre.