What do you get when you take a valley with steep granite walls and point streams emanating from surrounding mountains at the tops of these walls? You get a magical place like California's Yosemite Valley, surrounded by monumental cliff faces, punctuated by spectacular waterfalls.

What if, instead, you make the walls of the valley from limestone, which is a sedimentary rock which is more vulnerable to erosion than granite? And what if you situate three major mountains, with major glaciers surrounding them, above one of the valley walls, and send all the snowmelt and abrasive glacial detritus from these mountains into a single stream and down a single waterfall into the valley below? This is the situation in Switzerland's Lauterbrunnen Valley, where mountains called the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau all drain into a stream called the Trümmelbach, which becomes Trümmelbach Falls and joins the Weisse Lütschine River flowing through the valley. Lauterbrunnen Valley has many waterfalls (it's known as "The Valley of 72 Waterfalls"), but Trümmelbach is unique. Here's a picture of another waterfall in the valley, from a stream called the Schiltwaldbach:

As you can see, the Schiltwaldbach Falls are starting to erode their way into the valley wall. The Trümmelbach, with its advantage in volume of water (up to 20,000 liters, or more than 5,000 gallons, per second) and pulverized rock (20,200 tons per year), has far exceeded the erosive accomplishments of the Schiltwaldbach, to the point where Trümmelbach Falls is not visible from the valley floor, having completely burrowed into the valley wall and disappeared from view. You may be thinking that this doesn't sound like much of an attraction – what's the tourist value of a waterfall you can't see? Except you can see it – you just have to go in after it.

But first you have to get to it. In our case, we'd just come down from Wengen, above the valley on its east side, and arrived at the Lauterbrunnen train station. The walk from Lauterbrunnen to Trümmelbach Falls is flat and pleasant, but takes something like 45 minutes (it's just under three miles). Instead, we caught the bus, which isn't free but which takes just ten minutes. We got off the bus at a stop across from a restaurant, where a short trail starts which leads to the ticket booth (cash only) by way of a souvenir stand.


The total height of Trümmelbach Falls is 460 feet, but this doesn't exist as one big waterfall. Sedimentary rock is characteristically laid down in layers over many years, and these layers can have differing hardnesses and can erode at different rates. This variable erosion creates bends, shelves and pools along the length of the Trümmelbach and has the effect of breaking it up into several cascades – ten to be exact. These cascades are numbered from bottom to top, and there are stairs and walkways inside the mountain that follow them the whole way. There's a slanted elevator that takes visitors to a spot between cascades 6 and 7, but from this point it's all walking. If you have a problem with stairs, Trümmelbach Falls probably isn't for you. And you might think twice if you have problems with claustrophobia.

But we didn't have these problems, and we walked all the way to the top after getting out of the elevator. As we gained altitude, the walkway and cascades seemed to penetrate further into the mountainside, and the daylight dwindled. Fortunately there was lighting in several places that enabled us to see the cascades. And there were gaps in the rock in places that let some of the daylight in.







After seeing all of the upper cascades, we turned around and walked back down. We walked all the way down, so we could see the cascades we'd missed by riding the elevator up. The watercourse became more open as we descended, and in places there were views of the valley.




Eventually we reached the bottom, where the Trümmelbach again became a stream (with a whitish color, from the glacial material suspended in it) and crawled off northward, on its way to join the river.

We found the trail back out and headed back toward the bus stop. On the way we could see a more conventional waterfall across the valley.

We took the bus back to Lauterbrunnen, arriving after another ten-minute ride.


We did some resting and packing after returning to our hotel room. This was to be our last night in Lauterbrunnen. Eventually we went out into town to find some dinner. On the way out, we noted a display of stuffed animals which had been set up in one of the hotel's hallways.

We found a restaurant and ordered ourselves a final dinner of heavy-duty Swiss food. I ordered a hamburger which turned out to be interesting – there was a Swiss cross on the bun, the cheese was something very melty (I think it was Gruyère), and the French fries came with three dipping sauces. Keeping the meat in the bun turned out to be a challenge, as the bun was on the hard side and the cheese acted as a sort of lubricant which made the patty try to squirt out like a watermelon seed. The burger was tasty, but my stomach wasn't altogether happy with it later.

We finished dinner and headed back to the hotel to get some sleep.

My stomach's complaints kept me awake more than I'd have liked. But we had no choice but to leave the next morning. We had morning tickets for a train to our next destination: Milan, Italy.