Jeff & Stacey's

Kingdom trails never disappoints, and last weekend was no exception!  After  a late arrival at the campground on Friday night, we set up the tent, listened to much drunken debauchery, and then hit the trails bright and early Saturday morning.  The trails were in excellent condition, and the riding was superb, despite being the "fast group.."  all I can say is if I'm in the fast group, I'd hate to see the slow group!  Four hours of excellent trail riding, 16 miles, and one hot-fudge sundae later, and we were back at camp to call it a night.  Good times!

How many activities can you pack into one day in the Jungfrau?  How about a cable car/train ride to 15,000 feet, a cross-glacier hike, a mountain-hut lunch, a "holy crap look at the EIGER!" hike through alpine meadows, some ultra-touristy souvenir shopping in Grindelwald valley, and dinner on the side of a cliff?  WHEW!  One of the best weather and most scenic days in the alps was a gorgeous sunny morning with spectacular views.  We took cable cars and a fantastic 1-hour train ride through the Eiger (with a whole car load of Korean tourists..complete with Korean tour guide explaining all of the amazing sites...in Korean).  At the top of the Jungfrau, 12,000 feet, we hiked up to the plateau to get some incredible 360 degree views of the alps, and some close-ups of the Monch. We visited the ice-palace, a fantastic, ethereal tunnel through the glacier where we slid and slipped and ice-skated our way through the freezing ice to a number of sparkling ice sculptures.  We visited the observation platform, where you can look out ofver the entire Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps.  We then hiked about an hour in the crazy sun (and had the sunburn to prove it!) across the glacier to the Mountain hut, where we slipped and slid our way to some Gulasch soup (maybe the best soup on earth) and some bread and chocolate. After getting our fill of the Jungfrau, we bought brat and pouletwurst lunches and sat at the foot of the mountains, and then indulged in amazingly creamy Swiss ice cream for the hike down. We hiked down from Kleine Scheidegg to the ultra-tourist mecca, Grindelwald, did some shopping, and the train-cable-car-more trained our way back up to Murren, where we had dinner overlooking the Eiger!

Our Rick Steves' Guidebook said that Trummlebach falls was an "excellent rain-day hike."  It turns out, he's right, but mostly becuase you get so wet at the falls that it doesn't matter if it's raining!  he falls are a series of ten glacier-fed waterfalls, inside a mountain, illuminated and accessible via a number of (slippery) pathways and a pretty cool diagonal elevator.  The falls drain the run-off from the three big mountains of the Jungfrau region: the Eiger, the Monch, and the Jungrau, and pound out about 20,000 liters of water per second!  the falls were wet,  as loud as a freight train, and amazingly powerful as they funneled their way from the top to the river at the bottom.