Listing Through Life

The Piz Gloria has the 007 logo painted all over the outside. The inside is decorated in James Bond. There’s a small museum called Bond World 007 that consists of photos, tidbits of information about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and some photo ops.

The museum was fun because I’ve read the book and seen the movie, but we were up there for the outside view, so we didn’t stay long.

We hung around on the plaza a bit longer, enjoying the view and the Yellow-billed Choughs that were looking for handouts.

We noticed this sign on the way up, so I made sure I got a photo.

As we waited for the cable car to take us back down, we watched the scene from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service where the good guys stage a helicopter attack on Piz Gloria.

On our way down to Birg, we encountered a short Chinese woman who decided she wanted to be where we were and that the way to get there was simply to repeatedly butt into anyone in her way until they moved. She made a lot of headway until she got to me. On her first push, I pushed back a little and got an elbow. She then tried simply leaning against me but I stood my ground. She finally resorted to reaching her camera over in front of me and taking pictures even though the view from the place she’d already reached was identical in every way to the one in front of me. When the ride ended, her companions who were by the door, exited immediately. She panicked and hurried to catch up with them using the tactics of a wrecking ball. I’m sure there’s a cultural explanation that accounted for some of this, but she was way over the top. I have chosen to blame her for the month-long virus I brought home from Europe (the symptoms of which closely matched those of the Covid-19 virus that brought the world to its knees 10 months later).

There’s a expert ski run that begins at Piz Gloria and descends much, if not all of the mountain. We could see the occasional skier pass beneath us as we waited to descend.

Approaching Birg. Most skiers stop here. It also has a restaurant, a gift shop, and the Thrill Walk. There was also an “igloo” restaurant made of snow that interested us, but it catered to skiers and we’d have had to navigate a steep, snow-covered slope to get there and back, so we skipped it.

On our way up in the morning, we’d passed over a section of the “Thrill Walk” that hangs off the cliff below Birg. I determined to experience it when we got back.

Steel grate steps led down perhaps 100 feet from the restaurant plaza. If my estimate is correct, then we were anywhere from 200-300 feet above the snow and rocks below.

I wasn’t sure how I would manage, but quite frankly I found none of it intimidating. Along the walk, there were four sections of “thrill.” The first was a wire walk over a net. The second was a glass floor.

A third section had rollers for a floor. It wasn’t even worth photographing. The final thrill was a suspended wire tube we could crawl through. I wasn’t sure I’d even fit, so I didn’t try. We had to climb back up to the level of Birg through a slanted walkway in a big plastic tube. Living at 6,700 feet in Colorado helped here.

We ate mediocre sausages, cheeseburgers, and fries at Birg, and then descended back to Murren. Here’s the view from Birg, with Murren visible in the center of the photo.

We returned to the hotel for our perfectly-safe luggage and hung out in the lounge for a while, reluctant to leave the beauty. This was the view out the windows — yes, it’s the same view as the day before, but the tops of the mountains aren’t hidden in the clouds.

This is the Jungfrau. The peak seems to be right behind and above the wall in the foreground, but it’s about 5,000 additional feet — nearly a mile — higher and also further away.

The best shot I got of the Eiger (13,026′) and the Moench (13,475), poking up behind the shoulder of the Jungfrau. The woman who runs the hotel came in and said hello. I told her that we were from Colorado, but that her mountains were more beautiful. She agreed, and said they were higher too. Technically, she was wrong. Pikes Peak, which is visible out the windows of our house, is 14,115′. But our house is already at 6,700′ and the slope of Pikes Peak is gradual. Here, the Jungfrau, for instance, rises a sudden 11,030 feet above Lauterbrunnen on the valley floor, making it seem almost incomprehensibly tall.

We finally tore ourselves away and walked back to the train station. A short ride to Grutschalp, a quick cable car trip down to Lauterbrunnen and we were back at the car.

We made a short but courageous trip through the insanely narrow and tourist-crowded streets of the town to see the waterfalls cascading off the cliffs, and then we headed back to Germany.

When we arrived in Murren, we didn’t have a plan apart from eating fondue. But while we were wandering the streets on Friday afternoon, we happened upon the station where we could take a cable car to the top of the Schilthorn mountain to the Piz Gloria restaurant and the Bond World 007 Museum. It would cost us close to $100 each, but how much is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity worth? We decided to go for it on Saturday morning.

We woke up early and — I only mention this because it seemed like a really random thing to do high in the Swiss Alps — watched an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond while waiting to meet the rest of the family. Breakfast came with the room, and what a breakfast it was. No canned fruit, cardboard pastries, or omelets that bounce when you drop them. This was fresh food — fresh bread of several varieties, fresh cheese and prosciutto, amazing preserves. There were raw eggs available, with instructions on how long to submerge them in a container of hot water until they were cooked the way we wanted them, but we were content with the bread, preserves, fruit, and cheese. Very content.

We had one problem — our luggage. We had made the overnight trip by stuffing what we needed in our carry-on bags. It would have been inconvenient and uncomfortable to have to drag them up the mountain and carry them around while we were up there. But we couldn’t leave them in our rooms because we had to clear out by 11:00 and we wouldn’t be back by then.

The couple who ran our hotel were very friendly. When I asked the guy what we should do, he said we could just leave them in the lounge. He smiled — I suspect as a reaction to the surprised look on my face — and said they would be safe. We pulled out everything that we absolutely couldn’t afford to lose — wallets, passports, phones, credit cards — and packed them in our pockets. And then we left our luggage sitting in a corner of the hotel lounge. A lounge that at that moment contained a group of teenage boys. Spoiler alert. when we returned six hours later, everything was just as we had left it. The guy also warned us that things would be very crowded on the mountain because it was Easter weekend. He was right about that too.

We walked the length of Murren, stopping in the grocery store so I could buy a Diet Coke for my morning caffeine. (I don’t think I saw a Pepsi anywhere in Europe except in the commissary on the army base.) In Europe, you can buy your Easter eggs pre-died. I just threw that in for your cultural education.

When we bought our tickets, there was already a crush of skiers waiting in line for the cable car. Another crush came up from Stechelberg moments later, and we were in the middle. The cars move fast, however, and there were always two going back and forth from Murren to Birg, the halfway point up the mountain. We managed to get up against the railing on the downhill side of the next car so we could admire the view. Through the much-scratched window, you can see the town and the cable car station.

This was the view uphill, with Birg on the top of the cliff. You can see the thrill walk (more on this later) as a silver line across the face of the cliff.

At Birg, we had to switch to another cable car. Many of the skiers got off there and skied the lower slopes. It was from Birg that we got our first good view of Piz Gloria.

Piz Gloria was built in the mid-1960’s. It was used as the fortress of the villain Blofeld in the 1969 James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The name Piz Gloria actually came from Ian Fleming, the author of the novel the movie was based on. The setting in the book was in the southern Alps where the word piz means mountain in the  Romansh language spoken there. That’s not the case in the Berner Oberland where Schilthorn is, but the name stuck.

After exiting the car, we navigated our way to the large plaza next to the restaurant.

The views were …

Mont Blanc was visible in the distance off to the west.

Thun, where we were the day before, was visible off to the northwest. In the far right-hand corner, you can make out where the Aare River enters into Lake Thun.

We wandered out onto the snow below the plaza and found ourselves in the middle of a large group of tourists who wanted us to wait while they took dozens of selfies and got angry if we straggled into one of the photos. After attempting politeness for a while and getting none in return, we quit caring and just went where we wanted to go.

We skipped the revolving restaurant because we were still pleasantly full from our amazing breakfast. We did not, however, skip the gift shop.

There was more excitement, but this post is getting long so I’ll cut it here.