Interlaken

Interlaken is an amazing place. If you like the outdoors and enjoy regions like the Sierra Nevadas or the Colorado Rockies, add this to your list. There is incredible hiking and lots of other conventional mountain activities, but the area is also the extreme sports capital of Europe. At any given moment during daylight, you can look up and spot at least three parachutes falling above you. At one point while I was walking through Lauterbrunnen Valley, I heard a chute open, and someone had base jumped from a point right above me (probably the "Nose"). Interlaken is home base for the local rafting, canyoning, paragliding, hang-gliding, and skydiving companies, and they do a great job of offering some alternative ways to take on their Swiss Alps.

After I arrived from Zurich, I took a local train to Lauterbrunnen and then did a 4-5 mile hike up the valley rim to Murren, a town on the cliffs far above the valley floor. This was two hours of continuous climbing, and returning took just as long because of the trail's steepness, but it offered some beautiful views of the region's snowcaps and glaciers.

On day two, I finally decided (an hour before the group departed) to go canyoning. Canyoning is an activity in which guides direct you down a canyon featuring a white-water river of snow melt and glacier melt. Through jumping, hiking, rappelling, and riding natural waterslides, you make your way down the canyon. Long story short, it's a blast. Now water has a specific heat capacity of 4.187kJ/kg-K, meaning it takes a lot of energy to heat water, so between melting up in the high-elevation fields of snow and ice and meeting us in the canyon, the water maintains about the same temperature--it's just above freezing. ("That'll wake you up in the morning, boys!") They give you wetsuits, but the first time your head goes under, there is a good chance you'll get an ice cream headache. That means when you jump into a pool from a rock 30 feet above, you get quite a shocking splash, but it's a really exhilarating experience. If you go to Interlaken and you're in the 18-35 demographic, do not miss out on canyoning!

On my last day in Interlaken, I wanted to take it easy and rest up a bit to beat a cold I'd been fighting, so I just went back to Lauterbrunnen and walked the valley floor a bit. Down there, I went to see the Trümelbach falls, an amazing set of waterfalls that are fed by glacier melt and snow melt and fall through the inside of the mountain. The pictures don't really do this place justice, but it was really cool to see ice cold water roaring through caves at 20,000L/second (nerds--I'd guess turbulent flow but don't have the Reynolds number).

After leaving Interlaken (photos here), we went to Basel, Switzerland to catch our overnight train to Amsterdam, Nathan's last stop before heading home.

- R