When we boarded the Glacier Express panorama train in St. Moritz we shared the car with only one other couple. This made the first few hours an enjoyable experience of gliding down from the “Top of the World” while jumping from side to side shooting hundreds of photos pressed against the high windows.
When we got a bit lower to Chur things took a turn (pun intended). A group of retired-but no less rowdy-German tourists, complete with barking guide, filled up the rest of the car and started downing shots of (they were German so I’ll assume) Jagermeister. That was the end of our moving about in the cabin, or sliding through the countryside in peace.
However, the views were still dramatic as we ate a surprisingly delicious lunch next to the “Grand Canyon of Europe,” the Verdon Gorge. It was nice, but the Swiss part is just a little grey gorge with a blue stream, reminded me of Colorado. The grander parts must be on the western side in France.
With lunch all done we headed up to the snowy peaks of the Oberalp Pass.
We’d driven Mount Evans, which tops out at 14,000 feet, but somehow the nearly 7,000 feet of Oberalp Pass felt higher. The reason is that, unlike the roads through the Rockies, the ascent and descent are very swift and you can often see all the way to the bottom from the top by looking down instead of far out. In Colorado, you have to drive for hours to go all the way to the summit. In Switzerland, they whisk you up in minutes on twisty train tracks or a vertical funicular.
After crossing through the snowcaps we surged down into Andermatt, where most of our German friends stumbled out.
The next few hours were spent in a wide (by Swiss alps standards, which means maybe a mile or two at most) green valley with farmlands fed by the visible glacial waterfalls tumbling from the snowy peaks.
Eventually, we headed up again, climbing to a little town clinging to the cliffs called Brig and then eventually lifting through tighter canyons until we reached the end of the line (and farthest west we’d go on this trip): Zermatt.
