story time! from Grindelwald, there are 3 peaks, the Eiger, Monk, and Jungfrau.
There is a train you can take from the valley which winds along inside the mountains up to top of the Jungfrau (Jungfrau Joch).
This railway passes the famous Eiger window (1 of several) on the North Face.( as depicted in Clint Eastwood's "the eiger sanction".
I just read that as of 2017 the train no longer stops there so passengers can no longer get out a look out the window....which is indeed dramatic to say the least.
Up, more or less, behind the Jungfrau is a glacier system (KonKordia Platz) creating a gigantic broad flat plane with huts which you can walk or ski (pushing yourself) and make sort of a loop. The glacier is the Grosser Aletschfirn.
My friend and I went up there for a ski touring trip (mostly schussing/pushing, not much skiing April 1997) from the Jungfrau Jock to the Konkordiahutte to the Hollandiahutte and then skiing down from the plateau to the village of Gletscherstafel.
Ok, now here's the story, this was in 1997 and we only had paper maps to guide us.
On the way to the Hollandiahutte we had a white-out and couldn't follow our straight 'line of sight' to the hut. We tried to follow ski tracks for a while but that didn't work.
We then shot an azimuth to the hut through a break in the clouds and I would send Rich out in straight line on the azimuth until he was barely visible, ski up to him and repeat.
Well, we started curving very slowly to the right and headed up the wrong glacier valley for about an hour until the wind pushed the clouds and revealed a ridge that wasn't supposed to be there!
We were able to deduce our location through 'brilliant map reading skills' (lol) and backtracked to where we were supposed to be. By that time the fog amazingly lifted just in time for us to reach the hut before nightfall!
Which was a good thing because we weren't prepared for a camping trip on the glacier!
On the top part of the ski down the valley, I fell and my ski came loose and sailed down the mountain in the fog. I thought I was toast! Rich skied down and miraculously found my ski and was gracious enough to take a photo!
The photos are pretty much crap, but I'm putting them together for a short youtube video.
