Читать книгу Walking in the Bernese Oberland. Over 100 walking routes онлайн

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Perhaps it is no surprise that the most visually diverse and dramatic part of the range has been declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site – the first in the Alps. The Jungfrau-Aletsch-Bietschhorn site covers an area of 540sq km (208 sq miles), and a number of its footpaths are included in this guide. (See www.jungfraualetsch.ch.)

But the whole of the Oberland region is a paradise for walkers. Footpaths – thousands of kilometres of them – lead enticingly through the valleys, over hillsides and across high passes. Waymarked with the thoroughness and efficiency for which Switzerland is noted they offer sufficient scope and variety to satisfy the dreams of most mountain walkers for a decade or more of holidays, while the resorts of Grindelwald, Wengen, Lauterbrunnen, Mürren, Kandersteg and Adelboden – to name but a few – have their own unique atmosphere and appeal. They are, of course, among the most popular in all Switzerland.

The heart of the region is an arctic wasteland. In a huge basin behind the walls of rock that glower over Grindelwald’s pastures there lies a vast tract of snowfield and glacier jelled into a mass of permanent winter, like some displaced polar ice-cap. It’s a monochrome landscape of stark, yet resounding beauty; a wonderland of white from which stiletto peaks and abrupt massifs emerge as islands of stone in a great ice sea.