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There is one super outstanding site that you might want to stop off to visit along your bus ride, and that's the waterfall at Trümmelbach. You can get off the bus about halfway through the valley, and you pay a small fee to visit this powerful Trümmelbach waterfall which comes roaring down from the Jungrau, Eiger and Monk high above. There's an elevator that's inside the waterfall thanks to those amazing Swiss engineers, along with a series of tunnels and staircases and bridges to bring you right up to the face of this raging vertical river, all the while you are inside the mountain. It's phenomenal. Valley has 72 waterfalls but Trümmelbach is by far the most spectacular. It's really the only one that you can walk up with a elevator and staircase and walkways and go inside the mountain.
You actually go up inside the mountain to view the waterfall. It's the most amazing waterfall in the Alps that you'll ever see. The Swiss engineers have built staircases and walkways, elevators and viewing platforms to give you this view of a most unusual waterfall. It had carved out a narrow, vertical twisted canyon into the rock face of the cliff and the engineers thought this is an interesting opportunity to let people get up in there and be inside the waterfall itself. They have a variety of different colored lights -- they try and jazz it up a little bit, kind of tart up with a bit of psychedelic lighting and wonderful stairway access. You look at it on the way up, you turn around and you come walking back down again and get different angles, different viewpoints.
There are about a dozen major drops in this waterfall, so it's like looking at 10 or 12 waterfalls in one, and always there is the amazing carved in sculptured rock cliff face, with the booming water pounding through. It is water that's coming down from the Aletsch Glacier and from the Jungfrau Mountain. This is one of the main drains for the Eiger, the Munch and the Jungfrau, those three big peaks that are up at the Jungfrau massif.
When you're coming down, you could take the elevator halfway back down to the bottom or walk all the way down, and that's a better strategy because you'll see parts of the lower falls that you would've missed otherwise, and more of these wonderful views from the Trümmelbach looking into Lauterbrunnen Valley.
On our way down the park was closing already, so we had no choice. The elevator shut down. We had to walk all the way back down and we were glad we did.
The engineers design these interior tunnels and walkways so that you get vistas along the way. You'll be walking up a staircase, it's through tunnel and then it opens up and you can stand at the ledge and look down, look up, see the water spraying around. And they put some colorful lights in here which might seem a little tacky -- it's not really a disco ball spinning around -- but it does add some welcome color to this otherwise gray stone and gray water, so that's all part of the fun.
This is very easy visit and when finished you just walk back to the road to the bus stop and catch the next bus coming through. Now here's a little tip -- you might check the bus schedules that are posted on the board before you go into the waterfall so that you can time your visit, the buses are not all that frequent, and if you know when the next bus is coming, and you can then linger in the waterfall or hustle on a little bit in order to catch that bus. Otherwise you might have to sit around and wait for half an hour at the bus stop for a bus to come through. There is fortunately a convenient café restaurant right here -- you can have a drink or have an ice cream, have some coffee, sit at their tables and they're very friendly folks, and wait there for the bus and soon enough the bus arrives and it will pick you up bring you back to the town of Lauterbrunnen which is only about a 10 minute bus ride from this point.
You could also very easily walk from Trümmelbach back down to Lauterbrunnen town. There is a nice riverside trail that will take you about 45 minutes, a very easy level stroll through beautiful scenery. Or you could just walk along the roadway and that'll be quicker, maybe 20 to 30 minutes to walk from Trümmelbach to Lauterbrunnen, so take your pick, but if you timed it right the bus will pick you up and give you a ride.