Kleine Scheidegg

Where it sits. Kleine Scheidegg is a saddle at 2,061 metres in the Bernese Oberland, dividing the Grindelwald valley from Lauterbrunnen and Wengen. It has no village, no through road and effectively no permanent population — it consists of two hotels, a railway junction and a scatter of service buildings on an open alp. What it does have is position. The pass sits directly beneath the north walls of the Eiger at 3,967 metres, the Mönch at 4,107 metres and the Jungfrau at 4,158 metres, close enough that the Eiger's 1,800-metre face fills the entire southern sky and far enough back that the whole of it can be seen at once. That combination — a comfortable hotel terrace with an unobstructed view of the most notorious wall in the Alps — is what made Kleine Scheidegg famous, and it is why nothing here has ever needed to be more than it is.

A junction built for a tunnel. The Wengernalpbahn opened in 1893, an 800-millimetre-gauge rack line climbing from both Lauterbrunnen, via Wengen, and Grindelwald Grund to meet at the pass; at 19 kilometres it is the longest continuous rack railway in the world. Five years later work began on the Jungfraubahn, the line that continues from Kleine Scheidegg into the mountain itself: 9.3 kilometres to the Jungfraujoch at 3,454 metres, more than seven of them inside the Eiger and the Mönch, opened in stages and completed on 1 August 1912 after sixteen years of blasting. Two intermediate stations were cut with windows in the rock — Eigerwand at 2,865 metres, opening directly onto the north face, and Eismeer — and regular passenger stops at both were discontinued in 2016. The service door beside Eigerwand station, the Stollenloch, remains in use by rescuers and climbers, and it has an outsized place in the mountain's history.

On screen. Kleine Scheidegg is the base camp of Eiger cinema, and two films account for its reputation.

• The Eiger Sanction (1975), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, put its production here for the summer of 1974 and used the Hotel Bellevue des Alpes as the climbers' hotel; Eastwood performed much of his own climbing, and the shoot was overshadowed when the British climber David Knowles, working on the film, was killed by rockfall on the face in August 1974.
• North Face (Nordwand, 2008, Philipp Stölzl) reconstructs the 1936 attempt in which Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser died, and it makes the hotel terrace its framing device — journalists and spectators watching through coin-operated telescopes while men die a kilometre above them, which is exactly what happened in 1936. The hotel exteriors and the pass were shot here; most of the wall footage was doubled in the Sexten Dolomites and in a cold-water studio tank.

What you actually see today. The Hotel Bellevue des Alpes, run by the von Almen family and preserved in its 1930s form rather than modernised, still has the terrace and still has the telescopes, and it is one of the very few grand Alpine hotels where the fittings are original rather than reconstructed. Alongside it stands the simpler Grindelwaldblick, which takes walkers and climbers rather than tour groups. Between the two runs the platform, and on a summer afternoon the pass has the atmosphere of a small station in the middle of a field, with hikers, day-trippers bound for the Jungfraujoch and roped parties coming off the Eiger Trail all waiting for the same train. Walkers use the saddle as a trailhead for that trail, a six-kilometre route from Eigergletscher station down to Alpiglen directly beneath the north face, and for the gentler descent through flower meadows to Wengernalp and Wengen, which takes about two hours and drops 700 metres. A shorter loop climbs to the Lauberhorn at 2,472 metres in forty minutes for a view that adds the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn to the three-peak line-up. In winter the saddle is the hub of the Wengen-Grindelwald ski area, and the Lauberhorn downhill — at 4.4 kilometres the longest race on the World Cup circuit, first run in 1930 — starts on the slopes immediately above it each January, when the pass fills with 30,000 spectators and the trains run to capacity.

Getting there and timing. There is no road: access is by the Wengernalpbahn from Lauterbrunnen via Wengen or from Grindelwald Grund, or on foot. Since December 2020 the Eiger Express tricable gondola from Grindelwald Terminal has cut the journey to Eigergletscher, one station beyond the pass, to about fifteen minutes. Trains run year-round and roughly every half hour in season. The north face is in shadow for most of the day, which is why it holds ice and why it photographs best in the early morning or in the last light, when the summit ridge catches sun long after the wall below has gone blue.