Skip to content
Pocket Switzerland

Mönch

Fly here

Summit · cantons of Bern and Valais · 4107 m

The middle summit of the Bernese trio, between the Eiger and the Jungfrau.

From the basket

Of the three giants above Grindelwald, the Mönch is the one in the middle, and it is often the last that the eye picks out: its two neighbours catch the gaze first. Yet when the balloon passes over the Kleine Scheidegg pass, it is the Mönch that rises highest above the meadows, with nearly two thousand metres of north slope, a mixture of dark rock and sheets of ice. On its left, a white spur, the Nollen, juts into the slope like the bow of a ship.

Gain some height and circle round. The short north-east face is nothing but ice. On the south side the mountain grows more modest: its base rests on an immense field of snow, the Jungfraufirn, one of the branches that feed the Aletsch Glacier. On its western side opens the Jungfraujoch pass, which it shares with the Jungfrau, at more than three thousand four hundred metres, where the rack railway at last emerges from the rock after its long crossing of the Eiger and the Mönch.

Its name makes you think of a monk; it used to be written Münchenberg, then Münch.

From above, the three summits line up their north faces like the pages of one book lying open over Grindelwald. Let the wind push you from one page to the next, then slide south, where the snow of the Jungfraufirn throws back all the light of the sky.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Mönch” and “Jungfrau”; Federal Office of Topography swisstopo, “Grindelwald – Lauterbrunnen, par le col de la Kleine Scheidegg” (in French).

All around