Weissenstein
Fly here
Balcony of the Solothurn Jura over the Swiss Plateau and the Bernese Alps.
From the basket
North of Solothurn, the Weissenstein is the town’s own mountain, its balcony over the Swiss Plateau. From the balloon it is a long Jura ridge with pale cliffs facing south. Its name means “the white stone”, after the colour of its limestone, which shines in the sun above the old town’s roofs.
Its highest point has a name of its own, the Röti, at 1395 metres. Further east, no summit of the chain climbs past thirteen hundred metres any more. From the edge, the view sweeps across the Plateau to the long wall of the Bernese Alps, while far below the Aare draws its loops.
The mountain is crossed in every way you can think of. A pass road climbs from Oberdorf towards Gänsbrunnen with gradients of twenty-two per cent, among the steepest in the country. Beneath the crest, a railway tunnel almost four kilometres long has run through it since 1908. And at Oberdorf the gondola passes right over the tracks just before the tunnel mouth, a crossing found nowhere else in Switzerland.
Further west, under the pastures, lies a vast network of caves, the Nidlenloch, more than seven kilometres long. Fly the ridge from end to end, then let yourself drift down towards the roofs of Solothurn.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Weissenstein” (French, German and English editions).