Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau: three summits in one wall
Three summits between 3,967 and 4,158 metres in one north-facing wall. The Eiger north face, the railway through the mountain to the Jungfraujoch, the Aletsch Glacier on the south side and the valleys below.
The Eiger is 3,967 metres, the Mönch 4,107 and the Jungfrau 4,158. But what made the three famous is not their height. It is that they stand in one continuous wall, and that the wall faces north.
From Grindelwald, Wengen or Kleine Scheidegg you see them in a row, left to right: the Eiger with its dark north face, the Mönch in the middle and the Jungfrau furthest away under its cap of ice. It is one of the most photographed mountain views in the Alps, and it reads so easily precisely because it is so simple. Three summits, one wall, green pasture below.
Three summits, one wall
The three are not separate mountains but high points on the same ridge in the Bernese Oberland. The Mönch stands between the other two, and the Jungfrau is the highest of them. The names are usually translated as the Maiden and the Monk. The origin of the name Eiger is disputed, and we will leave it there.
What makes the ridge so dramatic is the drop on its north side. Grindelwald sits at around a thousand metres above sea level, and the summit of the Eiger almost three kilometres higher, only a few kilometres away. There are no foothills in between. The wall rises straight out of the valley.
The Eiger north face
The north side of the Eiger is one of the best-known climbing walls in the Alps, nearly 1,800 metres high. It was first climbed on 24 July 1938 by Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek. The mountain itself had been climbed long before, in 1858, but by a different side.
The face is steep, cold and often in shadow, and it looks straight down into the villages. That is an unusual position for so serious a wall, and much of its reputation comes from the fact that attempts on it have been followed through telescopes from the hotel terraces below since the 1930s.
The Jungfraujoch and the railway through the mountain
Between the Mönch and the Jungfrau lies the saddle of the Jungfraujoch. A rack railway runs up to it. It took sixteen years to build and opened all the way in 1912, running mostly in tunnel inside the Eiger and the Mönch, with its terminus at 3,454 metres.
It is a good example of the shape of a place deciding everything. There was no buildable route up the outside, so the railway went straight through the mountain instead.
The ice on the other side
South of the ridge the landscape is something else entirely. This is where the Aletsch Glacier begins, the largest glacier in the Alps, flowing south from the area around the Jungfraujoch. The north side is pasture and vertical rock. The south side is ice.
The glacier has been measured since 1870 by GLAMOS, the Swiss glacier monitoring network. Add up their measurements of the glacier front up to 2022 and it has retreated by a little over 3.5 kilometres.
The area around the Jungfrau and the Aletsch became a World Heritage Site in 2001, extended in 2007, as the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch.
The valleys below
North of the wall, the valleys cut deep into the landscape. The Lauterbrunnen valley is a textbook U-shaped valley: a flat floor, vertical sides and waterfalls dropping over the edge. Wengen sits on a terrace high on the valley's eastern side. Grindelwald lies in a wider basin further east, directly beneath the Eiger.
The U shape is the same kind of trace left by ice as in the Swedish mountains, only at a completely different scale. How ice shapes a valley is covered in the article on why the Swedish mountains look the way they do.
What the wall looks like in relief
A photograph shows the ridge from one direction. Terrain shows the whole system: how the Lauterbrunnen valley cuts straight down, how the Wengen terrace hangs on the valley side and how the ground climbs towards the ridge in the south. That is the view the Jungfrau 3D topographic map is built on.
The piece puts the Jungfrau on the southern edge of the window with the valleys in front of it, so that the full drop fits inside the square. The terrain is 25 x 25 cm and the frame, in oak or black, measures 28 x 28 cm on the outside. It comes with or without a name plate and is made to order in Sweden.
If you would rather have an Alpine mountain that stands alone, the Matterhorn is the opposite: one summit, four faces and no neighbours at the same height.
