We passed a few days in the swiss alps around new year. We stayed in Thun, near Interlaken in the Berner Oberland and went for excursions in the Jungfrau Region. It was great. Actually, this region is part of the UNESCO cultural heritage “Jungfrau - Aletsch - Bietschhorn”, the most glaciated part of the Alps.

Really great snow and wonderful wother. And in spite of my ISO mistake (I forgot to turn it down to 200 and let it at 1600 the first day after new year’s eve…) I got some not so bad pictures I want to share here. The ISO performance of my new Nikon D90 is not bad. There is a noticable difference im comparison to my D70s I used before.

I took some series to build panoramas, too. And this is the most beautiful one I think. I spent some time in creating sharpening masks and blur masks to reduce the noise in the sky (caused by my ISO 1600…) without losing details. And at least for this size it works I think.

Panorama of Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger

This is the view over the Jungfrau with Mönch and Eiger on the left of the panorama. The very left one is the Eiger.

Eiger Nordwand and a schematic map of the region

They built a cog rauilroad called “Jungfraubahn” from little Scheidegg to the Junfraujoch, which is a hotel, a restaurant and certainly a great panorama viewpoint. They call it “Top of Europe”, although the hightest european mountain is the Montblanc. Anyway, the railroad they built in 1912 is quite impressive as they even made a station or two with windows in the Eiger Nordwand! We did not go up as it is really expensive to go there. The cablecars to the places whe went were expensive enough. But I want to go some day. Hopefully with a similar weather.

We had the chance to watch a roaring avalanche on the other side of the valley. It was quite far away and in the shadow. The sound needed a few seconds until arriving to our side of the valley. Nevertheless impressioning. We were on the way down with sledges from little Scheidegg (over 2000m) (which is directly in front of the Eiger Nordwand) to Wengern.

The weather in the valley was ugly. Cold, dark and gray. But as we went up we encountered with the sun. I love those seas of clouds! The clouds were at about 1300m, which is exaclty the altitude of Wengern. The upper village had nice weather, the lower part had really bad and cold weather. You can see this on the third photo of the three below. This was the upper limit of the clouds. A few meters below the temperature dropped noticable.

High fog in Wengern

The last day we visited Thun and Bern. I published one of the photos of Bern in a previous blog entry.