Does the name Trübsee sound familiar? No? How about Mount Titlis? You’ve been there, have you? In that case, your cable car made a stop at Lake Trübsee on the way to Titlis, but you chose not to get down and head straight to Titlis.
A visit to Mount Titlis, by all means, is worth it.
The crowds at Mount Titlis
On Sunday evening, a day after our day trip to Mount Titlis, we opened a bottle of red, got comfortable on the couch with a box of tissues, and rewatched Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. And I’m not even a big fan of either the movie or the actors, but you’ve got to acknowledge the movie’s enduring appeal almost 30 years after its release and the inimitable charm of Shah Rukh Khan.
Our rewatching DDLJ had little to do with our visit and more with nostalgia as 1990s kids. We had grown up watching SRK and his movies, and it was amazing to see the magnitude of the boost this particular movie had given Switzerland in general, and Mount Titlis in particular.
On top of Titlis, there was a cutout of SRK and Kajol from the movie, with which you can take pictures. And so many Indian visitors wanted to do just that! My partner said she saw women renting sarees like the ones Kajol wore in DDLJ to take pictures with the cutout. A bit too much for my liking, but to each their own.
But I digress.
The cable car to Mount Titlis starts from Engelberg. A round trip to the top costs 96 Swiss francs, but I got a 25% discount, thanks to my EU Rail pass. The cable car makes a stop at Lake Trübsee, before going on to the next destination, where you disembark to take the final rotating cable car to the top of Mount Titlis.
The ski starting point at Mount Titlis
When the cable car stopped at Lake Trübsee, we decided to get down and explore the place before going ahead to Titlis, and it turned out to be a great decision.
We walked out of the cable car station and found a path that led down to the lake, with a huge blanket of snow-covered open stretch to our left. On the short way down, we met a man with binoculars, who offered them to us so that we could have a better look at a deer walking on the snow. We reached the lake to find undeterred views of its right bank, beyond which the sun had lit up the valley. Most of the lake was frozen, and it was fun throwing pebbles to watch them bounce on the transparent ice. Lakle
‘Getting down from the cable car at Lake Trübsee turned out to be a great decision’
Then we walked up a path with the lake to our right. Seeing the inviting swathes of undisturbed snow lying to our left, I decided this was the perfect place to make my first-ever snow angel! It was freezing (evidently!), so I could only do it for a very short time, but that was fun enough.
We could see that people ski at Trübsee from the stationary gondolas almost over our heads, but those were not functional then. The skiers were, at this point, at Titlis, which is at a higher altitude.
‘ I decided this was the perfect place to make my first-ever snow angel!’
We spent an hour or so at Trübsee, and what made it special was not just how beautiful it was but also how few people there were. It was as if that huge field of unravaged snow was sitting there just for us to play in.
Speaking for myself, I found the super-crowded and highly-commercialised Mount Titlis a bit of a downer after Trübsee.
