Camping at Oeschninensee

Hey travellers! 

Apologies for taking me so long to to put together the second part of our Switzerland roadtrip! I decided to go to my beloved Tatras this weekend to climb Rysy, but now I’ll in Prague for the next three days, so I finally have time to write some more articles! 🙂

Anyways, the second planned destination was – as the name of this article suggests – Lake Oeschinensee. We drove from Grindelwald to Kandersteg, where we parked the car and started hiking up to the lake. Of course, it wouldn’t be Switzerland if there wasn’t a cable car, but first we didn’t want to spend money on such a thing, and secondly, I think it’s more fun to walk, than to sit in a cable car for ten minutes. I feel like I enjoy the views a lot more when I know, that they’re well-deserved. 

So, from the town of Kandersteg, the hike took about an hour and a half, so this was more of an afternoon walk if I compare it to our 5-hour hike to Bachalpsee. 

We reached the lake at about 5pm and we began to think, where we were going to pitch the tent. There is a hotel and a restaurant right at the lake, so we had to hide a little bit (yes, as I wrote in the first article, camping in Switzerland is forbidden under a huge fine, so if you wanna sleep in a tent, it’s important to think of the right spot pretty carefully, so the trip price wouldn’t triple).

Finally, we found a nice place that was slightly downhill, but with a magnificent view of the lake and the mountains behind it. Normally, I would wait until the twilight to pitch the tent, but given that there were absolutely no people, we pitched it right away. I cooked some pasta with ketchup and parmesan (aka fitness food level 9999, hahaha).

After dinner, we hit the water and had a “bath”, haha. I gotta say, that compared to Bachalpsee, this one was much warmer, but it’s still a glacier lake, so about 2 minutes were just enough. 

There is a 2-hour long trail around the whole lake, but we were kinda exhausted from the first day, so we just chilled at the lake. The sky was cloudy, so I didn’t take that many pictures, hoping for the morning to be more sunny. Luckily it was more sunny! When I woke up, I opened the tent and smiled because of what I saw. 

There was a waterfall right next to us, a cute boat in front of us and the sun was shining into the lake, so it looked even more turquoise than yesterday. 

You often ask me what I kind of a frame backpack and sleeping bag I have, but I’m not able to answer you all, so I’ll write about it at least here! 🙂 My backpack is by Quechua, it’s 70l and I think it’s men’s (women’s backpacks were in colors like pink or purple, of which I’m not a big fan, haha). I’m really happy with this one, because despite being quite cheap, it’s greatly reinforced and is the only one that doesn’t hurt my back. I bought it about a year ago, so I don’t know if they still have it.

I have a sleeping bag from Salewa, so it’s pretty good one, but I think it’s suitable only to about 0°C, so it’s not a best choice for mountains. Even here I was a bit cold at night, so I’m going to buy a warmer one for my Mt Blanc expedition.

Well, what else do you guys wanna know about? Ohhhh right! Boots! For this trip, I took two kinds of shoes – one pair of hiking boots (Garmont Dakota Lite GTX) for more challenging hikes and one pair of light trekking shoes from Adidas (Terrex) for lighter walks. I was able to do this trek in the lighter ones.

And I guess I’ll be interested in what kind of camera & lenses I had with me and what the photos are photographed with. I had my Canon 80D, a 10-22 mm wide-angle Canon lense, a Sigma zoom 18-250 mm and a  50mm Canon f1.4 lense. I also had a tripod with me, but I didn’t need it. Almost all photos are shot with the wide-angle lens, and the rest of the lenses I used just exceptionally.

Anyways, after breakfast, we packed the tent and our backpacks and set off back down to the car. We weren’t in a hurry, because it was supposed to be only two and a half hours by car to Zermatt, which was planned next.

But after all it took us 5 hours to Zermatt. Why? I’ll tell you in the next article tomorrow! :)))) So stay tuned!
E.