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Schilthorn - detailed advice and anywhere to picnic?

We are in Wengen for a few days. Family of five with tween twins and a teen. We want to go up to the top of Schilthorn but I have a few questions. Pardon the long preamble but it gives a bit of context to my questions… 😀

  1. It seems like the breakfast buffet is a pretty good value given the scenery (though we have an apartment rather than a hotel room so we are able to have a light breakfast at the apt. though it doesn’t really last us all that long during the day).

  2. We are thinking it might be fun to stop at Birg on the way up to walk on the cat walks etc. as described in RS book.

  3. Not sure that our gang can get up early enough to stop at Birg and also make it to the breakfast. I am seeing that they offer reservations for parties larger than four but it looks like the last one we can get is at 9:30 a.m. and if we don’t have a reservation, a family of five is difficult to find a table for so we might not be able to get the breakfast buffet at all. Does anyone know when they stop serving breakfast? The reservation widget says “early lunch” starts at 11 but I don’t know if the menu changes at that time. Annoyingly I cannot find any menu information on their website on the mobile website which is all I can access on our trip. I would really rather have the breakfast buffet than a regular lunch menu.

  4. So I guess my questions are whether it would be worthwhile to try to get up early and make it up to the top for a breakfast at around 930 and then maybe stop at Birg on the way down - Though is that sort of a letdown once you have been all the way up at the top with the spectacular views from there?

  5. Or If it seems better to go ahead and stop at Birg on the way up and assume we can’t get the breakfast buffet for our size of group then is there a place to comfortably picnic up there? The weather during our visit is projected to be really good and unseasonably warm.

Thanks for any advice!

P.s. we will go to the tourist information office tomorrow and get their input but I am really trying to plan out our few days this evening because it is actually going to get quite hot here and we need to figure out when we can hike, when we should go to elevation, etc. hoping the forum will come through pronto!

Posted by
5604 posts

What is the weather forecast ? I think this needs to drive your plans. All the variables you detailed are useless if it's raining and there is no visibility at that time of day.
When we were there, we had great plans, but the weather was not in our favor, so we left without seeing the great vistas.
Safe travels!

Posted by
8164 posts

Go to the top and stop at Birg on the way down. i can not see how it could be a let down.
It is cooler at higher elevations.

Posted by
17427 posts

Ditto what Jazz said. If you want to stop at Birg, do it on the way down. The cable cars going up are very crowded and you may have difficulty finding one with room for you going up from Birg. Plus you can better allocate your time.

Posted by
272 posts

We were there in May and enjoyed the breakfast brunch very much. You should be able to fill your tweens/teen until at least dinner. They did start bringing out the soup about 11 and encouraged us to help ourselves, so we could have stayed for lunch. I don’t recall seeing anywhere to picnic.

Posted by
62 posts

Thanks for all of the input! We went ahead with the 9:30 reservation and will stop at Birg on the way down. It’s forecasted to be 85 degrees F in Wengen that day!