743 m
Glarus / Graubünden
The Kerenzerberg is barely a pass in the usual sense: instead of crossing a ridge, the road runs along the mountain front – a high balcony on the southern shoulder of the Walensee at 743 metres, between Mollis and Mühlehorn above the lake.
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The Kerenzerberg is barely a pass in the usual sense: instead of crossing a ridge, the road runs along the mountain front – a high balcony on the southern shoulder of the Walensee at 743 metres, between Mollis and Mühlehorn above the lake. Yet for centuries it was unavoidable. The cliffs at the western end of the Walensee left no room for a road along the water, so anyone travelling overland from Zürich toward Graubünden had to climb some 300 metres over the Kerenzerberg to get around the lake. The old Römerweg – the "Roman road" – and then the pass road, built between 1840 and 1851, carried that traffic, as did the marching armies of the Austrians and the French.
All that changed with the tunnels. A through road for cars was blasted into the lakeside cliffs only in 1964, and today the main traffic runs unseen beneath the mountain – the railway since 1960, the A3 motorway since 1986 – leaving the old high road quiet, used mostly by the villagers and by cyclists. And what a road it is for them: from the Mollis side the view opens over the Linth plain and the Glarus Alps, and as you reach Filzbach a panorama unfolds across the Walensee to the majestic wall of the Churfirsten. Not really a crossing at all – a balcony above one of the loveliest lakes in Switzerland.
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