The Grimsel looks like a landscape that nature made, but most of what you see was made by engineers. The three big lakes around the pass, the Grimselsee, the Räterichsbodensee and the Oberaarsee, hold water that spins turbines in power stations deep inside the mountain, and the dams that hold them in place were built from the 1920s onward by men working at altitude through harsh winters. The Spitallamm, a curved wall of concrete, closes the Grimselsee, and the road runs along its crest.
The hospice beside the dam gets its name from the old shelter that stood here, a place where travellers were fed and housed on the long crossing between the Haslital and the Goms. The earlier hospice was drowned when the lake was raised, and a new building went up on the shore. That sense of overlapping layers, medieval trade route, nineteenth-century carriage road and twentieth-century power scheme, is what makes the place interesting.
The rock itself is the star. The granite that forms the Grimsel is smooth and pale, polished by glaciers that once filled the valley, and in places the slabs are so clean they look like paving. Visitors can see the glacial polish on the roadside, and below the pass, in the Haslital, waterfalls and gorges cut through the same stone. The Handeck fall drops a good forty metres or so into a mist-filled gorge, and there is a gondola nearby that climbs to the Gelmersee for those who want to walk.
On a bike the ride is a delight, with big, open bends, fast approaches and views of water and rock. The weather is changeable and the temperature low, so layer up. Fuel is not available at the pass itself; Innertkirchen and Meiringen on the north, and Oberwald or Brig on the south, are the dependable places. The road is open in summer and early autumn only, and a clear, calm day in September is hard to beat.