EIGER ULTRA TRAIL HISTORY: A RACE BENEATH THE NORTH FACE
The Eiger Ultra Trail runs in the shadow of one of the most studied rock faces in mountaineering. Since its first edition in 2013, the race has built its identity around a single backdrop, the north face of the Eiger, the 1,800-meter wall above Grindelwald that climbers spent decades trying to solve. The race took that history and turned it into a running course.
Grindelwald sits in the Bernese Oberland, the cluster of high peaks in central Switzerland that includes the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau. The village has drawn alpinists and tourists for more than a century. The Eiger Ultra Trail added a new group to that traffic, distance runners willing to climb thousands of meters for a close view of the wall.
A race built around the north face
The Eiger's north face holds a particular place in climbing. For years it was called the last great problem of the Alps, a face that resisted ascent and killed several of the climbers who tried it. That reputation became the marketing language and the emotional center of the trail race that now starts at its base.
The course was designed to keep the face in view. Runners climb onto ridges and high pastures that look directly across at the wall, then drop back toward the valley floor. The organizers leaned into the comparison between the climbers' route and the runners' route, framing the trail as its own test on the same mountain.
The connection was more than scenery. Ueli Steck, the Swiss climber known for speed ascents of the north face, was associated with the race in its early years as a promoter and supporter. Steck held speed records on the Eiger wall before his death in the Himalaya in 2017. His name remains tied to the event's origin story, a climber lending his reputation to a running race on his home mountain.
The distances
The Eiger Ultra Trail grew into a multi-distance event rather than a single race. The current program runs from short to extreme, and each distance carries the Eiger naming convention built around its rough length in kilometers.
The flagship is the E101, a circuit of roughly 101 kilometers with about 6,700 meters of climbing around Grindelwald and beneath the north face. Below it sit the E51 at roughly 51 kilometers, the E35 at roughly 35 kilometers and the E16 at roughly 16 kilometers, each with its own slice of the high terrain. The shorter races share the signature views without the full overnight commitment of the E101.
The event later added the E250, a circular tour of the Bernese Oberland covering roughly 250 kilometers with around 20,000 meters of climbing. That race sends runners on a long loop past the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau and the surrounding glaciated terrain, the largest connected ice field in the Alps. The E250 pushed the event from a single hard day into a multi-day undertaking.
Joining the UTMB World Series
The Eiger Ultra Trail became part of the UTMB World Series, the global circuit organized around the UTMB races at Mont Blanc. That move changed what the race meant on the calendar. Finishers in the Eiger distances could earn running stones, the qualifying credits used to enter the lottery for the Mont Blanc races.
The World Series tie also shifted the start lists. A circuit affiliation pulls in runners chasing qualification points and World Series Finals slots, which raised the competitive level across the distances. The race that began as a Swiss event with a climbing pedigree became a node in an international qualifying system.
That shift is visible in the depth of recent fields. Top-three finishers in the longer distances now chase direct qualification for the series finals, which gives the front of each race a clear stake beyond the win itself.
The record book
The course records map the race's competitive history. On the E101, Shen Jiasheng holds the men's record at 10:44:38, set in 2022, a mark that stands out on a course with 6,700 meters of vertical gain. The women's E101 record belongs to Caroline Chaverot at 12:45:41 from 2015, set before she won UTMB in 2016. Her time has held for roughly a decade.
The E51 records show the same pattern of fast specialists. Petter Engdahl holds the men's mark at 4:48:23 from 2023, and Rosanna Buchauer holds the women's record at 5:43:46 from 2022. The E51 has become a favored distance for runners who want a hard mountain race without the overnight demands of the E101.
On the E35, Robbie Simpson set the men's record at 3:15:00 in 2023 and Dani Moreno set the women's record at 3:47:32 the same year. The shorter records turn over more often as the World Series affiliation brings faster runners to the shorter distances each summer.
What the race is now
More than a decade after its first edition, the Eiger Ultra Trail has settled into a stable identity. It is a Swiss mountain race with a climbing backstory, a UTMB World Series qualifier and a multi-distance event that can absorb both first-time mountain runners on the E16 and elite ultra specialists on the E101 and E250.
The constant across all of it is the wall. Every distance is built to keep the Eiger's north face in the frame, the same face that defined the mountain's reputation long before anyone thought to run around it. The race takes a piece of climbing history and hands it to runners, year after year, in mid-July above Grindelwald.