Hikes with cable cars, chairlifts and mountain trains

Eleven hikes where a lift helps: the Fiesch gondola to the Aletsch, the Lagazuoi cable car, the Macugnaga chairlift and the Rochers de Naye rack railway.

A lift is not cheating, it is a tool. A gondola can spare you hours of dull climbing up ski runs, make a route possible in a day that would otherwise need a night out, or simply carry up someone who lacks the legs for a thousand metres of ascent but has every right to see a glacier close up. On this page we have gathered our hikes where a cable car, gondola, chairlift or rack railway can be part of the route, sometimes as an optional shortcut, sometimes because there is no reasonable alternative.

For the Aletsch, the road to Fiescheralp is closed to traffic and you go up by gondola from Fiesch; on the Zugspitze, you come down from the summit on the Eibsee cable car, which closes in the late afternoon and therefore dictates your starting time. Elsewhere the lift is an option: the Lagazuoi cable car from the Passo Falzarego, the gondola from Siusi to the Alpe di Siusi, the Col Raiser gondola for Seceda, the lift from Molveno to Pradel, which saves about 500 metres of ascent on the Cima Brenta circuit, the Herzogstandbahn above the Walchensee and the Macugnaga chairlift towards the Belvedere. The Rochers de Naye has its own rack railway, which you can ride for part of the route; the La Breya chairlift above Champex takes you to the start of the path to the Orny Glacier; and at Pescegallo the chairlift to Rifugio Salmurano also runs in summer and shortens the Rifugio Benigni loop.

Good to know

Mountain lifts keep a calendar of their own, which does not always match a hiker's. Many run in winter for skiers and in summer for walkers, and between the two seasons they stop for inspections: in Switzerland several operators, such as those of the Schilthorn and Adelboden, carry them out every spring and every autumn and suspend service while they do, sometimes for several weeks, and on the Zugspitze the inspection days are published in advance. Summer timetables also change from month to month, and the last ride down often leaves earlier than you might think.

The advice, then, is simple: before building a day around a lift, check on the operator's website that it is running on your chosen date and note the time of the last descent. The fares and times we give on individual hikes are the ones we found, and prices in particular change from year to year.