From the very first moment, you will travel in comfort: your luxury minivans have spacious seats and water on board so you will sit back and enjoy the ride. The drive to the Alps takes around 2 to 2.5 hours, and the landscape outside your window makes every minute of it worth staying awake for. In summer, rolling green meadows and bright blue Alpine lakes stretch as far as the eye can see the kind of scenery you usually only see on postcards. In winter, everything turns white and quiet, with dark rivers cutting through a snow covered world. Whatever time of year you come, the drive alone sets the mood for what is ahead.

You will make a quick stop for coffee and a bathroom break. But this stop has something special: right by the road, you will find a traditional Swiss honesty shop. It is a tiny wooden hut with a small fridge inside, stocked with local products fresh cheese made from the cows in the area, milk, eggs. There is no shopkeeper, no till, no receipt. You simply take what you want, leave the correct amount of money in a small box and walk away. No one is watching. It is a beautiful little tradition that tells you a lot about how life works in the Swiss countryside. Just next to the hut, you will likely find the cows themselves grazing peacefully in the field. The traditional wooden Alpine houses dotting the hillsides around you are also worth a look with their dark timber frames and flower-covered balconies, they are exactly what you picture when you think of Switzerland.

From Stechelberg you will start your ascent by cable car. And here comes the first big fact of the day: this cable car reaches a maximum gradient of 159.4%, which officially makes it the steepest cable car in the world. In just 4 minutes you will feel the incline, the valley drops far below you, and the views open up in a way that takes your breath away. From Murren, you will continue upwards using the brand-new Funifor system a cable car technology that made its Swiss debut on 14 December 2025 takes you first to Birg at 2,677m, and then all the way to the summit: the Schilthorn, Piz Gloria, at 2,970 metres above sea level. Throughout the ascent you can watch the forests and valleys disappear below you as the snow-capped peaks come closer. In summer it is lush and green all the way up; in winter it turns increasingly white the higher you go. Either way, it is a ride that will leave you speechless.

When the cable car doors open at the summit, the first thing you do is stop and stare. In front of you is a full 360-degree panorama that includes the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau (all UNESCO World Heritage sites), more than 200 Alpine peaks, and on a clear day you can even see as far as Mont Blanc in France and the Black Forest in Germany. An almost 80-metre path runs along the northwest summit ridge to the Piz Gloria View observation deck, where you can stand at the edge and feel the Alpine wind on your face. It is one of those moments you remember for the rest of your life. And there is one more thing that makes this place extra special: Piz Gloria is where the 1969 James Bond film 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' was filmed. The revolving restaurant at the top served as the villain Blofeld's headquarters. Ellen will tell you all about it the behind-the-scenes stories, the fun facts and the things that never made it into the film.

On the way down, at the mid-station of Birg (2,677m), you have the chance to walk the Thrill Walk: a narrow pathway bolted directly into the vertical rock face of the mountain. It has a glass-bottom section, a crawl-through tunnel and rope sections all designed to give you that stomach-dropping feeling while being completely safe. If you want to feel the mountain in a very different way, this is it. If you prefer to take it easy, the views from the Skyline platform at Birg are equally spectacular.

You will take the cable car down to Murren, a car-free Alpine village where life moves at a completely different pace. No cars, no motorbikes, no noise just wooden chalets, flower-covered hotels and mountain silence. You will ride the Allmendhubel funicular up to 1,907m for sweeping views over the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau before making your way towards Gimmelwald.

Gimmelwald is one of those places that travellers whisper about to each other. Another car-free village, sitting at 1,367m, with flower-adorned chalets and old cheese storehouses that have been here for generations. Even getting there is an experience. Here you will know traditional Alpine farm to show you how things work. Cows, goats, rows of milk cans along the front wall, Swiss cowbells hanging at the entrance. This is the Switzerland that does not appear in travel brochures raw. You will have an experience tasting wine and cheese traditional from this zone inside a traditional Alpine house surrounded by old farming tools and wheels of cheese with their making dates carved right into them. Explaination how the cheese is made in these mountains, what makes the milk from these specific cows so special and the secrets of the ageing process. It is simple, honest and delicious the kind of food that tastes ten times better when you know exactly where it comes from and who made it.

You will take the cable car back down to Stechelberg The minivan will take you back to Zurich another 2 to 2.5 hours of Alpine scenery to replay everything you have seen and done. We arrive back at Swiss Epic Tours GmbH in Zurich at around 20:00, at the same spot where the day began.