The first people to ever see Switzerland from the 4,158-meter summit of Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps were two brothers, Johan and Heironymus Meyer, along with two local chamois hunters and, by most accounts, various hangers-on.

The route they took in 1811 can still be followed today. Just set out from Valais, cross the Beich Pass and the Oberaletsch Glacier, traverse the Lotschenlucke to reach the Aletsch Glacier, and approach the summit from the Rottalsattel.

Or you can just take the train.

Jungfraujoch Station is Europe’s highest railway station. Opened in 1912, it takes you from the Kleine Scheideeg Pass near the resort town of Wengen in the Upper Lauterbrunnen Valley, via Eigergletscher Station to the summit, the last seven kilometers being through tunnels inside the mountains Eiger and Monch that took 13 years to construct, an engineering feat worthy of a story all its own.

More than one million people a year take this train. They pack into it to go up, and cram back into it again to go back down. The ‘going up’ part I understand. But down? That’s where, in my opinion, most visitors to Jungfrau make a big mistake.

I recently took the train to the observatory on Jungfraujoch, the mountain saddle that connects the summits of Jungfrau and Monch. I walked through the Ice Palace with its fantastical ice sculptures and carvings, walked outside on its balconies and was lucky to have the clouds part revealing the splendor of the Aletsch Glacier and countless surrounding peaks.

I took the train back down through the tunnel to Eigergletscher Station and got out to stretch my legs. That’s when I saw the trailheads, and it was there that I had, well, an epiphany, I suppose.

Why not walk?

Enjoying a slower pace

I was staying around a thousand meters below Eigergletscher in the car-free and not at all cheap but very comfortable village of Wengen in the Upper Lauterbrunnen Valley in a Swiss art nouveau classic: the Grand Belvedere Hotel.

Built in 1912, the Grand Belvedere is an old world classic of pastel exteriors, green shutters, restored frescoes and voluminous wooden columns in a sumptuous lobby. It’s partly new world too, but you need to go find it. Cut cave-like into the hillside, its recently completed brutalist-style indoor-outdoor swimming pool, hammam and spa area are cocooned in their own subterranean lair, a minimalist world of polished concrete, architecture at its purest.

If you can’t imagine it all, just think of film director Wes Anderson and the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. Think, ‘There’s nowhere else I’d rather be’. Think Wengen’s only five-star hotel. Now you’ve got it.

Eigergletscher is 2,320 meters above sea level, but because of the fog that day it felt higher. Fog and low cloud had dogged me all afternoon, even causing me to pause on my way to the trailhead. No-one likes to see a mountain trail disappear into a white void before their eyes.

I’d originally hoped to hike the famous Eiger Trail that literally gets you to within arm’s reach of the mountain’s near-vertical north face, known as its ‘murder wall’, but the trail had been closed due to an unseasonably late snowfall.

Despite the fog, I was surprised no-one joined me. The descent is a gradual one, so isn’t hard on the knees. The trail, like all Swiss trails, is graded, broad, well marked and maintained, with regular signposted distances and times to each point. Even just a casual look at the route on a map fairly whets the appetite.

Immersed in fog and summer blooms

The trail weaved its way westward, the forests above Kleine Scheidegg on my right, and to my left through the fog, an occasional glimpse of the three great giants of the Bernese Alps: Jungfrau, Monch and Eiger.

It’s a landscape that swallows you up. I immediately felt immersed in it, seeing it in a way that the inside of a carriage could never offer. Altitude determines everything here, and in minutes Eigergletscher’s world of scree and slate was behind me, the ground a colorful cacophony of daisies, bellflowers, primroses, heathers, buttercups and forests of spruce, fir, beech and maple.

Though not as common as they were a few decades ago, if you’re hiking in the Swiss Alps, sooner or later you’re likely to pass a solar-powered refrigerator filled with local cheeses. Passersby can pay for them with cash via an honor system, or by using the displayed QR code and a payment app.

Every region in Switzerland – Appenzellerland, Lucerne, and others – has its own alpine cheese trails and while I’m a sucker for a good cheese platter, I resisted this time. Because at trail’s end the Grand Belvedere’s Waldrand Restaurant was waiting for me, and so would be my second Swiss Wagyu burger with caramelized onions and a truffle mayonnaise.

No wonder there was a spring in my step.

The best of summer trails

The fog had begun to clear and the trail continued, closely paralleling the train line. Every 30 minutes or so another Wengernalp train would trundle by, each with fewer and fewer passengers as the afternoon wore on, the sun dipping ever lower as the Jungfraujoch disgorged the last of its visitors.

Railway stations that were barely more than a simple platform and a signal box came and went, while shuttered chalets and guesthouses stood empty near them, patiently waiting for the start of summer, still several weeks away. Winter, however, is when these mountains buzz the most, and nowhere do they buzz more than right here, absolutely right where I was now walking – on the Lauberhorn Descent.

The Lauberhorn Descent is the Formula One Grand Prix of the skiing world. This heart-in-mouth downhill begins near the Eigergletscher at Abfahrt and cannons down the mountain past Hundschopf with its challenging 42-degree incline, past Minschkante and then around Canadian Corner, the craziest chicane in the whole World Cup circuit. At one point the slope narrows to a terrifying width of just three meters, the exhilarating, nerve-jangling threading of the ski world’s iciest needle.

In 1997 a Swiss skier, Bruno Kernen, crashed backwards into a safety net which then catapulted him back onto the piste near to where I was standing. In 2013, the great French Alpine racer Johan Clarey broke the World Cup speed record right here, with a speed of 161.9 kilometers per hour.

In winter, the tiny Wengernalpbahn station, with its unobstructed views over the course, somehow accommodates in excess of 10,000 people alongside and around it on Girmschbiel Hill. What a difference a little snow makes.

Back to civilization, surrounded by nature

The trail enters the outskirts of Wengen from the northeast through pastures overflowing with alpine flowers, waterfalls. One particularly gorgeous triple-arched stone railway bridge, circa 1893, part of the Wengernalp Railway which runs for 19 kilometers from Lauterbrunnen to Grindelwald, the world’s longest continuous rack and pinion railway.

I was admiring the bridge when a local man walked by whose passion, it turned out, was the creation of dioramas depicting historic trains, railway stations and bridges. Working off old photos from the late 1800s and early 1900s, his award-winning 3D models, which he spent 20 minutes showing me on his phone, looked to me like photographs, such was their astonishing attention to detail. I regret not getting his name, but he had lived in Wengen all his life, one man in his own unique way working to preserve the Lauterbrunnen Valley’s enduring legacy of steam.

I approached Wengen from the opposite end of town to the railway station and so found myself navigating one last surprise: the Wengen Nature Trail. A forest featuring more than 50 local species of trees, shrubs, flowers and ferns, this locally funded and supported initiative is signposted to help you learn about the plants, birds, animals, insects, bugs and butterflies that make these forests so special.

It had been quite a day. A train ride and a mountain summit, a heavy fog over flowering meadows, a cheese shop and a ski run, a model-maker and a nature trail. A Grand Hotel and a wagyu burger.

A day of ironies, made possible both by taking the train, and then by not taking it – and letting the Bernese Alps do the rest.

To book a night at the Grand Belvedere Hotel, a Beaumier hotel, go to www.beaumier.com

To book the Jungfraujoch ‘Top of Europe’ train, go to www.jungfrau.ch