How to avoid crowds when hiking in Switzerland

If you’ve gone hiking on a sunny weekend, you probably encountered a ridiculous amount of people on the trail, not to mention the roads and parking lots. That’s especially true for holiday weekends like Auffahrt and Pfingston, which are like a grand opening for summer season.

But don’t get discouraged, it’s not always like this. Here are some tips to avoid the crowds on Swiss trails.

1. Go early

If it’s a beautiful sunny weekend, you should try to arrive at your hike by 9:00. Not only will you get a jump on the late sleepers, but it will also help you minimize your wait for the cable car and get a spot in the parking lot. I know this means you might need to leave the house by 7:00 but you’ll thank yourself later. 

Here’s us waiting in line for the Pizol 5 Lakes hike at 10:00 and I was kicking myself for not getting up earlier. Fortunately, the hold up was the ticket buying since they have a gondola that continually runs and gets people up the mountain quickly.  But still we waited over 30 mins in line. Sigh.

2. Choose mountains with bad websites

The less information you can find about a place, the better when it comes to avoiding crowds. If a mountain doesn’t have a website or it’s completely useless or outdated, that’s a sign that they don’t have much of a marketing budget. Thus tourists and day trippers won’t know about these spots. On holidays, they still might be full with locals. But usually these places are rather quiet on Saturdays. 

So if the websites are bad, how do I get the info? I scour maps looking for tiny gondolas, then search online for reports from other hikers that have been there. I also collect free maps and brochures in every village we visit and sometimes they promote tiny places. Then I try them out, make the mistakes so you don’t have to, and write about them here so you have the good info.

I don’t want to call out any particular crappy website, so instead I’ll highlight the village of Illgau, which has a surprisingly nice little website for how tiny they are. I made a video of our hike and shortly after, they asked if they could embed it their site. I was delighted and impressed by their initiative. Well done!

3. Go on Saturday instead of Sunday

Since shops are closed on Sundays, most people do their shopping on Saturday and save Sunday for day trips with friends & family. So you’ll find that most places are much quieter on Saturday. We almost always hike on Saturdays, so I’m always surprised when we go out on Sunday and find the mountain crazy full.

4. Go when the weather forecast is poor

I’m not suggesting you hike in the rain (though that will almost guarantee solitude). But any hint of possible rain and even just a cloudy day will scare off most day trippers. So that’s a great time to go hiking if you plan it right.

If rain is forecast for one part of Switzerland, we study the precipitation map to find a rain shadow. If it’s scheduled to rain at 14:00, we get out early and do a shorter hike.

Often the forecast changes drastically overnight. While many people cancelled their outdoor plans Friday night due to a poor forecast, we recheck it Saturday morning and find the weather perfectly fine and trails empty. I’m surprised how often this works for us.

Last Saturday an intense rainstorm was covering most of western and central Switzerland, but there was a little pocket near Klosters/Davos that looked like only scattered drizzles until 13:00. In reality, we had hot sunny skies and a fab hike until exactly 14:00. In the pic below, it was supposed to have already started heavy rain 30 mins before the below pic was taken.

About 30 mins after this pic, the skies suddenly darkened, strong winds blew in, and 20 mins later we were in the car and the downpour started. So glad we didn’t stay at home wishing for better weather. 

5. Get off the beaten path

Even in popular touristy areas, you can often escape the crowds by simply walking away from the viewpoints and following a smaller trail. Many travelers don’t have time or inclination to do a lot of trail research and also don’t have wiggle room in their itinerary to take any chances. So they choose the most obvious destinations and most popular trail there. If you are reading this post, I know you can do better.

The Riffelalp trail at the Zermatt Gornergrat has always been strangely quiet for us, considering the hundreds of tourists mobbing the viewpoints above. I never understood it, but I’m always grateful. So just do a little research, bring a map and wander off script.

Same at Oeschinensee. Tons of people go up to picnic at the lake, but only a fraction of those people do the panorama trail. Your hard work earns you a bit of peace and quiet.

Same at Valle Verzasca. Everyone lounges near the famous bridge at Lavertezzo. But very few hike along the river above there, which is one of my favorite river trails in Switzerland.

6. Drive up a tiny mountain road

The harder it is to get somewhere, the less people will be there. So it might be annoying to drive up a narrow one-lane mountain road for 20 mins, but the solitude will be worth it. On Auffarht, we hiked at Urwald Bödmeren because it required driving 6 km up a truly terrible mountain road that was under construction.

Since it was a holiday, there were still 30 cars at the top and we got one of the last parking spots at 9:30. But that was a tiny fraction of the couple hundred cars we saw at the Stoos parking lot on our way there. Plus there was no competition for this bench with a view. 

7. Choose places with infrequent bus service

If the bus only goes there once a day, that significantly reduces how many people can get there. Yes, the whole bus arrives at the same time, but those 30 people will quickly disperse and you’ll be by yourself before you know it. We did this at Realp and were very alone on this gorgeous trail. I was stressed about missing the bus, but after we got there, it was all gravy.

8. Avoid festival days

Several times we’ve shown up to a normally quiet mountain and the parking was full and a long line for the gondola, sometimes the road was closed. Then we find out they are having Oktoberfest or the cow “Abfahrt” or a mountain bike race or some other sponsored event. These can be really fun events and I recommend them.

But if you want a quiet day, best to look at the website beforehand to see what events might be happening. This always seems to happen to us at Flumserberg.

9. Choose chair lifts & gondolas over big cable cars

It’s better to choose a place with continually running gondolas or chair lifts, which naturally staggers hikers. Big cable cars dump all 100 people on the trail at the same time, so it takes longer for everyone to spread out. Plus cable cars wait to fill up the car, so they only run every 15-30 mins. If you miss one, you’re stuck waiting until the next one. 

10. Look for tiny private cable cars 

Switzerland has dozens, if not hundreds, of little private cable cars that service alpine villages. They generally don’t market their services far and wide and are used mostly by locals. Since they usually only fit 4-6 people, you might have to wait a bit to ride up. But you won’t have crowds of people on the trail once you get up there.

Make sure to check the schedule beforehand as these usually run infrequently and often close over lunch. They usually take cash only and sometimes are self-service (meaning you push the “on” button yourself or call someone to ride their bike over the station to turn it on, I’m not joking). They are usually inexpensive (under CHF 20pp) but don’t take any travel passes or discount cards like SBB Half-fare or junior cards. So they can be more expensive overall for a family.

We’ve done this at many places but most recently at Guscha, which was a delightful surprise.

Some tiny cable cars allow you to reserve in advance, which ensures you get a spot. Trift glacier and suspension bridge is a good example of this. The cable car only fits 8 people and runs every 12 minutes. The first time we went, we had to wait over 2 hours to go up and many people that arrived after us were turned away. Now that they have a reservation system, it’s much more civilized.

11. Go on a weekday during the summer holidays

If you are spending your summer in Switzerland, this gives you a great chance to visit popular places on weekdays, which will be less crowded than weekends, even in high season. So if you have a choice, visit the most famous places on a Tuesday and visit lesser known places on the weekend. Whether you are traveling around Switzerland or doing a staycation from your Swiss home, weekdays are your friend.

12. Do I have to say it? Avoid famous places

This is obvious, but still I get messages from people noting how crowded it was in Zermatt or Jungfrau Region. Same goes for Instagram famous places like like Ebenalp/Seealpsee, Caumasee, Oeschinensee, Valle Versasca, Pizol 5 Lake Hike, and now the Stoos Ridge trail, which has exploded in popularity since the new funicular opened a couple years ago.

These places are always crowded, even more so on sunny weekends and holidays. Early in our Swiss lives, we went to these places and turned around disappointed because we couldn’t find parking and the lines were too long.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to these places. But if you want to be alone, they are a poor choice. We still sometimes go to these popular places in high season, but we know what to expect, we go early and are very clever with our photo taking to cut out the strangers photo bombing us. When we want to be alone in these places, we go off season and in bad weather.

Below is Caumasee on a sunny summer weekend. We fought for parking, waited a long time to get in, and still had one of the best days of our Swiss summer paddling our little boat around the lake and jumping off the 2m rock in the middle. 

I hope you found this post helpful. Do you have any secret quiet spots to share?