Grosser Mythen: a day hike from Lucerne, Switzerland

Grosser Mythen is a 1890m high mountain in the village of Schwyz, Switzerland. This was my first hike in Switzerland, and it did not disappoint! It was probably my favourite on the whole trip, and we got really lucky with the weather. It’s about a 90 minute ride by train and bus from the city of Lucerne, which is where we were based for the first couple of days of our holiday.

Our hike began at the Rotenflue gondola station, from where you can already see the peak of Grosser Mythen itself.

Even just after getting off the gondola, the views were pretty amazing. I can’t help but want to compare Switzerland and Japan when it comes to hiking, and one of the unique features of Switzerland would be that the neighbouring mountains are a lot closer, and you could see a lot more mountains around you covered in snow (at least in May). Generally when hiking in Tokyo you can see snow-tipped mountains but they tend to be in the far-off distance rather than so close.

Anyway, it makes for some pretty stunning scenery! And if you look in the opposite direction, the peak of Grosser Mythen is right there as well. It looks pretty tall, but it’s only a 3-hour hike in total.

From the top of the Rotenflue gondola, it’s a 30 - 60 minute downhill walk to reach the Holzegg junction where you actually begin your hike up. I was a bit nervous when first starting this hike. It’s my first mountain in Switzerland, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and the trail was pretty quiet - not many hikers about. But as we approached the Holzegg junction there started to be a lot more activity. There’s actually a second gondola from a different town that takes you up to Holzegg, and it seemed like a lot more people use that one.

Right before you start your climb up the side of the mountain, you’ll pass through a small forest, and this is where we met our first Chamois! He just casually walked across our path. This ended up being the only one I saw, so I felt pretty lucky that we happened across him within an hour of our first hike in Switzerland.

The entire climb up Grosser Mythen is a series of switchbacks along a rocky trail. Some of the turns were numbered with paint so you could get a sense of how far up you’d gotten.

The hike is considered a T3 grade course which is described as “challenging mountain hiking”. Japan doesn’t have a proper course grading system like Switzerland does, so I was curious what a T3 would feel like.

I guess it’s a bit hard to define “challenging” since it depends on a person’s abilitiy. If a T1 trail was the equivalent walking on a park trail with a stroller, T3 is a reasonable step up from that. But you never have to use your hands to clamber over a rock, or pull yourself up by a rope, so I would say overall it felt like a pretty straightforward beginner-friendly hike, as long as you are not afraid of heights.

As I let two people pass me on the trail I got a dankeschön from one and a merci from the other (French and German are both official languages in Switzerland). Coming from Japan where everyone just speaks Japanese, this felt pretty funny to me.

It’s also quite common in Switzerland to give a greeting on the trail, like in Japan - but while everyone in Japan uses the stock-standard konnichiwa, I feel like there was a much greater variety of what people would say to me on the trail here. Lucerne and Schwyz are in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, so I’m not sure if it was a German thing though. I also hiked in the French-speaking side later in the week and mostly got bonjours.

🇨🇭 I since had a reader let me know that they say “Grüezi” on the trail, which is the Swiss German equivalent of hello (thanks David!). I forgot that Swiss German was a thing. “Salü” is another Swiss German greeting, and I definitely heard that one (although I assumed they had been saying the French “salut”).

Eventually the mountain hut at the summit starts to come into view, so you know that you are getting closer!

Right next to Grosser Mythen is the similarly named Kleiner Mythen - you can climb this one too, although it looks like the peak itself is quite dangerous to reach, so you can just climb to the “pre-summit” point.

Once the 42nd switchback marker comes into view, you’re nearly there. Apparently there are 47 in total, but from 42 it felt pretty much like a straight climb up.

There’s a mountain hut at the summit. If you have cash, you can buy their specialty almond croissant. I’m not going to lie, after coming from the land of cheap conbini food I was still pretty in shock at Swiss food prices in comparison, which are more than double. So I gave this one a miss.

At the summit, there were plenty of people taking in the views - you can see out towards Mt Rigi, which sits in between Lake Lucerne and Lake Zug. Switzerland seems to have lakes everywhere.

The peak itself has a large cross. The town of Schwyz is very strongly Roman Catholic, so I suppose this makes sense. Kind of similar to how you’ll see little shrines on the summit in Japan!

We also spotted some alpine choughs flying about. At first I got pretty excited and was trying to take a picture from a distance. As it turns out, they are basically like pests on this mountain - and will come right up to you if you there’s any chance you have food in your hand. So it was pretty easy to get a close-up shot.

The weather was nice and sunny - it had been a bit rainy in the day or two before this hike - so I felt we got really lucky today.

Once we celebrated climbing our first Swiss mountain and had a lunch break, we took the same course in reverse back to Holzegg.

When we were taking the ropeway up, we had passed a small herd of cows with bells around their necks. As we started hiking down we could hear them jangling all the way down in the valley below. I’m sure we were a good 500m+ up from them, so the bells must be really effective at finding them if they get lost.

The hike is only 3 - 4 hours in total, so we were in no rush to descend. We had a bit of fun with my camera’s telephoto lens and got some pictures of a plane and glider.

Once we reached Holzegg, we had one final small climb ahead of us as we hiked up the hill back to the Rotenflue cable car station.

Overall, this was a great first hike in Switzerland. I would 100% recommend it if you are in the Lucerne region.

When to hike Grosser Mythen

The trail opens at the same time the gondola begins running, which is mid-May each year. It seems like they do trail maintenance the day before the official opening date, so you can’t hike if the gondola isn’t running yet.

We went on the first day of the season, which in 2025 was the 10th of May. The trail stays open through October.

When I was first researching for this hike, I was a bit confused because websites would just mention “mid-May” and I wasn’t really sure what the exact date would be - which I needed to know because I was planning on visiting in mid-May. The region has an official website (in German) which does have the details, although it can be a little hard to find exactly where it mentions the opening date. I found the easiest way to confirm was on its Instagram account.

Public transport access

There are two separate ropeways to where you can begin your hike, either the Brunni-Alpthal cable car or the Rotenflue Gondola. We came from Lucerne, so the Rotenflue side is closer, and the trip to the ropeway station took 90mins in total. We were able to get a train to Arth-Goldau, and then two bus transfers to get to the Rickenbach SZ, Rotenfluebahn bus stop.

There were a lot of hikers who got on the bus with us at Arth-Goldau, and I had assumed they were all heading to Grosser Mythen, but no one got off when we transferred so I’m not sure whether they were going. A bit of a mystery, really. It didn’t seem to be Rigi but maybe Stoos is nearby?

If you’re not used to Swiss transport systems, the interesting thing is that you can get on the trains and buses without any sort of ticket barrier, and you don’t need to show anything to bus drivers either. You’ll only need to pull out your ticket if an inspector passes (which we generally only saw on long-distance trains).

The entire trip was covered by the Swiss Travel Pass, including the gondola. Actually the gondola staff looked quite surprised when we whipped out our pass and opened up some binder to try and check what to do with it, so I suppose this side gets less tourists?

If you don’t have the pass, the gondola costs in the range of 40 CHF for a round trip. You could try to save some money by taking the gondola up, and then hiking down (going via the Brunni-Alpthal side is apparently easier). We didn’t end up doing this because a) the gondola is free and b) getting back to Lucerne from there would take an extra hour.

I’m also very grateful to the website Swiss Family Fun which gave a lot of great info for this hike (and just on hiking in Switzerland in general). Actually I feel like there’s a lot I can learn a lot from them - they’re like a more professional version of my blog.

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