TL;DR
I headed to Schilthorn Mürren in Switzerland for a recon mission before competing in the Inferno ski race — and ended up doing one of the more memorable ski days I've had in a long time. From the world's steepest aerial tramway at Stechelberg all the way up to Piz Gloria, here's what the resort is actually like.
Schilthorn Mürren: World's Steepest Aerial Tramway, James Bond Views, and an Inferno Recon
Getting to Mürren is half the experience. You drive through the Lauterbrunnen Valley, park up at Stechelberg, and then board what is officially the world's steepest aerial tramway to haul yourself up to a car-free village perched on the mountainside. No roads up here. No buses. Just a tram, a cable, and a fairly dramatic elevation change.
I came here a week before competing in the Inferno ski race — one of the oldest and longest amateur downhill races in the world — so this was as much a recon mission as a ski day. I still hadn't received my luggage at this point, so I was in full rental gear, GoPro jammed awkwardly onto a ski pole like some kind of ski tourist art installation. Not ideal.
The Lift System
The headline piece of infrastructure here is the new aerial tramway from Stechelberg up to Mürren, which opened in 2024. It's genuinely impressive — smooth, fast, and it replaces what was a much older system. From Mürren, you can continue up via lifts to Birg, and then the brand new section that opened for winter 2025–26 takes you all the way up to Piz Gloria at the Schilthorn summit, sitting just under 3,000 metres.
The rest of the lift network is a mix of older fixed-grip double chairs and a handful of express lifts. The double chairs have a certain old-school charm — they're not the fastest things on the mountain, but they work, and the terrain they access is solid. The combination of the new high-speed tram with the older infrastructure makes for an interesting blend. Not every resort needs to rip out everything that came before it.
