Titlis

Where it sits. Titlis rises to 3,238 metres on the boundary between the cantons of Obwalden and Berne, the highest summit of the Uri Alps north of the Susten pass and the first serious glaciated peak you meet travelling south from Lucerne. Its north side falls in a broad ice sheet towards Engelberg, the monastery village at about 1,000 metres directly below, so the vertical interval between valley floor and summit is well over two kilometres. Because it stands out ahead of the main Alpine chain rather than inside it, the view from the top reaches unusually far north across the Mittelland to the Jura and, on a scoured winter day, to the haze over the German border. The first recorded ascent was made in 1744 by a party from Engelberg, unusually early for a glaciated Alpine peak.

How you get to the top. The ascent is entirely mechanical and takes about forty-five minutes in three stages from Engelberg. The Titlis Xpress gondola climbs to Stand at 2,428 metres, and from there the Rotair takes over. Opened in 1992, it was the world's first rotating cable car: the cabin floor turns through a complete circle during the five-minute crossing of the glacier, so a single load of passengers sees the whole panorama without anyone jostling for the downhill window. It carries up to eighty people at a time, and the ride passes directly over the crevasse field, which from above reads as a set of blue parallel gashes. The upper station, Klein Titlis at 3,020 metres, is a multi-storey complex cut into the rock with terraces, restaurants and a photo gallery.

What is actually up there. Three things justify the price of the ticket beyond the view itself. A tunnel roughly 150 metres long has been cut into the glacier about ten metres below the surface, lit blue and held a little below freezing, so you walk inside the ice rather than on it. The Titlis Cliff Walk, opened in December 2012, is a suspension footbridge about a hundred metres long and a metre wide strung along the cliff at around 3,041 metres, with roughly five hundred metres of air beneath the grating; it is regularly described as the highest suspension bridge in Europe. And the Ice Flyer chairlift drops from the summit station out over the crevasses to the glacier park, where snow tubing and a small ski area operate through much of the year.

On screen and the Kashmir substitution. Titlis belongs to a specific chapter of film history. When the insurgency in Kashmir from 1989 closed the Himalayan valleys that Hindi cinema had used for two decades as its standard setting for snow, romance and song, production units went looking for a replacement, and central Switzerland supplied it. The glacier fields above Engelberg, the Bernese Oberland and the Saanenland all became stand-ins for a landscape audiences already recognised, and the substitution outlasted the original: even after Kashmir reopened to filming, Swiss snow remained the visual shorthand. Titlis has been worked by Hindi units since the 1990s, and the commercial consequence is visible at the summit station, where Indian visitors are among the largest foreign groups, the restaurant runs an Indian kitchen, and signage and staffing are arranged accordingly.

Engelberg below. The valley station sits in a village that is far older than the cableway. Engelberg Abbey, a Benedictine house founded in 1120, still functions, runs a school and keeps a baroque church rebuilt after a fire in 1729, with one of the largest organs in Switzerland. The valley also holds the Gross-Titlis-Schanze, a large ski jump that hosts a World Cup weekend each December, and the Brunni cableway on the sunny opposite side, which is the better choice for walkers who want meadow paths and a view of Titlis rather than a view from it. The Benedictine cheese dairy in the monastery courtyard is open to visitors.

Getting there and timing. Engelberg is a terminus: a branch line runs from Lucerne in about three quarters of an hour, through the Engelberg tunnel opened in 2010, and the cableway station is a ten-minute walk from the railway station. Drivers come off the A2 at Stans. Because the summit is glaciated, there is snow at the top all year, and the glacier park and ice cave operate through the summer; from roughly October to May the whole mountain is a working ski area with runs back down to Engelberg. Bring warm clothing regardless of the month, since the summit terrace commonly sits fifteen to twenty degrees colder than the valley, and check the webcam before committing, because cloud sitting on the north face makes the ride a costly trip into grey.