In pictures: Getting to mount Pilatus on wheelchair

If you are not interested in the details you can scroll to the photos directly.

Yesterday I had a great adventure going to the top of mountain Pilatus. I wanted to experience something Swiss and was deciding between the mountains and the falls. I ended up choosing the mountain as most people told me it might be tricky to go through the waterfalls with the wheels.

I went to Zurich central station and asked for the most accessible way to get to Luzern. They told me the app has an option to select only accessible trains. Sadly there was a bug in the app and this option was returning no results on the English version. They even were surprised and took photos of my phone to report the bug.

It turned out there is a train that takes 50 minutes and it runs every half an hour (make sure to check the schedules as they change and also the train models). I bought a one day ticket Zurich <> Luzern and was ready to go.

From Luzern central station I took a bus that took 11 minutes to the base of the cable cars. The only challenge was that the street leading to the cable cars was too steep. It is a 10 minutes walk that took me almost 30 minutes as I had to go in zig zag to avoid flipping with the wheelchair.

Once I arrived to the cable car station I bought a ticket and was ready to go. There are two options either to go up with the cable cars and down from the other side of the mountain with the train, or both up and down from the same side with the cable car. I couldn’t choose the former as I had to book train assistance in advance. I feel I could’ve pushed the lady to let me on the train but I was too lazy to persuade her especially that I wanted to get back to Zurich for dinner. I went with the cable car up and down option. I think the options vary in price too.

One catch is that there are limits on the size of the wheelchair that can fit in the cable car. It has to be manual and maximum width 70cm, length 95cm. With my wheelchair which has a width of 68cm I could’ve had one or two more companions inside the cable car.

The cable car takes 30 minutes and stops in the middle in a place called Frakmuntegg if you want to get out. I didn’t go out as it was in the middle of the clouds with no visibility (you will understand what I mean later). Once you reach the top there is another cable car that takes you to the very top. It takes 4 minutes.

I won’t bother you with more text. To the photos.

The last part is not accessible
The highest point I could get to. 2100 meters above sea level.