Raten Nordic Trail Network

Posted by Brittany on April 13, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Raten Nordic Trail

Today, I hiked on the Raten Nordic Trail. I have the “Leisure Guide to Hiking, Cycling, Incline Skating, and Nordic Walking” book that I picked up at the Zug Tourism office at the train station to reference. I chose this trail because I am trying to hit all the ones in the Zug Kanton, and I have never visited this area before. The guide states that this route is not signposted, but a map is included and I have GPS on my phone so I figured I couldn’t make a mistake. Well, I did, but not a bad one. I ended up on a shorter trail so it cut 40 minutes out. There are a lot of different paths you can take. I would like to go back and try some of the other ones out.

Raten Nordic Trail

The trail starts at the Raten bus stop. It is 45 minutes from the main station in Zug. Take the number 1 bus to Oberägeri and change to the number 10 to Raten. It takes you way out to the middle of nowhere. There is a restaurant there, but that’s about it. The bus comes by once an hour. I was very lucky on the way back. I saw the bus in the distance and sprinted for about 3 minutes and thankfully, the bus driver saw me and waited. Man, I was winded after that!

Walking in the snow in the clouds

The first 15 minutes are in an open field and then the rest of the way is in the forest. The trail descends almost all the way back down to the valley and then ascends all the way back up. It’s not too steep so fairly easy. It took 1 hour 20 minutes and 4 miles.

The area was in the cloud line so there wasn’t much visibility, but I found that pretty cool. There is no snow in the valley, but there was a light snow up there. The weather has been so icky this whole week that it was nice to get out.