Product Description

Stretch your legs and your sense of adventure! Become an Easy Walker and enjoy the wonderful walking trails found in the Swiss and Austrian Alps. Using this guide and its maps, you can explore beautiful footpaths through mountain meadows and hamlets.

Choose routes starting from one of the nineteen base villages selected by the author for their magnificent mountain locales, charm, availability of public transportation, and accommodations. Rated at one of three levels of ease (“gentle”, “comfortable”, and “more challenging”), each walk takes from two to six hours, excluding “take in the view” breaks or picnics along the way.

Whether you want to know the rules of the trail, which local hiking maps to purchase, what clothing to wear, or how to get discounts on travel to Europe, this book helps you get the most out of your alpine walking experience.

Visit: Lenk, Kandersteg, Gstaad, Saas-Fee, Zermatt, Verbier, Arosa, Samedan/St. Moritz, and Engelberg in Switzerland; Alpach, Kitzbuehel, Neustift, Seefeld, Zell am Ziller, Mieming, Badgastein, and Kaprun/Zell am See in Austria; and the cities of Innsbruck, Salzburg, and Vienna.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #745280 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 223 pages

About the Author
Chet Lipton became enchanted with the incredible alpine trail system during travels with family and he’s been walking it ever since. Lipton authored first editions of the Walking Easy books, including Walking Easy in the Italian and French Alps and Walking Easy in the Swiss and Austrian Alps with his late wife and hiking partner, Carolee. Lipton’s updated this edition with new information and greater insights.

Customer Reviews

Good for planning, not for the trails
I used this book (along with a few others) to help plan a 2 week trip to Switzerland in June 09 with my family. The book focuses on hiking from: Zermatt, Saas-Fee, Lauterbrunnen, Kandersteg, Samedan, Arosa, Engelberg, and Meiringen in Switzerland (half of the book is devoted to Austrian hikes). For each hiking base, there are several walks of varying ability (easy to challenging), along with other options in case of rain. This book should NOT be used as a trail guide--the descriptions are more general of the whole hike, and do not have enough specifics to guide a hike. The maps are useful only to show where a hike is relative to the base city and should not be relied upon. This book needs a serious editing--lots of typo's and some elevation readings that are not to be trusted. I don't think the photos in this book add much and are so generally labeled, that one cannot be sure they represent the hike or area on the page. Based on this book's recommendations, we went to Kandersteg and enjoyed the village and its walks very much.

bit disappointing
The book was a disappointment for me. It does present a choice of top alpine towns/regions suitable as a base for short mountain walks. But descriptions of regions are much too short and don't help much in taking decision which one to choose for your trip. Surely it was my mistake also to believe that it's possible to deliver more comprehensive info on such extensive topic within 200+ pages only.
Another downside is that book doesn't contain even basic maps of regions and only very few rough sketches of trails - for me it makes reading walks descriptions much harder.
As for walks choice - the title "Walking easy" really means it - they are mostly recreational short walks with extensive use of lifts and public transport Amatours of more challenging hikes should skip it. I admit that walks proposed in their category - meaning "easy" - are ok (though I expect suggested trails to be crowdy due to their popularity&easyness), and there are usually 7 of them for each region - good for an avarage 1 week stay. Walks descriptions are short and concentrate on giving directions and sometimes are bit chaotic - some information given in introduction to a walk is frequently repeated in actual description. As a plus - most of walks descriptions seem to be pretty good as for giving accurate directions for a particular trail. Clues given allow to plan particular walks well as for using transport, lifts, planning stop-overs for a snack etc.There are also alternative trail options given for some of the walks.
Finally, but this goes for editor/publisher, the number of typos in this book is appaling! Sometimes it makes reading a nighmare, and is especially harmful as for names of places/towns. Shame! Graphics in the book are virtually nonexistant (I guess budget was tight, as even cover image looks like taken using cellphone camera).
To sum up - the idea of the book was very ambitious - pity that the actual result is of limited use. It could be 3 star if not for typos and poor graphics.