Etzel with kids & grilling

We wanted to take a little walk with our kids plus do a little grilling over open fire in the process. We thought of the Etzel as a beautiful place to do all this.

We drove to the restaurant "Restaurant-Café Büel" where there is lots of parking for visitors to the Etzel (2.- for 3 hrs, 4.- for the full day, there's free parking for visitors of the restaurant). The parking is a bit below the waypoint "Etzelweg". From there we walked up to the Etzel (about an hour) through dense fogs that every so often opened up to give us glimpses of the magnificent views.

Once we arrived on top we found that there was no fireplace. Indeed there's a 200.- fine for any open fire. Some remark by the owner of the Etzel-Kulm restaurant implied that on some days they actually make a fire for you to grill on but I don't know how that deal looks like (do you pay for using the fire?).

So following the vague and hastily given descriptions of the owner we tried to find the fireplace but had a hard time. So here for any future hiker: You head West for a few steps then turn left (South) and follow the small trail down the forest all the way until you hit a bigger ("real") path. Beautiful views of the Sihlsee and surrounding landscape from there. On that trail you head right (West), cross a couple of cow gates and finally find the fairly new and nice open hut with fire place, wood, table, benches and still beautiful views South. To directly find it, it's lat/lon are 47.1748N, 8.7582E (see waypoint "Rastplatz südwestlich vom Etzel"). All in all it's probably a quarter of an hour walk to the place from Etzel Kulm if you know where to go.

From the fireplace it was a 20 minute downhill walk back to the Büel-parking which we only did after spending a lot of time building a fire, cooking and eating.

Next time we might just head directly to the fire place and do the Etzel Kulm itself only if stamina (of the kids) and weather conditions are good.