A spectacular mountain ascent looms over the home of my Swiss ancestors

We've always known the starting points of my American immigrant ancestors' journeys. But identifying a point on a map from understanding a place.

As I've traveled more in Europe, I've gotten a sense of these places of origin. For a person who's had an affinity, and longing, for the sea all my life, it's ironic that my four ancestor famies all came from landlocked bits of their nations. Even more surprising is that two turn out to be proper mountain people. For a child of rivers and plains, who'd hardly ever laid eyes on a mountain until recently, thinking that my DNA springs from such vertiginous landscapes is a stretch. And yet, that's reality.

Last weekend I traveled to Alpnach, the small village outside of Lucerne from which my paternal grandfather's family came, on a journey of discovery with my father. It was the first time anyone from our line of the family had been back.  Taking in the glorious view before us, I wondered if those immigrants were at all disappointed with the comparatively placid landscape of the Missouri and Mississippi river valleys. I love my home town, but in visual appeal it pales to insignificance beside this emerald valley encircled by saw-tooth peaks.

I felt a mixture of awe and unease; the strangeness (to me) of mountains always gives me a slight, jittery discomfort. Did Franz Melchior Wallimann felt the same in St. Louis, as he swapped the solid walls of his mountain valley for an indistinct, limitless horizon that landed somewhere beyond the rolling hills and river?

Lacking diaries, we will never know. Nor will we know why he and his family abandoned what appears to have been a stable and prosperous place. They certainly left plenty of people behind, as the family name is all over the modern cemetery and several current businesses. I think we can assume, however, that Alpnach was as boring as it was beautiful. Though the town name appears in documents as early as the 10th century, a walk around the place shows little built before the very late 19th, and probably early 20th, centuries. Only the farmhouses up in the hills give off a sense of real antiquity. I imagine Alpine beauty can pale beside a life of farm labour, limiting social life to your family and never meeting anyone who comes from beyond the valley.

Ironically, everything was changing for Alpnach right about the time our family left. The Romantic movement had taken Europe by storm, giving the educated classes a new taste for dramatic landscapes and the picturesque. Turner had painted his way through the Alps early in the 19th century; a one-man promotional bonanza. Thomas Cook established tours of the country in the 1840s and Queen Victoria spent a season in Lucerne in 1868 trying to shake off the gloom of her widowhood. The 49-year-old royal even ascended 2,128 metre Mount Pilatus by horseback. Well-heeled tourists followed. By 1889 the Swiss had established an engineering marvel to entertain them. The cog railway that ascended at 48% (still a world record) allowed anyone to follow in Victoria's mountain-climbing footsteps. The Mount Pilatus Railway starts in Alpnach.

Who knows? Maybe our Wallemanns were misanthropes who decided to clear out when their valley got too popular. Somewhere along the journey they also left behind the middle "i", starting to use an "e" instead. At the Alpnach source, everyone is Wallimann.

Alpnach itself is a bit of a misnomer. It's not one place, but a loose string of three villages that fill a bowl-shaped valley with about 6,000 residents. (There were fewer than 1,800 in the valley when the Wallemanns left.) Alpnachstad boasts the Pilatus railway station and the little harbour onto Lake Alpnach, at the end of which, through a narrow channel between mountain slopes, you pass into Lake Lucerne and can travel on to the big city. This is the prettiest bit of Alpnach, where you'll find the greatest concentration of charming Victorian architecture. It presumably sprang up at about the same time as the railway.

Just up the road, in the flat bottom of the valley, is the population centre of Alpnach Dorf, where you'll find the big church (an early 20th century take on Northern Baroque), grocery stores and a handful of restaurants. Grain silos ... one still prominently labeled "Wallimann" ... and lumber yards suggest the region's historic livelihood. A couple of modern hotels catering to hikers and the small airfield that's home to a branch of the Swiss Air Force presumably helps the modern economy. Although from the affluent look of the place I suspect there are plenty of corporate commuters here. Both Alpnachstad and Alpnach Dorf have stations with frequent trains sweeping you to Lucerne in just 20 minutes. A bit further up the valley an outlying cluster of houses around a second, smaller church is called Schoried. Traditional farmhouses of dark wood with peaked roofs and shuttered windows encircle the heights above the trio of villages, looking after herds of cows grazing on rich Alpine grasses. I little river called the Schliere bisects the valley, running down from the mountains to feed the lake. It is a sleepy, pretty, obviously affluent and remarkably quiet place.

The Pilatus Railway remains a major tourist attraction and is the only reason most foreigners travel to Alpnach. It should be on every Lucerne visitors' priority list, but brace yourself for the price. You'll pay about £60 ($78) to go up and down the mountain ... presumably it takes a lot of cash to maintain the precision engineering that gets you up and down ... and another £20 ($26) for the boat ride out from Lucerne. Switzerland is not for the budget traveler. But if you've got the cash and appreciate spectacular views, it's worth every penny.

Though you can zip out to Alpnachstad on the much cheaper (£6, $8) and faster train, the boat is part of the whole experience. Cruisers take off from just outside the central train station regularly and take a zig-zagging meander across Lake Lucerne for an hour. Lucerne itself is magical from any angle, but particularly breathtaking from the water. From the centre of the lake you can better appreciate everything from the towering mountains and imposing monasteries to onion-domed churches and holiday villas. There's a mix of architecture here, from traditional Swiss straight out of the pages of Heidi to classic Edwardian grandeur and a lot of sleek modern stuff. From the water, it looks like everyone here sits comfortably in the world's top 10% of earners.

This is particularly true as you pull up to the dock at Bürgenstock where a sprawl of buildings so cute they could have been designed by Disney fronts a cog railway that whisks visitors to the luxury resort on the cliffs above. It's positioned exactly opposite, though high above, Lucerne, giving spectacular views along with clean mountain air. (Qatari investors recently funded a £400m+ renovation; you can check it out for a starting price of £700 a night.) I recognised those cliffs. Thirty two years before, when I was travelling around Europe after university with $20 of spending money a day and staying in places a good deal more humble, we'd splurged on a dinner cruise that dropped anchor beneath the cliffs. A local, kitted out in leather shorts and boiled wool jacket, let loose on an Alpenhorn and demonstrated the lake's magnificent acoustics. I suspect that memory is worth more than a stay at the Bürgenstock. Not that I'd mind it, if someone else were paying.

Things get a little more "real" as you pass into Lake Alpnach and spot a bit of heavy industry to one side. The gravel pit and quarry implies that someone actually does physical labour here, and might make less than an investment banker. On the other side of the lake, however, are brand new apartments marketing the yacht space below that comes with your new digs.

Its just a short walk from the boat to Pilatus station and, this being Switzerland, it's all perfectly timed so that rail cars are waiting for the boat passengers.

The ascent itself feels like a merger between a lift (elevator) and a train. The cars are built at a steep incline, with each 8-person compartment positioned about four feet below the next. Surprisingly, the operation of the huge metal cogs is almost silent, remarkably smooth and fairly quick. At first, you're beguiled by the houses and the airfield in the valley below dwindling to dollhouse proportions. Then you clear a ridge and the whole sweep of Lake Lucerne opens up beside you. Long views alternate with passages through tunnels hewn from the stone and thick forests. It's a a mix of elm, oak and pine, later only the last. As the trees start to thin, you come into the meadows, where cows go about their milk-making duties and Alpine flowers dot the grasses. The track has curved, so you've now lost Lake Lucerne and are looking down into Alpnach. As you go above the treeline, heather comes to dominate the vegetation, house-sized boulders scatter the landscape and sheer walls of rock rise above you. This is where the incline slopes to its record-breaking 48 percent. It is spectacular, and over far too soon.

On clear days, of course, you can see for miles. We ascended into a cloud. Though the views were good for 90% of the journey, By the end we could only make out things about four feet in front of us. We didn't see the station as much as feel it when the train reached the end of its line.

Up top is a modern concrete and glass visitor centre with terraces, cafe and gift shop. There are walks across the peaks for hikers, though only an idiot would have ventured onto them with the visibility we had. There are also two hotels, and it's to one of these that we retired for a leisurely lunch in the clouds.

The Hotel Pilatus Klum opened a year after the railway and saw a full restoration in 2010 to bring it back to its original Victorian splendor. It's a classic aristocratic hunting lodge: hard woods, glazed tiles, enormous fireplaces, lots of antlers. The total lack of view gave us a chance to focus fully on a magnificent lunch, which was firmly drawn from local tradition and served by a strapping, rosy-cheeked lad who looked like he could easily chop down a few trees and haul some cows over mountain passes as soon as he finished with the easier business of giving us our lunch. (For more on the food, see my restaurant review coming soon.)

You have a choice on your descent: back down the cog rail or transfer to a cable car. (Or walk, of course. You can get off at multiple stops on the way up or down for Alpine strolls.) We switched to the cable car, which brings you down the other side of the mountains into the suburbs of Lucerne, making for a pleasant round trip. Our first few minutes started in cloud so thick you'd be terrified if a plane attempted to take off or land in it. We could see one or two metres of cable, then nothing. Then, quite suddenly, we emerged from the cloud and the whole valley of Lucerne spread below us. This side of the mountain is gentler, more heavily forested and liberally threaded with hiking paths. Half-way down, you reach a station where you switch from the room-sized, large-group car to four-seaters reminiscent of amusement parks of my youth. (Why did Disney take the cable cars out of Fantasy Land?) Had we had more time, this is where I would have happily gotten off and spent an hour walking before continuing down the mountain. But the day was getting on and a combination of rich food and white wine was suggesting nap rather than exercise, so we pushed on.

There is, however, a pretty little walk from the cable car terminus in Kriens to the Lucerne bus. It winds down through a residential area, past a pretty church, a traditional farmhouse and barn with dairy fields and a traditional Alpenhorn workshop whose proprietor, sadly, was already enjoying his Saturday afternoon so we could only admire through the window. Back on the flat, you emerge onto a main street just up from the bus stop. All of which was clearly signposted from the terminus,  with classic Swiss organisation. The No. 1 whisks you back to Lucerne central station in about 15 minutes.

We'll never know how many of our ancestors wandered that mountainside, but it's a safe bet they did. Who knows. Maybe Franz Melchior followed his herds up to the plateau that would become the Hotel Pilatus-Klum. Maybe he looked down on the spectacular, but then nearly-empty Alpnach valley and thought he needed to get out of the most boring place in the world. Sadly, the one thing we know he did not do was think to invest in the cog railway, the steamer line that brought tourists to it or a posh little hotel on the summit. Had he done that, we might have been enjoying the profits of the day rather than spending a fortune to enjoy it.

I forgive you, great-grandfather Franz. At least you gave me an excuse for a spectacular day out with your grandson.