Living in Switzerland requires vertical thinking. So too does traveling here. When visiting many of the dairy farms and summer communities located atop the Alps, the question becomes not how far they are by road and rail but how high up they are. Fortunately, Switzerland’s constitution mandates that every village across the country’s four linguistic areas must be connected by road, rail, waterway or, in the trickiest locations, cable car.

While much is written about Switzerland’s excellent network of punctual red trains, iconic cog railways and funiculars, it’s the humble, underappreciated cable car—called luftseilbahn in Swiss German—that truly connects the remote alpine com-munities to rest of the country. Word for word, the translation of luftseilbahn is “air rope train...