If anyone ever tells you that cows cannot climb mountains, they are disillusioned. Cows are perfectly able to reach the places that goats can. I know this because I saw them with my own eyes while putting up a strip wire at an altitude of 1,500 metres.

My two nights up on the Schwägalp were amazing, to say the least. Nestled under the Santis peak (2,503 metres), many local farmers bring their cows up to graze here during the summer.

I stayed with Bruno and Beat, two brothers whose parents stay farming lower in the valley while they bring the cows up on the Alps for seven weeks during the summer. Their farm on the Alps has a barn for the 20 cows, which also serves as a milking parlour. It also has a small shed for the goats and a house with no electricity or running water.

If you need to take a break from the hectic chaos of the social media scene, I highly recommend a week up here. There’s no such thing as Facebook notifications, pokes, likes, tags or retweets here. The only time you will be disturbed by others is when the goats decide they want to be milked at 5am in the morning and come clattering on to the roof above your bedroom, or when you hear another farmer playing the Alp horn across the valley.

Generator-powered milking machine

The orchestral clanking of cowbells blends in with the musical atmosphere of wild animal noises and the hum of generators powering the milking machines. It is forbidden for hikers to pick the rare alpine plants (Old man, Edelweiss, Alp Rose, etc), but the cows munch away on them all day long. Believe it or not, the dairy products do have a certain added sweetness as a result of this flowery diet.

The hike to bring in the cows twice a day would certainly put calves on you – excuse the pun. They graze the steep hill behind the house and the highest point on the farm is 100 metres higher than the farmyard. By the time the four goats have been hand-milked and the cows are tied into their stalls, the sun is up and the cows are ready to be milked. The generator creates light in the barn, pumps drinking water up the hill for the cows and also powers the milking machine.

The bucket plant has the cows milked in an hour and the churns have to be brought to the Kaserai (cheese factory) before 8am. Bruno was surprised that they yielded more than one churn the first morning I was there; usually they yield more milk in the evenings. While I would like to believe that this was because the cows had warmed to my presence, Bruno said it was most likely that the full moon had encouraged the cows to eat more grass during the night.

While life on the Alps is a great escape from the rest of the world, it is tough work and involves long days of sawing trees, milking cows and hauling fencing equipment up the mountain. But the farmers still keep up the tradition and are rewarded with a higher milk price as it helps maintain the farming landscape: 0.80CHF/litre (74c/litre) compared with the normal 0.57CHF/litre (53c/litre). The cheese fetches a much higher price too and many tourists visit the area every summer.

The base price for milk is curently 0.62CHF/litre (57c/litre) on the protected Swiss market. After transport and other charges are deducted, the final price is different for each farmer.