Together we take the Schilthorn cableway up to Mürren via Gimmelwald. The slope groomers gather here before their shift and have a coffee together. They exchange ideas. The newcomers get important tips. Yanick Wyss is not one of them. This is his third season as a slope groomer in the Mürren-Schilthorn ski area. I learn that we are travelling in the Gimmeln-Schiltgrat region today. With the Leitwolf, the big machine that has a cable winch. "It's my favourite thing to work with," says Yanick Wyss, who is also regularly out and about with smaller snow groomers. He is even sometimes involved in preparing the snow park. "The lift track at the Gimmeln ski lift is uneven," he learns shortly before starting work and promises to take a close look at it.

It's 5 p.m., the lifts have not been in operation for half an hour. The pistes are empty. We're ready to go. I take a seat next to Yanick Wyss. He starts the engine and the system starts up. He sets the heating to 23 degrees. "I'd rather be too warm than too cold." Then the nine metre long, five metre wide, 12.4 tonne, 530 hp vehicle starts moving. Yanick Wyss steers the caterpillars with his left hand, while his right hand is on a kind of joystick with which he operates the plough and the front shovel. A screen in front of him, lots of buttons - I would be overwhelmed. "It's easier than it looks," says Yanick Wyss. He didn't have to do any training. "The car test is enough". A lot of it is "learning by doing". "The fact that I'm practised in handling large machines has certainly helped." In addition to his job as a slope groomer, he helps his father on the farm. In the summer, he works temporarily on the construction site - and goes to the alpine pastures with his father's animals. He would like to obtain his hunting licence in the near future.

We are always travelling at 13 to 16 kilometres per hour. Every now and then, Yanick Wyss stops, gets out, attaches the cable and starts up the snow groomer's winch. "So that we don't slide down steep slopes." The job doesn't seem that safe to me. "You just have to be on the ball," says Yanick Wyss, "and react correctly in dicey situations." When he slipped for the first time without a cable winch, he was also briefly afraid. Now, however, nothing can rattle him so quickly. A short time later, the screen shows an incline of over 60 per cent as we descend attached to the winch. I let out a "That's pretty steep". In response, I get a "That's nothing yet." When Yanick Wyss uses the cable winch, he sets up a warning triangle. "It happens time and again that skiers or people are still out on their sledges at night, often slightly drunk. If they don't see the wire rope or it gets caught somewhere and then flies across the piste. Then it becomes life-threatening."