Chatting it up on the four-hour hike from the Swiss alpine village of Saas Grund to our destination near the 13,245-foot Weissmeiss, we get the truth: Ettle, skilled in climbing technique and rescue, has never used a GPS to find his way around.

Where Ettle spends most of his time, the trails are marked with precision. Piles of rock cairns and spray-painted arrows on a long succession of boulders lead a hiker at the end of the day to a warm meal, a cold beer and a cot in one of a series of Alpen huts sponsored by European mountaineering clubs. My husband is describing the wonders of the handheld global positioning system he discovered two years ago, and which now accompanies him on every complex outdoor journey.

"Nope, never needed one," Ettle says. "A compass maybe, but rarely."

We find this revelation slightly staggering, for we have come to climb in the Swiss and French Alps with our brains and bodies tuned to the only model of outdoor vacation we know: wild. We are products of the Rocky Mountains and the redrock deserts. We know that in our world, it is highly possible to get lost a few hundred yards from the car, get trapped unequipped in the icy waters of a keeper pothole deep inside a southern Utah canyon, or to end up a tasty meal by happening suddenly upon a grizzly bear in the Alaskan wilderness.

And we wouldn't trade the U.S. version of wild for all the best glacier climbing on Mont Blanc.

There is jaw-dropping scenery here in Switzerland and in nearby France's Chamonix Valley. The narrow winding road from Argentiere to Chamonix is ringed by the spectacular Mer de Glace and the Glacier des Bossons, as well as the craggy pinnacles of the famed Aiguille les Drus and the Aiguille du Midi peaks. But there is also no end to civilization in what passes for wilderness in these places.

European tourists flee the cities for these mountains to "get away," but for me, the order and structure of this environment never quite makes that possible. People we meet in the mountain huts talk obsessively of racking up lifetime lists of "four-thousands," - peaks surpassing 4,000 meters (13,123 feet). It's something all right, that goal, and if you've climbed Utah's King's Peak, at 13,528 feet, or Wyoming's Grand Teton at a robust 13,770, you'll understand.

But getting to the Alps' grandest peaks is a fascinating process. Most climbers will pack up their crampons, ropes and ice axes, then head for one of many "téléphérique" or tram rides up the mountain to get there. At the top of the Aiguille du Midi, a glass and concrete observation deck complete with restaurant and bar guarantees a view of Mont Blanc and the bustling Chamonix Valley.

We've seen a bit of this phenomenon here in our own backyard. Fascinated by the streamlined, European approach to the outdoors, mountaineer and businessman Dick Bass plopped a bit of the Swiss Alps in Little Cottonwood Canyon 30 years ago with his Snowbird resort. It's lovely, it's clean, it's maintained, it's big. The tramway, the chain of concrete lodges, the thwarted effort to build a restaurant high atop Hidden Peak - close your eyes, click your heels three times and you could well be in Switzerland's Jungfrau.

I'll never have a long list of Europe's "four-thousands." Not if it means taking a cable ride to get there. Give me big and open, give me untamed. What's left of it here is well worth preserving.

hmullen@sltrib.com