Rita Christen – Switzerland’s pioneering mountain guide

Rita Christen is exceptional. The first female president of the Swiss Mountain Guide Association is one of only 40 or so female guides in Switzerland.

As a young girl, Christen would spend every spare moment during the ski season at the Urnäsch village ski lift in canton Appenzell Outer Rhodes, northeastern Switzerland. Her father was the director of the Säntisbahn cable car, and she would join the mountain rescue team on their last run of the day to make sure no one was injured on the pistes.

In 1998 she became Switzerland’s 12th female mountain guide – only about 3% of Swiss mountain guides are women – and in 2020 the Swiss Mountain Guide Association elected her president. The fact that she was the first woman to hold the position in the organisation’s more than 100-year history triggered massive, and positive, media coverage.

This film by Romansh-speaking Swiss public television, RTR, gives an insight into Christen’s work as president, but it also shows her with her family and doing what she loves the most: climbing. We get to know a cheerful and lively woman with a profound passion for the mountains.

(Subtitles translated from German to English by SWISS TXT)