Zermatt Usually we would try to get away for a few days of winter sun early in the year, but the only week I could get off work was the same week that Judith had already arranged to go skiing. So it was a case of sit around at home on my own, or go with her to one of my favourite places in the world. Bit of a no-brainer really.
Matterhorn Saturday - A mid-afternoon flight from Gatwick to Geneva was quite civilised from the point of view of not having to get up really early to drive to the airport. However, once we'd arrived in Geneva we had a long coach and train transfer to Zermatt, so we didn't arrive at our chalet until about 22:30. Just time for a bite to eat before bedtime.Sunday - It was cold, very overcast and snowing a bit on Sunday morning. So I wrapped up warm in several layers and headed out for my first day of walking. I walked up to Stafel, where the weather cleared just enough to allow me this tricky directly-into-the-sun shot of the impressive north face of the Matterhorn. The mountain looks kind of short and wide from this angle because Stafel is pretty much right at the bottom of the north face.On the way back to Zermatt I detoured to the cablecar station at Furi (1,867m) to give myself the option of a ride home for the last bit if my legs were starting to go a bit wobbly. However, I was still feeling pretty good, so I walked the last couple of miles back to Zermatt (1,620m).Total ascent today - 2,402 feetTotal descent today - 2,402 feetDistance walked today - 9.5 miles
Blauherd Monday - The weather was much improved, so I decided to opt for one of the more scenic trails, from the cablecar station at Blauherd to the restaurant at Fluhalp.I started the day by getting a funicular train and two cablecars from Zermatt (1,620m) all the way up to Rothorn (3,103m). It was blowing a gale and freezing cold at Rothorn (my thermometer was showing -12C), so I was glad I wasn't actually doing any walking up there.I swiftly retreated to the cablecar and went back down to Blauherd (2,571m) to start my walk. The photo shows the trail stretching off into the distance as I left Blauherd. There was no wind and it felt significantly less cold, although the clouds in the distance looked a little menacing.
Blauherd View Looking behind me, I'm treated to a magnificent view of the snow-covered valley and the Matterhorn.
Fluhalp View After a while I got my first view of the restaurant at Fluhalp - the tiny, dark shape right in the middle of this photo.
Matterhorn View Arriving at Fluhalp (2,616m), there are still fabulous views of the Matterhorn behind me. If you look carefully at the bottom of the photo, you can see that mine are the only footsteps in the snow. I'm the first person to have walked this trail today.The vast majority of tourists were in Zermatt to ski, so the hiking trails were positive havens of peace and tranquility.
Fluhalp Here you can actually make out the restaurant clearly. As it was a relatively short and flat walk from Blauherd to Fluhalp, I arrived well before lunchtime, so it was a bit early for a bite to eat. So I sat on the restaurant's terrace for half-an-hour admiring the view before heading back to Blauherd.
Memories of Summer On the way back to Blauherd, I could see one of the summer trail signposts poking out of the snow in the distance, waiting for the summer to return.
Goat Because there were so many noisy skiers about, the local wildlife appeared to have retreated to the quieter areas, i.e. the nice bits I was walking in.
Snow It started to snow, which briefly obscured the fabulous, uninterrupted views I'd had all morning. Fortunately it didn't last long.
Tufteren Having made it back to Blauherd safely, I got the cablecar down to Sunnegga (2,288m) and briefly met up with Judith. She was just going for some lunch, but I wasn't hungry as I'd been snacking on tiny Lion bars all morning. So I decided to take the short, flat walk to the restaurant at Tufteren (2,215m).Being short and flat, the trail to Tufteren was rather busy. Although when I say "busy", I mean I saw a couple of dozen people over a period of an hour-and-a-bit. As it was such a short walk, I still wasn't particularly hungry when I got to the restaurant at Tufteren, so I turned straight round and headed back to Sunnegga.
Goats On the way back to Sunnegga, I saw these goats sneaking about in the trees near the trail.It was still fairly early when I got back to Sunnega, so I thought I'd take a slightly indirect trail back to Zermatt. About a mile-or-so out of Sunnegga, the trail forks. The left trail goes more-or-less directly back to Zermatt, whilst the right trail goes north along the side of the valley at the same altitude (~2,000m) for a couple of miles before dropping steeply towards Tiefenmatten and turning back to the south where it eventually skirts along the edge of the town. From here numerous side trails allow you to re-enter Zermatt at a convenient point.
Goat Shortly after I'd taken the right trail at the fork, I saw this goat. There were a couple of others with it, but they remained fairly well hidden in the trees and offered no photo opportunities.
Another Goat A short while later I came across this goat (there were a lot of goats about), which appeared to be sunbathing on a sunny, south-facing bit of the trail. However, when it saw me, it got up and prepared to leg it...
Brave Goat ...which was particularly impressive given where it was standing. As I approached it started to jump down the rocks and shortly disappeared from sight. I've no idea how they can move around so confidently on such steep and snow covered rocks.
Zermatt View And this is the view of Zermatt where the goat was sitting (with the Matterhorn in the distance). It had clearly picked a good spot. The sun had moved around and was shining almost straight into the camera by this point (it's barely out of the shot in the top left), so it was a fairly tricky photo to take. I made a mental note to come back up here one morning when the sun would be in a more favourable position.
Cross Here I've done the big drop on the trail that I mentioned earlier and am on the south-facing bit of the trail. Even though I'm now only about 30 minutes from our chalet, you can see that I'm still a fairly long way above the town.
Sunset As a arrive back in town, the sun has disappeared behind the Matterhorn.
Apres Ski I dumped my rucksack at the chalet and walked into the center of Zermatt to meet Judith in some bar or other (it’s near a bridge apparently), where there was a live band playing. They are far too loud for my aged and sensitive ears.Time to head back to the chalet to see what's for dinner.Total ascent today - 876 feet (because I used trains and cablecars to get up most of the mountain)Total descent today - 3,219 feetDistance walked today - 10.7 miles
Trail Tuesday - Having made a mental note yesterday to go back to the view point when the sun wasn't shining straight into the lense of my camera, first thing after breakfast I've set off back to yesterday's view point.As you can see, the snow here was pretty deep - about three feet in places - but the trail has been very well prepared.
Edelweiss Through gaps in the trees, about a mile away I could see the hotel/restaurant at Edelweiss on the other side of the valley. Being a short, but challengingly steep, thirty minute walk from Zermatt's high street, this is somewhere I would normally visit regularly if I'm here in the summer (often just to stretch my legs before breakfast). But at this time of year it looks very much shut for the season.
Zermatt View A short while later and I'm back at the view point. As you can see, I've arrived so early that the eastern side of the valley is still casting a shadow over most of town. I made a mental note to come back up here not quite so early one morning when the sun would be in a more favourable position.
Chalet The chalet that we were staying in is right in the middle of this photo. If you think the photo looks a little odd, it's because I've applied a miniature effect to make it look a bit more interesting. Judith does not like this style of photograph.
Matterhorn View A while later and I've reached the point where the two trails down to Zermatt meet on the way up to Sunnegga. I didn't have any particular desire to go back to Sunnegga itself as it was very busy with skiers yesterday. So I turned hard-right and headed down the trail back to Zermatt.Back in Zermatt (1,620m) I optimistically decided to try to walk up to Riffelalp (2,211m).
Chami-Hitta I had hoped to have lunch at Riffelalp, but about half way up it became apparent that I was going to run out of puff a fair while before I got there, despite the best efforts of my stash of mini-Lion bars. Handily it was at about this time that I walked past the sign you can see in the photo for the restaurant Chami-Hitta.
Chami-Hitta A short while later I arrived at the restaurant Chami-Hitta, which looked most welcoming. I had a beer and a very nice goulash soup for my lunch.When I got up to leave, there was a lady on a stretcher laid in the doorway of the restaurant surrounded by fellows in very serious looking mountain gear. After a minute they picked up the stretcher and took it outside, which was handy as it had been blocking the exit.
Chami-Hitta Terrace Fifty meters away a helicopter was waiting to whisk the unfortunate lady away for presumably urgent medical attention. The people you can see in this photo looking to the left are photographing and videoing the helicopter. However, I thought it seemed a little disrespectful to photograph the lady's misfortune, so I haven't got any photos of the helicopter departing.Anyway, after the helicopter had blasted everyone on the terrace with snow as it took off (which was quite entertaining), I continued my walk up to Riffelalp (2,211m).From Riffelalp I got the train up to Riffleberg (2,582m), from where I had decided that I was going to finish my day with a shortish walk up to Rotenboden (2,815m).
Riffelberg Here's a photo of the hotel at Riffelberg, looking north along the valley past Zermatt, which is just visible at the bottom of the valley on the left.
Trail There are no trees up here and the wide trail meanders across a rolling, snow covered landscape. The three people you can see in this photo are about as busy as this trail got.
Gornergrat In the distance I can see Gornergrat, with the cablecar station at Hohtalli off to the left.An hour-and-a-bit later, after a more arduous uphill slog than I had anticipated, I arrived at Rotenboden (2,815m). I got the train down to Riffelalp (2,211m), where I had the genius idea of walking back down to Zermatt (1,620m).I think it would be fair to say that I was well shattered when I got back to the chalet that evening.Total ascent today - 4,098 feetTotal descent today - 3,648 feetDistance walked today - 9.5 miles
Zmutt Wednesday - Having overdone it a bit with my vertical efforts yesterday, today I had decided to have a "rest" day. So I started the day with the relatively gentle walk from Zermatt (1,620m) to Zmutt (1,936m). Because Zmutt isn't near any pistes or cablecars, it's basically deserted in the winter, as you can see from the photo. So I quickly passed through and pressed on to Furi (1,867m).
Zmutt Shortly after leaving Zmutt, the trail crossed a bridge to the other side of the valley, which afforded a better view of Zmutt as a whole. As you can see from this photo, it sits relatively close to the edge of a rather large cliff.
Riffelberg and Gornergrat On the way to Furi I was treated to this unusual view of the hotel at Riffelberg (in the foreground) with the hotel at Gornergrat barely visible through the clouds, a couple of miles further away.
Blauherd/Fluhalp View I also got a nice view of where I'd been walking on Monday. The arrow in the top left is pointing to the cablecar station at Rothorn, where I briefly froze first thing in the morning. The middle arrow is pointing to the cablecar station at Blauherd where I started/ended my walk. And the arrow on the right is pointing to the restaurant at Fluhalp.
Fluhalp I've zoomed in as far as my camera can manage and you can just about make out the shape of the restaurant at Fluhalp, right in the middle of the photo. From all the way over here, it looked much, much insignificant in the landscape than it did from close up.
Zermatt There was also a nice view, looking to the north across Zermatt.Shortly afterwards I arrived in Furi, where I met with Judith for lunch in the Restaurant Furi.
Urinal View After lunch I thought I should lighten the load a little, as it were, before I set off walking again. In the toilets, standing at the urinal, this was the view from the window directly in front of me. If anyone knows of a better urinal view than this, I'd very much like to know where it is.
Mysterious Reid As it was still fairly early, I decided to try to walk to Reid. However, this proved to be a much more challenging task than I was expecting.On the way back to Zermatt there was a sign to Reid, so I followed that for a while. It led me a few hundred feed up the side of the valley before the trail simply ended.So I backtracked towards Zermatt until I found another trail to Reid. Unfortunately, after a short while this turned into a "multi-use" trail, i.e. you have to share it with skiers. Besides being rather narrow, at that time of the afternoon there were many skiers making their way back to town for some apres-ski and I was basically walking in the opposite direction to them, which just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.So I backtracked again and tried to find the start of the GPS trail from the middle of Zermatt that I'd downloaded from the zermatt.ch website. Again, this proved surprisingly difficult to find. By the time I had actually found, it I was thoroughly bored and decided to head back to the chalet instead.
Matterhorn Back at the chalet, the combination of the clouds and the sun setting behind the Matterhorn was creating a rather nice view, so I spent a few minutes taking photos.
Matterhorn More cloudy views.
Matterhorn Eventually it was time for dinner.Total ascent today - 2,139 feetTotal descent today - 2,139 feetDistance walked today - 9.8 miles (so not that much of a rest day after all!)
Reid Thursday - After having finished yesterday making a lot of effort to find the start of the GPS trail to Reid, I thought I would start Thursday by capitalising on that effort and walk to Reid.So I headed back to the start of the trail and set off. Within 50 meters the real trail in the snow had deviated from the marked trail on my GPS and I was on a snow covered slope that I could barely cling to, even with spikes on my boots and a pair of walking poles! I managed to scramble up the slope and picked up the trail again a couple of hundred meters away, where it promptly led me to the front door of someone's chalet. At this point I decided to give up on the insane GPS trail altogether and went to find another signposted trail that I'd passed about 20 minutes earlier.This also initially proved to be challenging, with the first 50 meters-or-so being very steep to the point that I was again barely able to cling on with my spikes and poles. However, after that it leveled out a lot and reverted to the standard trail format I'd become used to.It turned out to be a rather short trail too, as I arrived in Reid about 30 minutes later. This is the view looking back towards Zermatt from the trail. Having passed through Reid, I ended up back on the "multi-use" trail I had avoided walking on yesterday afternoon. However, this early in the morning no skiers were thinking of returning to Zermatt yet, so I had the whole thing to myself.
Tiefenmatten Although there are allegedly 70km of prepared winter hiking trails in Zermatt (according to the zermatt.ch website), there are a still signposts for a couple of hundred kilometers of summer hiking trails. It appeared that a few intrepid snowshoers had been walking on some of the summer trails. Given that it hadn't snowed all week, the trails the snowshoers had made had persisted and a few intrepid walkers had also started to follow them, which had created quite well packed and easy to follow additional hiking trails. I saw a signpost pointing up such a trail to Tiefenmatten, where I'd already visited a couple of times already. So I headed in that direction.Eventually I popped out onto a prepared winter trail, which afforded excellent views of Zermatt.
Zermatt View And here's another one.As it was still only late morning, I decided to reprise Tuesday's arduous walk up to Riffelalp (2,211m), which turned out not to be so bad on this day, maybe because I knew what to expect this time round?Anyway, I made it to Riffelalp okay, from where I got the train all the way up to Gornergrat (3,089m).
Gornergrat There weren't many people around at the hotel at Gornergrat, since most of the people on the train were skiers, who just got off the train, put on their skis and headed back down. Which was a shame (for them) because the views up here were magnificent.Here's a view of the train station, with the ever present Matterhorn just visible through the clouds.
Panorama Here's a mini-panorama from the viewpoint just above the hotel, showing the hotel and some of the surrounding mountains. Awesome.
Clouds The Matterhorn was popping in and out of the clouds, creating some impressive scenes. So I settled down to take a few photos.
Glaciers Periodically one has to remind oneself to look somewhere other than at the Matterhorn. The views over the Gornergletscher were also fabulous.
Glaciers in B&W This is the same photo as the last one, but in black and white. I think I prefer the other one, but the textures in the black and white version look really nice.
Matterhorn Clouds on the Matterhorn. I think this is probably my favourite photo of the week.
Matterhorn More clouds on the Matterhorn. I could have sat and looked at this view until it got dark, but eventually I had to head back down the mountain. So I got the train to Riffelberg to meet Judith, who happened to be skiing on the same bit of the mountain.
Judith Finally I managed to be in the same place as Judith when she still had her skis on.As she was done skiing for the day, we got the train down to Riffelberg before getting the new cablecar (new for us anyway - it either wasn't here or wasn't working the last time we visited) down to Furi. Finally we got the Matterhorn Express cablecar back to Zermatt for a few beers before dinner.Total ascent today - 3,287 feetTotal descent today - 1,742 feetDistance walked today - 7.3 miles
Zmutt Friday - It was our last full day. As I'd already walked pretty much everywhere, I thought I'd spend my last day reprising my favourite trails from earlier in the week. So I started by heading for Zmutt (1,936m). As the weather was much, much better than the last time I was here, I finally got a picture of Zmutt in the sunlight.
RIffelberg and Gornergrat From near Zmutt I was also able to get a better version of the picture I took on Wednesday, when Gornergrat was barely visible through the clouds. On this day it was very clearly visible. From Zmutt I headed for Stafel (2,199m) again. Because I'd set off quite early and spent less time dawdling about than on Sunday, I got to Stafel well before lunchtime.
Signpost I hung around for a while taking photos, my favourite of which was this one of a snow-buried signpost. On the right hand side, just above the level of the signpost, you can just make out the blue of the ice in the Zmuttgletscher (thanks to Judith for pointing that out - I'd not even spotted it!).
Matterhorn This was also the closest I'd come to the Matterhorn all week, so it seemed fitting to make this my last photo of the holiday.From here I walked back to Furi (1,867m) and from there I walked back to Zermatt (1,620m). As it was still early, for good measure I walked up to Tiefenmatten again.Total ascent today - 3,330 feetTotal descent today - 3,330 feetDistance walked today - 12.6 milesSaturday - Up at 6am for a 7am taxi to the station to catch a train took us to Tasch to catch a coach that took us to the airport in Geneva, where we stood in a shed (actually the winter overflow terminal) for an hour before getting into the airport proper, where we caught our flight home.And so ended another completely brilliant holiday in Zermatt. Although I wouldn't have ideally chosen to visit a ski resort in the ski season, Zermatt has managed to provide enough entertainment to keep me out of the way of the skiers for most of the week. Judith seems to have had a pretty good time too. I can't wait to come back again.Total ascent this week - 16,132 feetTotal descent this week - 16,480 feetTotal distance walked this week - 59.4 miles