Zermatt (again!) When we were in Zermatt in February, I took a photo of the Matterhorn that I liked so much that I had it printed poster-sized and I put it on the wall at home. I was looking at that photo a few weeks ago and it occurred to me that I really wanted to see the Matterhorn again. So, seven months later, here we are again.
Brig Saturday - Up at some ridiculous hour of the night to drive to Heathrow for an early flight to Geneva. We arrived at Terminal 5 a few minutes after the bag drop desks opened and the queues were enormous - the biggest I’ve ever seen in Terminal 5 by far. Fortunately we’d booked Business Class seats, so managed to skip the queues completely. Phew.We arrived in Geneva for 9-ish and jumped straight onto a train to Brig. The photo is the view looking East from the platform at Brig station.
Waiting Judith waiting for the train at Brig.
Zermatt It took an hour to get from Brig to Zermatt. At Zermatt station we phoned the hotel to tell them we’d arrived and they sent their little electric buggy to pick us up. We were quickly checked in and shown to our room. No view of the Matterhorn from our balcony this time, but as you can see, it’s still not bad.
Room The hotel had given us a complementary upgrade, from a “standard” room to this spacious suite. This is Judith in our living/dining area. If you’re feeling particularly deep of pocket, I can very highly recommend the Hotel Firefly.
Matterhorn View As it was still only late afternoon, I decided to have a quick go on the short trail up to Edelweiss. It may only be a short trail (it’s pretty much exactly one mile from Zermatt’s high street to Edelweiss), but the trail rises just over 1,100 feet in that distance, making it a reasonable/significant effort if you’re giving it beans.On my way from our hotel to the start of the trail, I was treated to this magnificent view of the Matterhorn from the bridge in the center of town.
Edelweiss View Thirty minutes later (28-30 minutes is as fast as I can get up there these days) and I was at Edelweiss. As there are many photos of the view down to Zermatt from Edelweiss elsewhere on my site, I thought I’d walk a little further up the trail and take this alternative photo of the side/back of the hotel/restaurant instead.
Waterfall On the way back down I stopped at this waterfall to take a few photos.
Waterfall And another. I took a similar photo in this location a couple of years ago, which turned out better than I expected and I wanted to see if it was just a fluke. But I’m pretty pleased with how these ones have turned out too.For the photographically oriented amongst you, the waterfall photos are HDRs using a shutter speed of around a second. Because the waterfall was in deep shade, a polarizing filter and an aperture of around f/11 at ISO100 was quite sufficient to get a slow enough shutter speed to blur the water nicely.
Beer Back at the hotel, there was time for a beer in the bar before turning in after a long day.
Games Room This is the hotel’s games room, which is adjacent to their bar. In case we wanted entertainment of a more electronic orientation, we had a complimentary PS3 in our room, which was nice (although we never actually turned it on).Distance walked today - 2.9 milesAscent today - 1,237 feetDescent today - 1,237 feet
Dam Sunday - A slightly unusual feature of our hotel was that it didn’t actually have a restaurant/dining area of its own. So it was strictly room service only for breakfast. Which is a bit weird, but does seem to encourage you to get up and about in the morning (apart from in Judith’s case, where she didn’t actually get out of bed until breakfast was on the table, then went back to bed immediately after finishing eating) .Anyway, having dispatched a very nice breakfast in our room, I headed off on my first proper walk of the week, to the Schonbielhutte. The Schonbielhutte is one of the mountain huts in the area, situated at the furthest reaches of the hiking trail network from Zermatt.I started by walking up to Zmutt and past the dam. Here’s a photo of the dam.
Valley View Further up the valley, the weather wasn’t looking too clever. On a clear day there would be magnificent views of the Matterhorn from this trail. However, on this day I could just see the base of it (in the top left of this photo), with the bulk of it hidden in the gathering clouds.
Marmot My first marmot of the week. Yay!
Rock Fall This wasn’t a good sign. I’d been diverted because the trail ahead had been obliterated by a rock fall. However, a quick check of my map indicated that the detour would only take me about fifteen minutes out of my way, so it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience.
Waterfall Before long, I was back on the correct trail and starting to gain some altitude. If it hadn’t been so cloudy, there would have been magnificent views of the Matterhorn across the valley. As it was, I couldn’t really see much of anything at all.Coincidentally, later in the day I was flicking through a magazine in the hotel’s spa and there was a full page photo taken from this very spot. The only difference was that their photo was taken on a clear day and they had a brilliant view of the Matterhorn.
Caterpillar I came across this enormous caterpillar walking on the trail. For reference, this 2Fr coin is a little bigger than a 2p. Presumably whatever it turns into would have to be similarly enormous. However, I didn’t see any bird-sized butterflies or moths during our stay.
Schonbielhutte This was my first view of the Schonbielhutte (in the upper right of the photo). And it was getting cloudier. Or maybe I was just getting closer to them?
Morraine At this point the trail passed along the top of the morraine of the Zmuttgletscher (a morraine, for those who don’t know, being the big pile of rocks pushed out to the side as a glacier passes down a valley - when the glacier melts/retreats, you’re just left with big piles of rocks).Unfortunately there’s nothing in the photo to provide any scale. So you’ll have to take my word for it (or go to Zermatt and look yourself) when I say that the slope on the right down to the valley floor is about 200 feet high! So you wouldn’t want to tumble off the trail at this point if you could possibly avoid it.
Clouds I was probably only about half-a-mile from the Hutte now, but I was also inside the clouds, so I couldn’t be quite certain where it was as the trail switched back and forth up the side of the valley.
Schonbielhutte Finally, I arrived. And the clouds had kindly lifted slightly so I can actually see my destination. Unfortunately it had also just started to rain quite heavily too.It had taken about four hours to get here and I was definitely ready for some lunch.
Lunch As you can see, the Hutte was completely deserted (apart from the very nice people that work there and were fetching me my lunch). This was at least consistent with the trail here, which was also completely deserted (apart from the four mountain bikers I saw who shouldn’t have been on the hiking trail in the first place because they have their own dedicated trails!).I hung around in the Hutte for about 45 minutes, hoping that the rain would ease up a bit, but it didn’t. So eventually I had to resign myself to a walk home in the pouring rain.Shortly after setting off, I heard what I thought was thunder. For some reason, I turned to see where the sound had come from, just in time to see a huge lump of ice breaking off the glacier on the other side of the valley. Fortunately there were no glaciers on my side of the valley.
Sheep As the journey back to Zermatt was basically just retracing my outbound steps, there didn’t seem to be much point in subjecting my camera to the elements just for the sake of it. However, I thought it was worth making an exception for these sheep that for some reason had all decided to stand on the trail.My shooing efforts seemed to attract as many extra sheep onto the trail as I was displacing off it and it took me a few minutes to get through them.
Deer A bit later on I saw a couple of deer. However, they were a fair distance away and this was the best photo I could manage in the rain.
Pool Being downhill on the way home, the return journey took a little less time than the outward journey, which was a relief. Back at the hotel and there was time for a dip in their lovely, deserted pool before dinner.
Sun Lounge There was also time for a bit of a rest in the sun lounge. This is where I was reading the magazine that had the photo of the waterfall I saw earlier.
Zermatt View Monday - Considering we’d had five previous visits to Zermatt, in all that time we’d only really been properly rained on once. And here, on our sixth visit, we were experiencing our second properly wet day in two days. Still, this wasn’t going to stop me from having a crack at what should have been a relatively short, but impressively steep walk.Having made my way to the North end of town, the trail quickly rose steeply.
Valley Within an hour-or-so I was already up amongst the avalanche fences that are dotted all over this part of the mountainside above Zermatt. There was quite a lot of cloud below me and above me and generally all around me. It seemed likely that it wouldn’t be long before visibility deteriorated significantly.
Helicopter Visibility deteriorated significantly.I had heard a helicopter flying back and forth above me for a while, but I’d not been able to see it. However, finally I had started to get glimpses of it through the murk. It was apparently ferrying building materials to some workmen that were maintaining the avalanche fences very high up on the mountainside.At one point, when it was a little clearer than this, I raised my arms to take a photo of the helicopter, as is customary these days when peering at the little screen on the back of a compact camera, and the helicopter fellows must have spotted me and thought I was waving for assistance. They flew over and circled me a couple of times before satisfying themselves that I was in fact in no need of assistance at all.Note to self - take care when trying to take photographs of nearby helicopters in geographically challenging locations.
Goats After having my progress yesterday blocked by sheep lounging on the trail, today it was the turn of goats. As I was due a rest at this point, I decided to have a sit down and a couple of mini-Mars bars before trying to shoo them off the trail.
View Just as well I did because a couple of minutes later the clouds cleared and I was briefly treated to this fabulous view.
Trift A while later, I got my first misty view of the mountain hut at Trift. I’d been walking for about three hours and I’d only seen two other hikers on the way up here. And I saw them about two minutes before I took this photo.
Trift As you can see, it was still pretty cloudy and raining. Despite the fact that I saw practically no-one on my way up here (because I came up what is effectively the round-the-houses, back-door way), the Hutte itself was absolutely rammed. This was mainly because it’s a short and impressively scenic walk straight up the valley in the middle of the photo, from Edelweiss (where I was on Saturday). This was also the route I was about to take back down.Due to the fact that the weather was miserable again, I took no photos on the way down (not that I could see much to take photos of, even if I’d been inclined). Which was a shame because it really is an impressive walk down.A couple of hours later I was back at the hotel.
Pool Time for a dip in the pool before dinner. Judith took this from our balcony.
Hotel Bar There was also time for a beer in the hotel bar before dinner too.Total distance walked today - 10.7 milesTotal ascent today - 4,961 feetTotal descent today - 4,961 feet
Edelweiss Tuesday - There was still a lot of cloud about (there should be a mountain visible behind Edelweiss in the photo above). And the trees in the photo look white because it had been snowing overnight! It looked like I was in for another challenging day of walking.
Edelweiss This is the same view as the previous photo, just a wider angle. You can see a bit of the “missing” mountain behind Edelweiss in the bottom right corner.
Clouds and Trees The clouds blowing through the snow-covered trees made for an atmospheric early morning vista.
Firefly As I headed out, it occured to me that I hadn’t taken a photo of the outside of our beautifully presented hotel yet. So I did and here it is.
Matterhorn Despite the fact that there was a lot of cloud about when I got up, it seemed to have cleared up quite a lot in the intervening hour-or-so, giving me a brilliant view of the freshly snow-covered Matterhorn.
Snow The plan today was to head up the East side of the valley at Winkelmatten, then head North to Tufteren and then on to Tasch. However, despite the fact that the snow didn’t appear to have made it all the way down to into town, I only had to walk a few hundred feet up the side of the valley to be in the snow. Given that it’s still fairly early and this was a snow-covered, West-facing slope, it was cold. Really cold.
Scary Trail Before long I came to my favourite bit of scary, precarious trail. This is also one of the winter hiking trails. Often mountain goats sit on this bit of trail because it’s the first bit of this side of the valley to catch the morning sun. Not today though.
Trift Across the valley, I got a nice view of Trift, where I was yesterday. Visibility had improved significantly, as you can see.
Trift Zooming out a bit, you can see how small the Hutte looks in the imposing surrounding scenery.
Trift Zooming out even further, you can still just see the Hutte, slightly below the middle of the photo.
Tufteren After about 90 minutes of walking, I got to Tufteren. Unfortunately, the sign to Tasch was covered over with this temporary sign that said the trail was closed due to a rock fall (I think). That was a bit of a blow because there aren’t many other places to go from Tufteren. It was far too early to head back to Zermatt, and I wasn’t going to Unterrothorn or Oberrothorn because a) it was a really long way, b) it’s very high and would be covered in snow (Oberrothhorn is apparently the highest peak in Europe that you can walk to without the assistance of a mountain guide). So Blauherd it was then.
Matterhorn View This was the view from a couple of hundred feet above Tufteren. As you can see, despite the slightly cloudy start, it was turning out to be a splendid day and, in the sunny bits at least, the snow had melted rapidly.The Matterhorn is clearly visible on the left. The hill/mountain on the right is Wisshorn - the one that I walked up and over yesterday. And the dark bit right in the middle of the photo is the valley that I walked back down through.I would very much like to do that walk again one day when the weather is better (along with the one to the Schonbielhutte).
Fluealp Having passed Blauherd, I pressed on to Fluealp, which is just visible as the dark patch pretty much in the middle of this photo.
Fluealp Getting closer, but the trail was crossing one of those rocky bits where it's almost impossible to see where you're supposed to be going. Stiil, so long as I kept walking towards the hotel/restaurant, I would be broadly okay.
Into the Unknown I've been to the restaurant Fluealp many times over the years, but I'd never ventured past it. Until today.On the left is the lower slope of Oberrothorn. On the right is the moraine of the Findelngletscher. The trail was headed straight up the small valley that's been created between the two, to the point where they converge, about a mile ahead.
Morraine Initially the moraine was a couple of hundred feet above the trail, but as the trail climbed, the crest of the moraine got progressively closer. After about 20 minutes it was only about fifty feet above me, so I scrambled to the top for a look at the view.The Matterhorn, as ever, was clearly visible in the distance, with the restaurant Fluealp visible below it to the right.Although I'd only had to scramble up around fifty feet of rocky slope to get to the top of the moraine, there was an impressive drop of two or three hundred feet down the other side. As I was basically just balanced on an enormous pile of rocks, I didn’t hang around for too long.
Reflection Pretty much at the point where the mountain meets the moraine, there's a small, natural bowl with a little lake/pond in it. Being quite sheltered from the breeze, the water was glass smooth, creating this beautiful reflection of the Matterhorn. It was well worth the four hours or so had taken me to hike up here.I think this is my favourite photo of the week.
End of the Road I carried on up the trail for a few hundred yards more, to the point where I was permitted to travel no further. Here all of the hiking trail signs pointed back the way I'd come. Ahead was an alpine trail. To proceed beyond this point you need to be equipped with ropes and crampons and know how to climb and traverse a glacier. Basically none of the things I had/can do. It was time to turn back.Confusingly, this point is actually called Fluealp. Unlike the restaurant Fluealp, which is actually in a place called Flue.
Fluealp View Behind me was a magnificent vista - the Matterhorn, the restaurant Fluealp (at Flue), the glacial moraine and the little lake I took the earlier reflection photo at. Given its remote location, I reckon hardly anyone ever comes up here. I could have sat looking at this view all day. Unfortunately was a long walk back to town. It was time to get going.
Schonbielhutte From the trail back to town, I could see all the way across to the Schonbielhutte, where I walked to on Sunday. Even on maximum zoom, the Hutte itself was still quite hard to see. In this photo you can just make out a dark rectangle under the arrow.
Schonbielhtte Having zoomed out a bit, the Hutte is now pretty much impossible to see, but you can get a good idea of the scenery it’s in (which is more than I could in the clouds and rain on Sunday).
Schonbielhutte Finally, zoomed out further still, you can see its location relative to the Matterhorn. There would have been fabulous views of the Matterhorn from over there. Oh well, another trail to (re-)add to the list for a future visit.
Trift Now that the clouds have cleared, I’ve also got nice views across to Trift too.
Trift Now you can clearly see all of the mountains that surround Trift.
Beer It turned out to be a fairly straightforward walk back down to town, with magnificent views of the Matterhorn and the surrounding scenery all the way.Back in town, it was time for a beer and some dinner.Total distance walked today - 14.0 milesTotal ascent today - 4,121 feetTotal descent today - 4,121 feet
Zermatt View Wednesday - After yesterday’s sunshine, the weather had gone a bit pear-shaped again. As I’d had two big walking days in a row, I decided to have a bit of a rest today and just walk down the valley to Tasch, the first stop on the train out of Zermatt. This also gave me the option of getting the train back to Zermatt if I didn’t fancy the walk back or the weather turned really nasty.This was the view across Zermatt as I was leaving town first thing in the morning.
Bridge After a few miles I had the option of continuing to follow the trail that basically runs parallel with the railway line to Tasch, or to cross the valley (using this bridge) to take a trail that runs diagonally up the East side of the valley before descending into Tasch. The latter option sounded slightly more interesting and challenging, so I decided to do that.
Tasch The walk to Tasch was relatively uneventful and because I was walking down the bottom of the valley (in the rain), it wasn’t particularly scenic either. After a couple of hours I arrived in Tasch. This is a photo of their well kept graveyard.
Golf Course As it was still only late moring, I decided to press on further down the valley to Randa, where the next railway station is, again giving myself a get-back-to-Zermatt-quickly option. However, past Tasch lies the only bit of flat land in these here parts, which makes it a) not at all interesting to walk across, and b) all the more surprising that they’ve decided to use their only bit of flat land to build a golf course.Anyway, despite the fact that I was still a mile or so from Randa, this seemed like a nice spot to stop for lunch.
Logo There’s no denying that the bench I was having my lunch on belonged to the Zermatt Golf Club, what with them having carved this nice logo into it.After lunch, I couldn’t see any point in walking the last flat mile to Randa, so I started heading back to Zermatt.
Valley View On the way back the weather started to improve and I got to see my first blue sky of the day.
High Street Back in Zermatt, there were a lot of people out and about on the High Street.
Firefly As I got back to the hotel relatively early, i.e. a bit too early to head straight out for beer/dinner, I decided to pop out for an hour to see if I could find anything to take photos of. Here’s a nice one of the front of our hotel. In the background is Edelweiss (a little too small to actually see in this photo) and the bottom of the valley that goes up to Trift.
Pool View There was a nice view from the hotel’s swimming pool.
Old Town These are some of the barns and houses in Zermatt’s old town. Some of them apparently date back to the 1700’s.
Barn A barn in the old town. The building is balanced on those stone “mushrooms”, which prevent mice from getting at the stores. You would think it would also mean that they would occasionally blow over. However, I never saw one blown over and I never heard anyone mention that the do. The fact that some of these buildings are almost 300 years old presumably means it doesn’t happen much, if at all.
Barns More barns in the old town.
Stairs I thought these stairs made for an interesting composition.Anyway, after an hour of walking around town looking for things to take photos of, it was time to go for some dinner.Total distance walked today - 15.0 milesTotal ascent today - 1,982 feetTotal descent today - 1,982 feet
Matterhorn Thursday - The sun is out properly today and I was going to try to reprise my walk to the Hornlihutte from a couple of years ago. In this photo, the Hornlihutte is somewhere behind that small peak just to the left of the Matterhorn. The last (and only) time I was at the Hornlihutte, it was cloudy and snowing a bit and I couldn’t see anything of the Matterhorn itself. Hopefully the views would be somewhat better today.Also, just to make it a bit harder, I was going to try to walk there directly from Zermatt, whilst on my previous visit I started out by getting the cablecar up to Schwarzee, which chopped some 3,200 feet off the distance I’d need to climb, reducing it from around 5,500 feet to a mere 2,300 feet. On this day I was going to try for the whole, full-fat 5,500 feet.
Damme The first bit of the trail was very similar to Sunday’s effort - up past Zmutt to the dam. However, today instead of passing the dam and continuing along the valley, I would be crossing over the dam to walk up the other side of the valley.
Matterhorn View After a while, when the trees thinned out a bit, I started to get fabulous views of the Matterhorn ahead. This was taken outside the restaurant at Stafelalp.
Stafelalp And here’s a photo of the restaurant at Stafelalp. It had recently been refurbished and extended and it’s a really nice place to visit for lunch. Unfortunately it was still only mid-morning when I passed by, so it hadn’t opened for the day yet.
Ascent I was getting really close to the Matterhorn now. Up to this point, the trail had been climbing fairly gently. The next leg, up to the ridge, was going to be a serious slog.
Slope The trail up to the ridge zig-zagged back and forth up this rocky slope. My map indicated that it would take around an hour-and-a-half to get from the signpost in the last photo to the ridge. I think I did it slightly quicker than that, but not by much. In this photo the slope doesn’t look nearly as steep as it felt when I was perched on it. As I got higher, there were also increasingly large patches of snow to traverse, which wasn’t fun on a slope this steep.
Slope Here I was probably still several hundred feet from the top of the ridge.
Hornlihutte At last I was on the ridge and I could now clearly see my destination - the building towards the lower left of this photo. I could also feel the freezing, howling gale that was blowing across the ridge. All the way up, I’d just been walking in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt in the lovely sunshine. There’d been a bit of a breeze, but that had been quite refreshing considering the uphill slog. Now I’d had to put on my windproof gear, but it still felt like I was on the verge of being blown off my feet.
Helicopter A helicopter flew over. It looked like it was trying to land at the Hornlihutte, but the wind was making things tricky. It carefully closed in on the Hutte before giving up and flying in a big circle to line up for another try. It did this maybe three or four times before appearing to give up and fly away. Hopefully there wasn’t someone up there awaiting emergency evacuation.A couple of hikers ahead of me, who were much better equipped than I was, stopped for a discussion after crossing a particularly tricky patch of snow and ice. After a minute or so they decided to turn around and head back down. That was good enough for me. If they thought the conditions were too challenging with all the kit they were packing, the conditions were definitely too challenging for me. I turned back too.
Matterhorn View As soon as I crossed to the East side of the ridge, there wasn’t a breath of wind and a few hikers were sitting around in the beautiful sunshine eating their lunches. I popped back to the West side to get blasted by the freezing gale again, just to remind myself that wasn’t just my imagination.Having also stopped for a while to have some lunch, I started my descent. There were some great views of the Matterhorn on the way down.
Walkway Ah, the good old rickety metal walkway bolted to the crumbling mountainside. Awesome. I’m sure it’s a lot more sturdy than it looks. It was put up by the Swiss after all.
Schwarsee I texted Judith to tell her that I’d aborted my mission for the day, so she decided to get the cablecar up to Schwarsee, which you can see in the distance in the middle of this photo, to meet me. Zermatt is visible in the far distance on the left.
Schwarsee On the way down I passed the beautiful lake, with it’s little church. Interestingly, there’s a steady stream of people visiting the church, but no-one is coming over to this side of the lake to take this brilliant photo. Weird.
Zermatt This is a greatly zoomed in photo of Zermatt from Schwarzee.
Walking I found Judith in the restaurant at Schwarzee having some lunch, after which she gamely decided to join me in the walk back to Zermatt. Here she is in her traditional pose of walking away into the distance while I stop to take a photo.
Zmutt After a great deal of time and much mumbling and grumbling about how it was much further back than she remembered, we got to Zmutt. There was no option of diverting to a cablecar station at this point, since it was now so late in the afternoon that they had all closed for the day.
Beer A period of time later, we made it back to the hotel. Having spent a nice half-hour in the hotel’s pool, we went out looking for dinner and ended up having “Curry Rice Set” in Grampi’s again. Frankly, given how really nice it was and what great value-for-money it afforded, I would have gladly eaten Curry Rice Set for breakfast, lunch and dinner all week. In fact, if they’re still selling it the next time I’m in town, I might very well do that.Total distance walked today - 16.3 milesTotal ascent today - 5,013 feetTotal descent today - 5,013 feet
Condensation Friday - As the inside of my Garmin Fenix was still covered in condensation this morning (it had been like this since Sunday), I thought I’d best take a photo of it, just so I had some evidence later. (And it was just as well that I did because when we got back home, which is broadly at sea level, the display was completely clear! With the evidence of this photo, the shop that sold me my Fenix have sent it off to Garmin, hopefully to soon be replaced with one that is able to keep the moisture on the outside.)I’d decided that as I’d been pretty much walking all day, every day since we arrived, I was going to have a complete break from walking today and just be a tourist. So I dusted off my SLR, which had barely seen the light of day all week, and headed outside.
Firefly/Matterhorn I think it would be fair to say that unless you’re in one of the really expensive rooms in our hotel, you’re not going to get much of an in-room view of the Matterhorn during your stay. But as there are brilliant views of it from pretty much everywhere else, that shouldn’t really be a problem for anyone that’s on anything other than their first-and-only ever visit to Zermatt.
Gornergrat As we’d only got one day to be tourists, we needed to narrow down our options a bit. Judith decided she wanted to go to Gornergrat. Options suitably narrowed, we headed for the train station. Here’s a photo of the train on its way, er, down I think.
Gornergrat The train platform is visible in the bottom right (I don’t know why I didn’t wait and take my photo when there was a train in - that would have been much better) and that’s the hotel/shopping centre/restaurant/observatory in the distance. At some point I’m going to have to get round to organizing to stay up here one night and see what it’s like when all of the tourists have cleared off. There were many tourists up here. I would guess that this is the number one spot for people to visit when they’re in town by quite a significant margin.
Station A view of the station (with a train in) from the hotel.
Observatory A view of Judith in front of one of the observatory domes.
Monte-Rosa Hutte I’d been up here loads of times before and never noticed the Monte-Rosa-Hutte. In fact, I’d only spotted it this time because I saw it on a postcard in one of the shops in the Gornergrat “mall”. Having seen it on the postcard, I immediately headed outside to try to find the real thing.Despite its space-age design and construction, it’s basically a mountain hut, albeit quite a big one, with five or six floors. But have a look at where it is....
Monte-Rosa Hutte Zoomed out a bit, you can see it’s very much perched on the side of a mountain.
Monte-Rosa Hutte Zoomed out a bit more and you can barely see it, still right in the middle of the photo, clinging to what is basically a cliff face between two glaciers. There is no chance of me being able to go there unassisted, since it’s on one of the previously mentioned Alpine routes. That is proper bonkers.
Hornihutte Speaking of bonkers, there were also great views of the Hornlihutte, perched half way up the side of the Matterhorn. If you look very carefully you can just about make it out right in the middle of the photo. It’s amazing to think there’s a regular hiking trail up to that (I say “regular”, but it’s about as extreme as “regular” gets without actually becoming “Alpine”).
Hotel Schonegg View Back in town, we decided to pop up to the Hotel Schonegg, which is where we would very probably have stayed if we hadn’t stayed in the Firefly. Because the hotel is situated slightly up the side of the valley, they’ve got a most beautiful view from their terrace and balconies, as you can see from this photo. The view was so beautiful that we decided to hang around for a couple of hours to admire it whilst drinking a few beers. This place is definitely a strong candidate for a place to stay on our next trip to Zermatt.
Schonegg View And here are a couple of the beers that entertained us while we admired the brilliant view from the terrace of the Hotel Schonegg.
Miniature The slightly elevated view across town also offered one of the best opportunities of the week to do one of those “miniature” photos that Judith enjoys so much.
Pool Back at the Firefly, I took the opportunity to get a couple of photos of their pool while it was illuminated at night. There are LED lights in the pool that change the colour of the water. This is blue/purple.
Pool And this is red. There were some other colours too, but they didn’t come out so well in the photos.
Pool Presumably this is with white illumination, so the pool just looks, well, pool coloured?Anyway, so ended our last full day in Zermatt. Time for bed.Total distance walked today - 0 miles (approximately)Total ascent today - 0 feetTotal descent today - 0 feet
Edelweiss Saturday - Our flight wasn’t until the early evening and the hotel had kindly said we could hang around in our room for as long as we liked, so I took the opportunity to get an early(ish) start and end the week as I started it - with a blast up to Edelweiss.When I got there the sun was just appearing over the mountains across the valley, so I couldn’t take any pictures off their terrace towards town and had to retreat to this shady spot.
Matterhorn View On my way back through town to the hotel, I was treated once again to this magnificent view of the Matterhorn.It was time to pack, get the little electric buggy back to the station, a train to Brig and another train to Geneva, from where we could catch our flight back to Heathrow.
Sunset There was a fabulous sunset just getting going as we started our descent into Heathrow, but we were told to turn off our electronic devices just before it reached its most colourful, so this was the best photo I got. It’s still a nice photo to end the holiday with though.We had experienced the worst weather we’d ever seen in Zermatt - two very rainy days and one drizzly day - but we’d still had a magnificent time. In fact we might even have appreciated the sunny days all the more for them not being guaranteed each day. I can’t wait to go back again.Total distance walked today - 2.9 milesTotal ascent today - 1,237 feetTotal descent today - 1,237 feetTotal distance walked this week - 76.6 milesTotal ascent this week - 22,928 feetTotal descent this week - 22,928 feet