John and I have
been watching the weather every weekend for the past few months
waiting for a clear day to go see the Matterhorn. We’ve had some
sunny days during the week, but every weekend it has been raining.
Not so conducive to seeing a mountain. This weekend, though, the
weather forecast for the town of Zermatt which is at the base of the
mountain was “cloudless skies will dominate”, so we decided to
go.
It’s a 3 hour
45 minute train ride each way to the mountain. Much closer than a 14
hour flight plus a 3 hour 45 minute train ride, however, so we had to
do it before we left Switzerland.
We left our
apartment at 7am and hopped on the train and then another train until
we arrived in Zermatt at about 11am. We looked up, and there it was.
There were clouds over the middle of it, but we saw the bottom and
the top. We took a couple of pictures from the town on a whim, not
knowing that that would be the only time we saw the top of the
Matterhorn that day.
I wanted to ride
the funicular, gondola, and another gondola to Rothorn, because as
Rick Steves says, “This is where you get the classic Matterhorn
views.” Unfortunately, however, the two gondolas hadn’t opened
for summer yet. We took the funicular up anyway and then ended up on
a DDM (Dolin Death March) for the next four hours as we hiked to the
next gondola station.
We took the “Walk
of the Five Lakes” which boasted swimming in four of them and
reflections of the Matterhorn in three of them. The glacier lakes
were really beautiful, but we didn’t see any reflections. Other
than maybe clouds. We didn't see the trail for much of the way either.
We also ran into
several wildlife creatures including vicious sheep, threatening
mountain goats, and a marmot in the distance. It was strange just to
walk right through the animals who could have cared less that we were
there. Although I cared about their poop I was trying not to step in.
We finally made
it back to our funicular stop and got the best views of the base of
the mountain that we had seen that day. So we figure if we put all of
our mountain sightings together that we saw the whole thing. We both
agreed that we could successfully check the Matterhorn off of our
Swiss bucket list since after 8 hours in the train in one day, we’re
not going back.
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