Matterhorn, part zwei

I am of the belief that there are places in the world, that I call “the edge of forever,” that are somehow all connected to each other in space and time and that if we could figure out how, we could walk through one and end up in the other. When I stood at the Cape of Good Hope in February, I thought for sure that I had discovered the first of these places. Last weekend, I hiked to the top of Oberrothorn in Zermatt, looked out over the valley and the mountains and thought, I’ve found the second place. It might be coincidentally appropriate then, that an old Swiss man told me that the Matterhorn is actually an African mountain, that 90 million years ago the African continental plate slid over the European plate and the resulting rocks pushed up to form what we see now as the Matterhorn.

I went to Zermatt to think about life and love and what I wanted, but mostly I just ended up being sad somewhere beautiful instead of somewhere mundane. I also ended up almost falling to my death 5x, though that part wasn’t on purpose; it was more a result of my typical inability to navigate the wilderness and going off in the wrong direction on a trail (and bringing some hapless Italian people along with me). I had decided I wanted to climb Oberrothorn, the highest peak you can get up to without professional climbing gear. The trail doesn’t open until mid-June due to snow, so I thought I’d be ok the last weekend in June. As you can see, the trail looks pretty clear down at the bottom.

It was actually a gorgeous, amazing, unbelievable hike, occasionally dotted by these beautiful glass trail markers in the shape of eyes. They told a story about the progression from mineral to plant to animal to human to soul, the highest “form” can you attain as you move from an element to a living thing to a spiritual being. I wasn’t able to find all of the markers as some were inaccessible due to snow, but I reached three of them on the way up, including the highest one.

About halfway up, the trail disappeared, and I wasn’t sure where to go. I decided to walk in the footprints of hikers who had already passed through, which turned out to be a less than stellar idea, since it became clear partway through the snowbank that these people hadn’t a clue where they were going either. I spent the next thirty minutes scrambling up the sheer side of a mountain, slipping through the snow, sometimes sinking up to my knee, and then grabbing onto loose rocks and muddy moss that would frequently tear out of the earth. The interesting part of this entire trip that I realized was, had I been with someone else, especially a boyfriend, I probably would have given up a long time ago and either refused to budge or gone back down the mountain the way I came. I’m not sure what it is about being by myself, but I have the balls and guts of a Swiss mountain goat when I get an idea in my head about where I’m going to go and there’s no one to offer a second opinion.

Close to the three-quarter eye marker, the trail turned into a stream, sometimes waterfall, where the melting snow chose the easiest path down the mountain. I slogged through this, crossed another slushy snowbank, and crawled over some sharp rocks to get to the blue eye. I sat there for a while, looking at my icy, muddy, sopping wet hiking boots, proud and pleased with their now very authentic state of being. Getting the rest of the way to the top was even more frightening, with lots of loose pebbles and slippery, thawing boulders. When I finally got to the peak, the Italian couple that I had seen earlier in the hike far below me were almost caught up. They came over the ridge as I sat down to look out over the mountains and the gorge.

The three of us sat there in silence for a while, watching as a cloud slowly started to gather around the tip of the Matterhorn. They began speaking quietly in Italian and then watching as I set up my tripod. Finally they asked if I would take their picture, and offered me a piece of Toblerone. There’s nothing quite like climbing up the side of a mountain for two hours and then being offered a piece of Swiss chocolate at the very top, while overlooking the Matterhorn. (I’m not breaking out into song here, though. Maybe if there was someone to impress besides two Italian people who I didn’t want to scare off.)

Thinking that the way down would be scarier than the way up, I left shortly after the couple left, but I didn’t follow them down. They proceeded to go the same way we came up, which I knew now to be the less desirable path. It was much easier to follow the trail downhill, and I only had to climb through snow once on the way down. When I got to the bottom, instead of taking the gondola back down, I decided to hike down “Marmot Way,” which is actually a fairly steep ski run in the winter. In the summer it’s full of sheep wearing their signature neck bells, and furry, brown marmots running all over the hillside. As I was slowly picking my way down this steep incline, I heard some strange stomping coming from far behind me. When I looked back, off in the distance was a man with hiking poles, literally running down an almost vertical mountainside. Now, I know the Swiss take their hiking with poles very seriously. Instead of jogging, they like to go into the woods with these poles that engage your arms as well as your legs during a hike. I just had no idea it could become an Olympic endeavor. I’m really not sure how this guy was not rolling ass over teakettle down the mountain, but he wasn’t.

The hike down, while steep, was breathtaking when you finally turned the corner. My camera snapped this unsuspecting photo of me when I was trying to set it up to use with my remote (instead it must have been on self-timer).

A word about the red trains that go to Zermatt and other alpine villages. The red trains are totally distinct from the intercity tilting trains that speed across the flat parts of Switzerland. Whenever you want to go to an alpine town, you have to change trains at some point and get on the red train, a slow moving cogwheel train that climbs the mountains. I will admit I could not figure out how these trains were climbing mountains at all until I learned that the windows on the train roll almost all the way down. You can actually hang your head and arms out the side and let wind from the Alps blow through your hair. While you also have to watch out for imminent decapitation, I don’t mind this risk, since in the U.S. we’d never have this sort of thing at all and I was perfectly capable of pulling my body parts back inside before going through a tunnel. This is when I noticed that all the red trains are cogwheel trains, as you can see on the track in this photo.

I would love to share all these amazing places with someone, but I guess for now, you can share them with me here, and I’ll keep writing.

The entire Zermatt and Matterhorn gallery is here.