It’s literally impossible to capture the beauty of this small town. I was grinning like a fool throughout my walks through the town — and that was just the town.
The scenery around, buried in a valley Zermatt is surrounded by such stunning mountain, including the famous Matterhorn itself
I look through my photos of the town and none of do it justice.
Of note is that there are no cars in Zermatt, just tiny electric vehicles — and only special ones, no Tesla’s in sight. Tom Scott did an excellent video on it. https://youtu.be/R2oD1ZHNMFE
Up and up
The morning brings my journey up the mountain — not to the peak in the photo above, but to the Matterhorn Glacier Park, which sits right next to it.
It’s a short 15 minute walk (or bus if you’re lazy and don’t like the stunning vista as you walk) to the gondola station. And then it’s up, up, and up. The gondola makes multiple stops along the way, as it serves all the skiers, they can ski down a field and take a ride back up without having to go all the way down (from the top it takes about an hour, if you ski fast, to get from the top to the bottom).
I’m just going to dump a bunch of photos from the ride up — 1600m (5300ft) to 3900m (12800ft).
.png)
Once you get to the top, you reach the main ski fields, the visitor centre, restaurant, and ice caves.
As I understand these ice sculptures are more or less permanent, the ice doesn’t thaw up here.
Now the obligatory selfies
The highest viewing platform is 3,896m (12,784ft) up. This is as high as I’ve been since the Nepal trip.
Why was I here? What drove me to take trains half way across Europe? My oxygen saturation stats were 85-90% unacclimatised at that altitude. That’s within limits, to go back to serious altitude.
No comments:
Post a Comment