After living in Switzerland for 6 years, I had still not seen the iconic Matterhorn peak – and nor, I may add, had my husband, though he was born here. But when friends visited this summer from North America, they wanted to go to the big M, and so we decided to come along.
It’s not an easy spot to get to, one reason why we’d never made the pilgrimage. The last town in the Mattertal, Zermatt, is not accessible by car; you have to park and take a shuttle, then a cog railway to the best viewing spot. From our house, we drove about three hours into the Valais, where we rented a place lower down the valley for a few nights (staying in Zermatt proving very pricey). At first the weather was not at all good for visiting the higher peaks, which were buried in clouds. So we spent one day around the town of Grächen, a pleasant alpine spot.
Fortunately, the next day the clouds cleared and we headed upwards. It took almost 2 hours by car, shuttle, and train, but at last we made it to the top – Gornergrat is the end of the line. Climbers can go higher, but we were just there to look around.
Overall, this area was not exactly our style, though I was glad to see it once — an impressive, but bleak landscape, with a strange overlay of commercial tourist attractions: restaurants, hotels, souvenir shops, etc. The Matterhorn is striking because of its shape and the way it stands alone from some of the surrounding peaks.
We had lunch and photo ops on the Gornergrat viewing platform, finishing up with munching some Toblerone. Then we walked down to the Riffelsee, a lake which in many dramatic photographs of the mountain looks much bigger than it did to me on this occasion. The weather lately had been dry, so maybe at other times it has more water.
When taking my own photo I framed my shot to make the lake look pristine and deserted, though it wasn’t at all — the hordes of chattering tourists with their cameras were here too!
On our way home, we stopped in Saas-Fee, a more comfortable kind of area I could imagine visiting again. There were lots of lovely hikes around here, too, without being quite such an exhausting journey.
Still, it was certainly a unique and memorable trip, and I’m glad we did it. If you came to Switzerland, what would you most want to see? Would you make the effort to see the Matterhorn?
