Matterhorn...

After our six weeks in England we headed over to the European continent for a week. We started our trip by heading out from England on a car ferry across the English Channel to France. We drove from France through Belgium to Germany to meet up with my parents and brother there. It was a long day of driving especially after it took an hour to go 9 miles on the motorway around part of London! The next day Jim and I headed for Zermatt, Switzerland while the girls went with my parents and brother to Garmisch, Germany on the Austria border. The drive through Switzerland was absolutely beautiful. Jim was trying to think of a different schemes whereby we could move there and live. We definitely need to go back and spend more time there! One of the funny parts of our trip to Zermatt was that we hadn't looked real close at the Google driving directions until we were halfway to Zermatt and we came upon the directions to catch a car train that went through a tunnel to the other side of the mountain range. Given that we hadn't looked up any information on the train and it's schedule we opted to drive around the mountain instead. No private vehicles are allowed in Zermatt so we had to park a few miles down the canyon and catch a train into town.

Upon arriving in town we walked to the other end of the beautiful mountain village to catch the tram. It was great being able to catch a tram part of the way to eliminate many hours of hiking each way.

(J at the top of the tram)

We still had a steep 2 hour hike from the top of the tram to the hut we were staying at that night. We enjoyed a wonderful hot meal that night while gazing out the window at the Matterhorn before heading to our room we shared with 24 others (12 on the bottom bunk, 12 on the top). Actually luckily the room wasn't full that night so there was one space between us and the party next to us. We could get used to these kind of accomodations when climbing! We celebrated our 9th anniversary the next day by heading out to climb the Matterhorn. (If you've ever seen a Paramount pictures film it's the mountain used in their logo.)

(K all geared up about an hour into the climb)

We woke at 3 am to begin climbing but after about 4 hours the going was too slow and no longer safe due to the large amounts of snow still on the mountain covering the bolts used to protect the climb so we turned around at about 12,000 feet (about 2,6oo feet below the summit).

(Why we climb!--The challenge and amazing views. To truly enjoy the Alps you have to get up high as you can't see much from the villages in the narrow canyons. In the picture of J you can see the town of Zermatt in the lower left.)

We made it about halfway up the technical portion of the mountain. It took us 5 hours to down climb back to the hut due to the melting snow.

(K downclimbing the ridge, and J traversing the narrow, snow-covered ridgeline)

We were surprised that there was so much snow as it was the middle of the typical climbing season for that mountain but this year the snow stuck around later. Next time we'll just have to wait until August to climb. We picked up the rest of our gear at the hut and then headed down the mountain to our car. We then drove to meet the rest of the family in Garmisch late that night.