London Gatwick terminal bridge, stopover on the way to Genevé

Lame picture, I know. I've taken to photographing maps and schedules rather than write the info down. I had to take the Brig train to Visp in the southern valley below the Bernese range.

Lake Geneva is surrounded by vineyards and dotted with sailboats. Beautiful.

The end the lake, over an hour in to the 4 hour train ride.

It is raining on the other side of the lake.

Terraced vinyards as far up the hill as the eye can see.

Bad photo of a waterfall before I realized how common they'd be as the valley narrowed. I wouldn't mind living in that house at the top though. Near the turn off to the Chamonix valley.

Change trains to the Glacier Express in Visp. This train can climb a 20% grade and plow the track.

Old bridge from 1599. Zermatt has settlement documents dating back as early as 1200.

When the grade gets really steep, you can see the middle, slotted rail that the train engine grabs on to.

You can see the track really start to climb here.

The train window messing with my camera focus...

The train passes under its first glacier

Panorama of the glacier... too bad there are clouds.

'nother water fall.

First signs of sun and snow. You can see the buildings all use the local quartzite rock slabs as their roofs.

Bernese mountain puppy on the train. =)

Arrival in Zermatt. You can see, with no gas powered vehicles, this is a very pedestrian city. Very clean, quiet and nice.

An old traditional home. You can see quartzite slabs are used at each support leg. My guess is this is to allow the legs to be replaced when needed and spread the surface area of the legs' contact points since they aren't part of the house frame.

Why the Swiss rock. (3 cascading sink basins if you couldn't tell)

First glimps of the base of Matterhorn that evening.

Looking north down the valley our train came up.

Walking through town the next morning, this dog was perched over a doorway to an elevator in the hillside. No one noticed him till I took his picture.

Riding the first lift out of town to the mid-station where one could take the Schwarzsee lift up to the Hornli hut trail to the Matterhorn or Gondolas up to Klein Matterhorn and hike to many other peaks.

The base of the Matterhorn and Hornli ridge.

Our cable car shadow, way, way below.

Glacier ice falls to the east of Klein Matterhorn.

After reaching the top of this amazing gondola, you walk through the middle of the mountain and come out here where many hikes start, you can ski on the glacier or walk under it.

First self picture on the trip. The back side of the Klein M.

Entrance to the tunneled out glacier where they do wine tastings on Saturdays.

Descending in to the glacier.

Ice sculptures all over in the glacier.

Flowers frozen in to ice blocks

I left the tourist area of the tunnels and followed a crack further in to the glacier a bit.

I wasn't planning on hiking today, just getting aclimated a bit and exploring but I saw a peak nearby when the white out conditions would break for a minute, I had my crampons so I just decided to go solo.

Klein Matterhorn lift behind me, traversing the glacier.

This peak was whited out most of the time but ever few minutes, it was visible for a few seconds.

It turns out, this was the easy route up the Breithorn, the decent route for my climb on Wednesday.

Everyone else was hiking alpine style, roped to each other. You can see 4 of 'em ahead of me.

Seeing all the people roped together made me feel a bit silly being alone but I made WAY better time than they did and never felt out of control. It got way harder to see than this at times.

The crest of the Breithorn, very windy, very cold. I had ice forming on my eye lashes.

Clouds broke over Zermatt for a sec.

You can see frost forming on the side of my hood.

A bunch of German climbers.