Zermatt

The company that I work for doing translations, Picard Angst, decided to invite all of the employees to Zermatt for a ski weekend. Since I've never been, am horrible at skiing, and want to see as much of Switzerland as I can, I of course signed up right away. The guy from the ski rental made sure to correct me: I'm not "bad" at skiing, I'm just a beginner and am inexperienced.

Starting in St. Gallen, it was about a 5 hour trip. Here's the approximate route.

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An interesting thing about Zermatt is that no cars are allowed. The road stops in a city called Täsch, and from there you have to proceed by train, helicopter, or electric car. As a result, there are a lot of little electric cars / buses / taxis / horses etc zipping around Zermatt. It's pretty neat.

We arrived on Friday evening, so conditions were suboptimal for picture taking. As part of the program, all of us went to a place called CERVO, and had some Swiss specialities. Here are some pictures from the train and from my hotel room's balcony:











On Saturday, I went skiing. I didn't go to the Matterhorn itself, but went to a nearby mountain called Gornergrat. Since it's fairly high up, you have to take a train to get to the top, and up top there's a James Bond -esque fortress / mall. From there, you have a perfect view of the Matterhorn, the Dufourspitze, and many other mountains, as well as the valley.

At first, I was pretty nervous, since I haven't been skiing since last January when I went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany with Brian Holmes and when I went to Lech am Arlberg in Austria with Alicja / Alison Link. Links to old blog posts here and here. After I made it down the first curve or two, I had gained a lot of confidence in my ability to stop, steer, and control my velocity. I stuck to the blue runs for the most part, and took a few pictures.


















After working up my confidence on the blue runs for a bit, I gave a red run a try. Of course, the first one I tried had an immensely steep drop-off, and I went too fast and seem to have sprained my hand. That put me out of action for the rest of the day, but I still got to hang out up on top of the mountain and enjoy the view. If you're a good enough skier (i.e., can do red runs :) ), you can ski across the border into Italy and back. I think I'll save that for next time...

Now, I'm planning on getting to bed early so that I can get up early and try out the Sunnegga area (instead of the Gornergrat). Here's a map, if you want to get a vague idea of how things are situated. You can also compare that to the Google map below:


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So! I'll make sure to take more pictures tomorrow, and some pictures from the train on my way back to good old St. Gallen.