High Times in the Swiss Alps : Hanging On for Dear Life Up the Matterhorn

Two Matterhorns in two weeks?

The inspiration came at Disneyland on the occasion of the fifth birthday of a small friend, and just prior to a summer vacation in Europe with his mother. It was my first trip on Disney’s version of the peak since the days when it was an “E-ticket” ride; it was the little boy’s first trip ever on the ride, and he was understandably apprehensive.

As the “bobsleds” chugged up the cograil before taking the first fun plunge downward, it occurred to me that we’d have the opportunity to see the real thing a scant two weeks hence.

As our car went over the top, so did the type-A personality seated within. I’d done my share of fair-weather rock climbing, I thought, but nothing remotely resembling Alpine climbing. As far as I knew at that point, crampons were something meant to ease stomach pain.

Calls to the Swiss Tourist Office the next morning revealed that experience with crampons was required to climb the Matterhorn in Zermatt.

The Disney ride was the child’s favorite of the night. Ironically, he’s referred to it ever since as “magic mountain.” How right he was.

The Matterhorn is the idealized majestic peak, the most recognizable and perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing mountain in the world.

The tourist board forwarded a Matterhorn fact sheet. “You need to be in TOP PHYSICAL CONDITION,” it proclaimed in capital letters. It is necessary to undergo several days of training in the Zermatt area, scaling between 3,000 and 5,000 feet daily, it went on, “or roughly 1,300 feet hourly including rest stops.” As guides are in high demand, preference would be given to those who first climb other peaks in the area.

Other materials suggested ability to run a 10K.

I hate jogging. But I had been going to the gym fairly regularly. Anyway, I told myself, we’d be doing a lot of walking on our vacation.

The 14,692-foot Matterhorn is not your proverbial walk in the park. It is in fact considered one of the hardest routes in that classic height range. Yet, so seductive is it to would-be mountaineers that more than 3,000 make the attempt each summer; 65% are successful. Of the rest, Air Zermatt makes more than 100 rescues, and a dozen aspirants are killed annually.

Uh, whoa! Suddenly I was a tad apprehensive.

But those feelings of ill-boding were offset the day my guide, Cristoph Petrig, whose family has been guiding in Zermatt for more than half a century, took me up the nearby 9,603-foot Riffelhorn. There we saw several ibex, the creature thought by many to be the inspiration for the unicorn, bounding about the rocks. It seemed a good omen.

We had arrived in Zermatt from Venice, planning to spend only about five days there. Petrig’s guiding me up the Matterhorn two days later was contingent on my successful ascent of the Riffelhorn as a test of technical proficiency.

The Riffelhorn went swimmingly, up-climb and down-climb. The only question remaining was one of endurance.

The feeling of doom and gloom returned the next afternoon, however, when the two-hour hike from the Schwarzsee cable car terminal to the Hornli hut, at the base of the Matterhorn, seemed like the hike from Hades. If I could hardly do the hike, I reasoned, how the heck was I going to do the climb? I collapsed before being awakened half an hour later for dinner.

When I first arrived at the hut--which looked like a bare-bones mid-mountain chalet restaurant--there had been much commotion outside due to helicopter activity, which I’d assumed to be delivery of provisions. I found out at dinner that the helicopter was retrieving the bodies of a guide and his client who had fallen 2,000 feet to their deaths that afternoon.

Decidedly not a good omen.

As we ate our soup, spaghetti and a piece of fresh fruit, the guides at the guide table were silent. Many climbs were canceled. My mood further blackened as my table mates discussed the various peaks they’d climbed that week in preparation for the Matterhorn. Everybody had climbed several, and spent a great deal of time at altitude becoming acclimatized. I had done none save the Riffelhorn, and the hut was higher than that!

The guide seated next to me said that technical capability had infinitely less to do with success on the Matterhorn than conditioning, and acclimatization to altitude was absolutely key. Looking at me like the grim reaper, he expressed serious doubts as to my ability to complete the climb.

His client, whose name was Peter, offered me an aspirin to deal with the headaches that he said would inevitably arise from climbing without benefit of acclimatization. I wrestled with the idea of taking it then and there to deal with the stress headache developing without any climbing at all.

After several days of post-card-perfect weather, the Matterhorn had seemed decidedly foreboding when I’d left that afternoon for the hut. Sure enough, some time after everybody retired at 9 p.m., an electrical storm hit that seemed centered on the hut itself. The thunder was deafening; lightning lit the hut walls like X-rays.

Ironically, the more deafening the thunder, the calmer I became. Perhaps the climb would be canceled for inclement weather!

The next thing I knew it was 3:30 in the morning, and everybody was quietly getting dressed and gathering gear. We were served hot water and powdered coffee, bread and processed cheese, and were out the door, the night sky clear and not cold, by 3:55 a.m. Our headlamps lit the way along Hornli Ridge, the most popular ascent route.

Cristoph and I climbed with Peter and his guide, John Hogg--the grim reaper at dinner. Peter and the guides were quite silent, while I was doing everything I could to catch my breath. Surprisingly, John now offered words of encouragement: “If you keep up this pace, you’re going to make it for sure.” Meanwhile, I had my doubts that I could keep up that or any other pace.

Unlike my domestic rock climbing experiences, wherein one climber fixed to a rock or other natural feature helps protect the moving climber to whom he is roped, an arrangement known as a “fixed belay,” we proceeded on a considerably less reassuring “moving belay”: If the guide felt the situation was not particularly dangerous, the two of us, roped together, moved simultaneously; at more precarious sections, he’d sling a loop of rope around a jutting rock or one of several strategically located permanent iron pegs.

Cristoph’s skill and instincts were such that I never felt unprotected. Nevertheless, I kept my eyes fixed on each step in front of me so as not to be reminded by what a misstep could mean.

We stopped briefly at the Solvay Hut, exclusively assigned as emergency quarters in bad weather or accidents. My impression had been that the hut, at about 13,200 feet, was well along the ascent, but Cristoph remarked that it was only half the climb--a measly quarter of the way up and down! I drank tea (recommended instead of water) from my thermos ferociously, and was already eating into the dried meat and trail mix I’d brought for a midmorning snack--and it was barely dawn.

We set out again within moments, and now we could turn off our headlamps. The others periodically inquired as to my well-being. Cristoph asked with a chuckle, “Life was hard until today, yes?” and requested that I refrain from hugging the rock.

More and more snow was insinuating itself into the rock-strewn landscape. We stopped to put on crampons, a framework of spikes attached to our industrial-strength climbing boots to prevent slipping on ice.

Pitch after pitch of steep snow lay before us. Not only was it my first experience with crampons, but also with climbing hand-over-hand using permanent ropes. The ropes, set on a particularly steep segment of climb, marked the spot where four members of the first ascent party fell to their deaths in 1865. In that tragedy, seven had been climbing on a single, unfixed rope; when the first fell, the others followed until, miraculously, the rope broke, leaving the remaining three on the mountain.

We continued past what first appeared to be a tiki goddess, but turned out to be a wood-carved Madonna, after which our route narrowed to a foot-wide ridge of snow that dropped off equally in both directions. Cristoph encouraged me to “stay focused and walk carefully.” He had already pointed out how important it was not to walk with my feet too close together, as the crampons would become tangled and I’d trip. Here it was obviously critical; staying focused seemed an excellent idea.

Climbers passed each other on the ridge as they traversed the last few feet to the summit, stopping to shake hands, and to offer congratulations in Italian, German and English. Peter passed me on his return, positively jubilant.

A group of Italians stopped to exchange pleasantries with us. A particularly portly man wearing a large pack, obviously ecstatic with the view and seemingly unaware that one foot of trail for the both of us wasn’t exactly practical, turned this way and that to look and point, his pack bumping into me with every swing of his torso, oblivious to the fact that one of those little bumps could mean the end of life as I knew it.

A few more feet, and finally . . . we . . . sat, with a sheer drop-off on both sides, and the most beautiful panorama I had ever seen before us. The view is overwhelming, from Mt. Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe, in the west, to the Breithorn and Monte Rosa, the highest in Switzerland, in the east, and the view down the mountain itself every bit as sensational.

There was a cross on the summit, and I took a photo of Cristoph with the cross in the background. It suddenly struck me that as both a guide who’d made some 60 trips up the Matterhorn and as a devoutly religious man who wears two St. Christophers and a Virgin Mary medal around his neck, Cristoph seemed to be tempting his maker on a rather regular basis.

“It’s more likely I’ll be killed by one of the electric cars in Zermatt,” he said with a smile, alluding to the fact that automobiles are prohibited in the village. “You can’t hear them coming up behind you.”

Most accidents on the Matterhorn occur on the down climb, for several reasons: The snow gets slushy and the rocks less stable as the sun gets higher; climbers mistakenly believe the hardest part is over once they’ve reached the summit and relax their concentration; simple fatigue and accompanying poor judgment; effects of altitude and accompanying poor judgment, and all combinations of the above.

Ideally, climbers should be back at the Hornli hut by lunchtime. Because beautiful weather had returned, the snow was already getting slushy as we descended, and it was only midmorning when we reached the hut.

As we neared the end of our climb, I made an interesting discovery: on the way up, my headlamp having illuminated only the rock before me, I’d never known how precipitous were the ridges we’d traversed in the dark!

And at the end of the climb, surprises awaited at the Hornli hut. My traveling companion had made the two-hour hike to meet me (and had arrived in considerably better condition than I had the evening before). And whereas Peter and John had summitted before us, Christoph and I “hutted” first.

When they eventually joined us, John said, “Well, I didn’t think you’d make it.” After his encouraging words on the climb!

All that remained was the two-hour return hike down, three cable-car rides from the base of the hike to town, a walk across town to return climbing gear we had rented from a sports shop, and another back across town--no automobiles, remember--to the hotel, where bath, dinner and a beloved bed were mine.

Cristoph’s father owns the hotel where we stayed; his sister was in charge that evening. “Do you feel lucky to have done it?” she asked. “Today I’m exhausted,” I answered. “Tomorrow I’ll feel lucky.” Sure enough, the next day I found myself whistling Jiminy Cricket’s, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and feeling lucky indeed to have this adventure to tell my children and children’s children when they’re old enough to take to Disneyland.

It’ll make a good story while waiting in line for the Matterhorn.

GUIDEBOOK

Climbing the Matterhorn

Getting there: The skiing village of Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn, is accessible by rail from both Geneva and Zurich. International rail connections link up at Brig for a 90-minute, narrow-gauge ride through the romantic, rugged Visp Valley to Zermatt; one-way tickets are $27 second class, $45 first, double for round trip. Motorists can drive as far as Tasch, from which shuttle trains go the remaining three miles to Zermatt, with departures every 20 minutes. Free parking is available in Tasch, as well as in Visp, for motorists wishing to continue by rail; no motor-driven vehicles are allowed in Zermatt.

When to go: Depending upon the amount of snow on the Matterhorn, the best time to climb is mid-July to mid-September. If there is too much snow on the mountain, no attempt should be made, a determination best made by an experienced guide.

Where to stay: There are 110 hotels and pensions in Zermatt, most under local family management and in all price ranges, and 300 seasonal apartment rentals (called “holiday” apartments). We stayed at the centrally located City Hotel, with about 30 rooms and a scrumptious breakfast for about $100 double; from U.S. telephones 011-41-28-67-2071, fax 011-41-28-67-5686.

How to arrange a climb: A good first step is to call or write the Swiss National Tourist Office (address and phone number below) for a Matterhorn-climb fact sheet, plus information on accommodations, etc. Potential climbers should plan to spend enough time in Zermatt to allow for climbs of other peaks, and the five or six days that it might take to arrange for a guide. Guides take only one client per climb. The Zermatt Guides’ Office does not book guides in advance from the U.S.; instead, check in at the office upon arrival there. Generally, priority is given to those who have taken preparatory training, and particularly those who have successfully completed other climbs in the Zermatt area.

Costs: Most guides charge about $400-$450 plus a suggested tip of 10%-15%. That does not include costs of roughly $140, paid by the climber, for overnighting, dinner and breakfast at the Hornli hut. In addition, each climber must be insured for mountain accidents and possible rescue transportation. The half-day climb of the Riffelhorn with guide costs approximately $220. If the climb is completed successfully, a special certificate and handsome medal are available at the guides’ office for less than $20.

Information: Contact the Swiss National Tourist Office, 222 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 1570, El Segundo, Calif. 90245, tel. (310) 335-5980, fax (310) 335-5982. Or write or call the Zermatt Guides’ Office, Schweizer Bergfuhrerburo, 3920 Zermatt, Switzerland (from U.S. telephones 011- 41-28-67-3456, fax 011-41-28-67-2155); or the Tourist Office Zermatt, 3920 Zermatt, Switzerland (tel. 011-41-28-66-1181 or fax 011-41- 28-66-1185).