Zermatt - Matterhorn

247. That's how many photos were taken with my camera on our 2-night trip to Zermatt. Rather picturesque, the Matterhorn. Quite a Mountain-Maker, the Creator. You'll be relieved to know that I managed to delete about 60 of the shots right off, and that I selected only six to share with you.

The Matterhorn is enormous, stunning, breathtaking, majestic. We arrived on a rainy evening, and we couldn't even tell which direction to look for the famous mountain. The hotel staff informed us we should look to the left when stepping out of the front entrance.

In the morning, there it was!!!

Even indoors in Zermatt, there were different artistic depictions of the Matterhorn everywhere - at least two unique paintings in each room of the hotel, both bedrooms and public rooms! A lot of artists have tackled this subject.

To get to Zermatt, we drove our car for about 3.5 hours, including taking it on a car-carrying railway through a very dark tunnel inside some mountain or other (the pass was still closed this "early" in the season). 3.5 hours, that is, if you don't count the hour we lost on a mistaken trip through the Gotthard Tunnel and back (resulting in a quick hello to Ticino, the Swiss-Italian canton south of the Alps). The Gotthard takes about 17 minutes to drive through, one way, if there's no traffic at all. Then there's the time it takes to reflect upon whether one has really, truly, just made this mistake and there's no help for it but to retrace one's steps. Yep.

Then once we made it to Täsch, we had to park the car and board another train on foot with our luggage, to get up to the "car-less" village of Zermatt. But they do have electric vans that shuttle guests and luggage to and from hotels and such. Good thing, since it was raining quite hard when we got there.

The next morning, after gaping at the Matterhorn sitting there in the midst of crisp blue sky, we took yet another train up to the top of the Gornergrat, opposite the Matterhorn. (Except for Jason, who stayed in bed sleeping off fatigue from a bad cold, poor thing.)

A plaque at 10,132 feet (3089 metres) up there above Zermatt says:

Groß und wunderbar sind deine Werke, HERR, allmächtiger Gott! Offb. 15/3

After a little looking, I discovered that it is Revelation 15:3 "Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty."

So "Offb" is short for "Offenbarung" which means revelation. Cool. I have being doing a tiny bit of reading in a little French Bible that I have (I keep it in the bathroom), but haven't done any German perusing - in fact I think we have only the New Testament in German, a present I gave to David when we were courting (having no idea we'd eventually live in a German-speaking area).

Then the poem beneath it:
Berge hoch erhoben,
ihren Schöpfer loben,
schneebedeckte Gipfel,
felsen, hohe Wipfel
preisen Gottes Majestät
MB

It means something like "Mountains raised high praise their Creator; snowcapped peaks and high rocky tops praise God's majesty." It's a perfect poem for that location. It's surrounded by a dozen glaciers and peaks of over 4000 metres in height, all covered in snow. You see here the Monte Rosa on the left, the highest peak in Italy (and 2nd highest in Europe, I believe), with the Grenzgletscher (Grenz Glacier) to the right of it. The scale is very hard to grasp - these are HUGE expanses.
It was really cold up there, so we were suited up in our ski jackets and hats, but when we sat down for lunch (with a bit of a view!), in the strong sun, we were able to strip down for a few minutes.
The next day we took a mini-hike up the wooded hillside behind our hotel before check-out and the return home.