Working and Skiing in Zermatt

From Sunday to Wednesday this week, I was at a workshop in Zermatt, Switzerland, which is the location of the Matterhorn! I was nervous about the workshop and about skiing again for the first time (every season I'm convinced that I'm so out of practice I'll hurt myself), but it turned out to be a great experience. Every day we would get up early and work for a few hours, then ski all day and work again in the evening. The weather, especially on Monday and Wednesday, was absolutely amazing, and Zermatt is a very beautiful place.

  

Matterhorn!

 

Me and the Matterhorn!

The city itself is a tiny town in a valley. There are no cars allowed, but there are electric taxis and buses. Still, the city is so small that you can easily walk anywhere in town, even in ski boots (if you must, nobody likes walking in ski boots)!

 

This one's from Tuesday so the weather isn't as good, but you can see Zermatt in the bottom of the valley.

  

From Monday, so better weather! This time you can see just a bit of the city way in the bottom left.

 It was very cool to see the Matterhorn everywhere we looked, it's a really well-known mountain, but it's even more impressive in person. I took lots of pictures.

 

Mountain! Beautiful weather!

 

The Matterhorn hanging out with some other mountains.

 

No Matterhorn in this picture, but look how beautiful the whole area is! 

To get from the city to the slopes, you can take any of an assortment of buses, gondolas, and cog trains. Each combination takes you to a different part of the mountain (including the Italian part if you want to ski in a different country, but the international ticket is extra-expensive so I didn't go that route), so it's important to study the map every morning to make sure you don't spend the whole day on lifts and gondolas instead of skiing.

 

One of the cog trains that takes you up. Since normal trains don't do steep inclines very well, they use that toothy part in the middle and a corresponding gear-thing under the train to pull us up.

One cool thing about skiing here that I'd never encountered before is that you can actually ski all the way off the mountain and back down to town. On the first and third days we were on the same side of the mountain where the route out was icy and not very fun, so we skied halfway down and met the train. On Tuesday, though, we were in a different place and we actually got to ski all the way down from the top of the mountain to the bottom in one hour-long run that took us within walking distance of our hotel!

  

Last view of the Matterhorn on the way off the slopes.

 It was especially fun because, as you're working your way down the mountain, you actually ski through little towns and villages, which was totally new to me! In the last few hundred meters of the run, there are lots of ski bars where people from town can hike up or skiers can stop on the way down. We did stop in for a quick aprés-ski (which made me feel very fancy), before heading in for our afternoon work. I can attest to the fine quality of the hot chocolate here in Switzerland. 

  

Parting shot of the Matterhorn being patriotic.

Love,
Katie