The Travels of Garmisch: Zermatt Skiing

Martin and I spent this past weekend skiing/snowboarding in Zermatt. We couldn't afford a hotel in Zermatt so we stayed in a little town called Randa two stops up the train line from Zermatt. Zermatt is a pedestrian-only town so you have to take the train to get there anyway.

While Zermatt is supposedly pedestrian-only, it does still have buses and taxis in it. Funny how that works. Each hotel there has its own shuttle from the train station to the hotel (all quarter mile of the distance to each hotel) and a few of the hotels had horse-drawn carriages as their shuttles. I found it rather humorous. That being said, Zermatt was still much less ritzy than St Moritz. I don't know how else to describe it but the town was more down to earth, more cozy, not filled with designer stores, and nobody was wearing fur coats/mittens/boots/hats there. It's more all about skiing than about wandering around showing off your money.

I regret to say that I did not get any pictures of Zermatt itself. Since we had to take the train into Zermatt every morning wearing all of our ski clothing and carrying nothing on our backs except what we were skiing in that day, we did not bring the nice big camera either day as we don't want to have to ski with it. All the pictures we took on the mountain were taken with the cell phone. And since Martin had the cell phone the day I wandered around town a bit, I was unable to get any pictures.

But boy did we ever get a million pictures of the Matterhorn! You can't get away from it while you're skiing. I was a little disappointed in that you can't easily see the Matterhorn from the town of Zermatt itself ... I mean you can if you crane your neck around some buildings in just the right way but it's not as prominent and easy to find as I thought it would be. But as soon as you get up onto the ski trails above the town it's around every single turn.

Here's the Matterhorn from the top of the Gornergrat bahn, or the train that takes you up to one of the peaks you can ski down from. This train has *amazing* views of the surrounding mountains and the Matterhorn and it's a 30-minute ride so you get to really sit and admire it all. It's worth the $79 roundtrip ticket just for the views, even if you're not going to ski.

Martin with the Matterhorn behind him:

I even got to eat lunch with the Matterhorn:

I had the traditional Swiss dish of Rösti, which is potatoes topped with a fried egg. Perfect fuel for a day of snowboarding:

On Sunday, Martin skied a different area of the resort called Plateau Rosa. The Zermatt ski resort is enormous, it's actually 4 separate areas/peaks, and it is split into two sides that are not connected so you can't ski between them (but you could go all the way to the bottom again and then take a bus to the other base and then ski over there). And this other side that Martin skied on is half in Italy (Cervinia resort) and half in Switzerland (Plateau Rosa). I didn't go with him because I had heard that it was really flat in this area and it's hard to snowboard on flat terrain - you just end up walking over it all. Which, to me, is not worth the trouble. And neither of us went into Italy - the lift ticket was more expensive to add on Italy. But there were a lot of trails over there I would have liked to have tried out, if we had had another day (and $200 extra).

Here's the trail map for those of you who are having issues visualizing what I'm talking about. Plateau Rosa is the blue shaded area center right. Where you see the Swiss/Italian flags is where the resort continues over the other side in Italy. The mountain named Monte Rosa is, I believe, the tallest in Switzerland (center left background):

Anyway, all the following pictures were taken by Martin from this other side of the resort, which is higher than the Gornergrat part and therefore has great views of snow-covered mountain peaks.