27
Jun 25

Across from the Matterhorn

We walked from our hotel through Zermatt, 5,310 feet elevation. We boarded a train to go up. Up to the Gornergrat ridge, which sits 10,285 feet above sea level. There are two stops, and then you’re there, at the top of the world, it seems like, except for what you can see opposite.

It ain’t bad.

The high mark, of course, is the iconic Matterhorn summit, just over there.

Mountains, being great skewers of time and space and distance, are always misleading. The Matterhorn is actually six miles from where we are standing.

Here’s a broader view of the view. This is a panoramic shot of sorts, so you know what to do.

(Click to embiggen.)

And here’s a slightly better closeup. Doesn’t look like anyone is climbing it today. At least on this side.

Tomorrow, Europe’s highest open-air theater (really, a flat spot with a screen and several rows of chairs, which we passed on the way up) is opening for the season and they are showing “The Matterhorn Story,” a play that depicts the first ascent of the mountain, in 1865. It debuts tomorrow. We’ll be gone by then.

Where we were today was above the tree line. But there were a few things growing that high up.

Oddly, I didn’t have most of the same thin air effects I was complaining about on our visit to Jungfraujoch. I must have acclimated in the last 48 hours.

(I did not.)

Way up there is a humble little chapel, dedicated to St. Bernard — patron saint of the Alps, skiing, snowboarding, hiking, backpacking, and mountaineering, if you go in for that sort of thing.

I’m not Catholic, but I’d like to find out how a person who lived in the 11th century and canonized in the 17th century picks up snowboarding as something to protect. Snowboarding just dates back to 1965, after all.

Anyway, the altarpiece is carved wooden figures in a relief-style with alpine flowers above the altarpiece. The tabernacle is decorated with grapevines, the altar table is made of stone slabs with a cross.

There’s also a little hotel and restaurant and gift shop up there. A development waiting for other developments, unless it’s a one-night novelty, I’m sure. As a guest, your options are the views, the observatory, two short tourist experiences and going back down the mountain. One of the tourist things is a beautiful 10-minute movie that shows you the four seasons on the mountain. The other is a three-minute VR presentation of paragliding over the Matterhorn. We’ve seen people doing this all over, and made jokes with the in-laws about getting them in one of those rigs.

We got close.

I sat in one of those chairs, too. (Not pictured.) I joined the flight in-progress, so I went through it again, just to see everything. It was shot on a nice 270 degree camera, so you can see a great deal. Almost just like doing it! I was hoping my mother-in-law would stick her arms out and soar through the sky …

There’s also a nice display of a first-generation engine at the Gornergrat summit. (There are two others a bit further down, as well.) These are historic and legendary pieces of the Swiss railway system — albeit “reinterpreted” for their installment in 2023. The signs don’t tells us what was reinterpreted, but I’d like to think they looked exactly like this when they first took on their job of going up and down the mountain in 1898, when they opened this system. Today, it is the oldest, still-operational, electrical cogwheel in the world.

Even still, these engines had a shorter trek than their modern descendants. The original rail station was about 230 lower than today’s peak spot. Regular folks did the walk. Others, of means, were carried up in sedan chairs.

Hopefully they felt self-conscious about that.

Mark Twain said “Nowhere is there such a display of grandeur and beauty as can be seen from the Gornergrat summit,” but he got up there some other way. He wrote that in 1878, before this railway was completed, which wasn’t too long after the place started appearing in the travel guides (1856) and topographical maps (1862).

Cogwheel rails work on a rack and pinion system, which allows them to shorten the distance by mastering steep inclines. Static friction of the wheels provide the propulsion. The part in between the rails is the key, and in this case a setup like this handles inclines, the sign says, of 200 percent. Carl Roman Abt was the engineer that developed this setup, which has some clever ingenuity in design and reusability.

This is how it all connects together. It’s powered by a 275 volt three-phase current. TO save power, the engines act as generators when braking, so when it is descending, the engine is producing electricity. Recuperation allows that energy to be used on the next ascent. Today, three trains going downhill produce enough power for two trains heading up. (There are two trains an hour up here, too.) The rest of the power comes from Zermatt’s power grid.

If you look closely, you can see the teeth from the cogwheel system here. Since its earliest days, this has been an electrical system. The only steam engine that ran on these lines was the locomotive that helped in the construction. When it’s task was completed, they sold the thing to Spain.

Twelve photos, a history lesson and 900-plus words, so let’s call it here. In the next post, I’ll share some video from the Gornergrat summit. Don’t miss it.


26
Jun 25

Rainy in Zermatt

Today was a relaxing day. A rest day. This was a day designed for my in-laws, but I was glad for it, too. Part of the deal was that I would haul around my in-laws luggage and after 10 days of lugging luggage, bringing up the rear, sweating incessantly, being jet-lagged and sleeping in rooms with minimal AC, I was ready to just … sit.

This day was supposed to be tomorrow, but the forecast changed. Today was rain, tomorrow is sunny. So my lovely bride moved things around, and we all had a peaceful and slow day.

She went for a little run; I nursed my hamstring. She and her mother did a bit of souvenir shopping; I read in the room. And on the balcony. This is our view. Or the top of it.

Here’s the actual view. And you can see the weather rolling in from the other end of the valley, and making that little turn into the town.

The same view, after dinner.

We walked down to a little Italian place at the other end of town, by the rail station. We discovered it by accident when we were here for a day in 2022. Every so often we’ve talked about the pizza we had there. And when this trip got planned, that place was on the agenda. So we ate pizza there last night. We went back for a plate of Italian food, but, honestly, nothing seemed very appealing this evening. I had another pizza, but this time, a different pizza.

And a lot of water. I am about a week deficient in being hydrated, I think. See above.

Tomorrow, now that we are all recharged and the weather will be glorious, and we will go up above the tree line again. Should be some great stuff to see once we come back down, so come back to see it!


25
Jun 25

Once more, to the rails

We said goodbye to Ringgenberg, and our new friends Mark and David, two brothers who run the hotel where we stayed. Just delightful guys, they took a real liking to my in-laws, let them stay an extra day, and tried to charm their daughter at every turn.

Again, this was the view they gave us from our balcony.

(Click to embiggen.)

From the two of them we learned a lot about Switzerland, how the culture and the government and their sports work. So it became more than just the views. It became the sort of feeling that made you think: we’ll be back to this specific place sometime, soon.

Again, look at that view. Why wouldn’t you go back to a place like that if there were nice people there, too?

So we hopped on a series of trains — our last day with train changes, I think — and then headed two-and-a-half hours to the south, and into the mountains. It’s just basic views like this the whole way. No big deal.

And when you don’t see mountains, or small waterfalls, or the verdant nature of summer in Switzerland, you can see the rivers and streams and creeks that parallel the train tracks.

The closer you get to the snowmelt and the glaciers, the whiter the water gets, from all of the sediment and runoff. But no matter the shade you see in any given moment, it’s impressively, starkly beautiful.

Oh look, more mountains. So mountainous.

Which reminds me … we have seen several young people — on trains and at famous places — doing the things that people do these days. For days now the four of us have been saying “So preeeeeetty!” to one another after sharing a train car with five teenagers who were passing all of these beautiful sites and could not be bothered to see any of it because of all of the selfies they were taking. But their photos were “So preeeeeetty!”

Go ahead, I dare you, try to explain influencers to anyone that’s not chronically online. You sound like an insane person. And it looks ridiculous when you see it in practice. (To be fair, most things having to do with media look ridiculous in practice.)

Anyway, we have arrived at Zermatt. Here’s my lovely bride pointing out the chief attraction.

And here’s an artfully framed composition of that same mountain.

“So preeeeeetty!”

Also, I did that thing where you hold the camera lens up to the tourism telescope. So here’s a closer look.

And the view, no kidding, right outside of our hotel.

We are at Zermatt, and that’s the Matterhorn. The day after tomorrow, we’ll climb the thing. By which I mean we’ll take a train to an adjacent high spot and pretend like we’ve climbed the thing.


24
Jun 25

The Olympic Studies Center

We left my in-laws in one hotel and hopped a train to Lucerne, two hours away. We had a meeting. Or, as I explained it to them, “When they heard your daughter was coming to Switzerland, they cleared their schedules and we’re meeting with some serious higher ups. She’s a big deal is what I’m saying.”

Because she is. This is how you know.

We went to the Olympic Studies Center today. They’ve got signs and everything. We met with two librarians and archivists. And then we met with a grants specialist.

They explained their impressive library, signed us up for their newsletter and gave us remote access to their online catalogs. (Which are incredibly extensive. I have so much new information to write about now.)

Being the official archive collector of the Olympic Games, they’ve got, well, everything. Books you can’t find online. (I’ve been looking after drooling over some of what we saw today.) There are proposal reports from every city that has bid to host the Games. Research from every corner of the world. And, as they say in French, Bien plus encore.

I wrote pages and pages of notes. I also took a lot of photos of books I want to find and read. There were two whole shelves of books I want to find, so I just shot video of those.

I’m not an Olympic scholar — my lovely bride is a globally renowned Olympic scholar — but they are making it easy, and tempting, to give it a try.

We took our meetings just casually sitting by the torch from the 2024 Paris Games. I was sitting three feet from this.

I could have written more notes in the meetings, but my mind did wander and wonder: how much does that torch weigh?

The library closed at 5 p.m., and the people there couldn’t have been more charming. We’ll be back. (If we can convince the dean this is a business trip, we’ll be back often!)

There’s a museum next to the Studies Center, but the museum was closed today. On this beautiful — and extremely warm! — day today, though, we enjoyed the sculptures and displays on the grounds. Here’s one of my obvious favorites.

There’s also an Olympic-caliber track, which was installed by the people who actually supply the Olympic track. They had a 100-meter straightaway.

If you can see those little lights on the left (the ones on the right are just regular lights) they are synched up to Usain Bolt’s world record at Berlin in 2009. Each lighting at his pace, so you can see how suck you are compared to God’s greased lightning.

His world best is 9.58 seconds. The lights are synched to that. You do OK on that first light. Probably because you initiate the thing while he had to react to the starter. It’s over at the second light. It’s LAUGHABLE at the third. (Seriously; I was laughing.)

Anyway, we did a few starts, and then the Yankee decided to do the whole 100 and I timed it. So I had to do the whole thing too, and she timed it. I’m happy to say that Bolt, the fastest human ever, at his peak form at 23 years of age, with the finest tech of the day, is less than twice as fast as me, a currently untrained, non-sprinter, wearing linen slacks, a billowy polo and high tops.

About three-quarters of the way down, the thought occurred to me: You’re 48!

Literally in the next heartbeat my left hamstring said: I’m 48!

So now I’m limping.

I did it in 17.4, though, having pulled up in those last few strides. It might have otherwise been 16+, at this age and in those conditions with no training and casual street wear. I’ll take it.

(You also start under a pole vault display, which shows the Olympic and World Records for the men and the women. They get really, really high.)

Anyway, now I am going to do some Olympic writing … writing about previous Olympics, more precisely. It’ll be great fun, just like today


23
Jun 25

Beautiful views from the gondola down from Jungfraujoch

From the “Top of Europe” you take a brief train ride. And you are so high up — just over two miles above sea level — that the train station doesn’t bring you all the way down to the valley floor. You take a gondola, the Eiger Express, to get you down to Grindelwald, a village of about 3,000 people that sits at 3,392 feet above sea level. You are, after all, in the Alps.

And this is what it looks like, coming down on the cable car. Enjoy.

  

Tomorrow, it’s all about the Olympics.