The Walkers' Haute Route, 2018 - Stage 11 grächen to zermatt friday august 3

Stage 11: Grächen to Zermatt, Friday August 3

We had always planned to do the Mattertal valley walk from St. Niklaus to Zermatt, having no desire to do the scary, rock-fallin’ Europaweg. I do not love exposure, and Chris does not love rocks falling from above. Since we were starting in Grächen, though, we decided to do the mid-altitude path through Gasenreid. It was pretty and nice until it wasn’t, and then we just got on the train. Sometimes that’s okay. We were over trying to prove anything to anyone!

You can take these paths pretty much anywhere.

These stations are unmanned. You press a button to get the train to stop.

When Chris was a kid, he read a book about climbing the Matterhorn. The thing about the Matterhorn, though, is that it is hidden behind all these other huge mountains, mostly that pesky Weisshorn, which seems to be everywhere. But we got to Zermatt, and there it was!

We spent the night at the Hotel Alalin, with a view of the Matterhorn from our bedroom.

We walked around town some, but it was boring. We might just have no more interest in shopping and sites aimed at tourists, or maybe we were just tired.

Marmot statue in front of the Zermatterhof

Crowds of tourists felt so strange after days of isolation in the mountains.

It was interesting, though, to discover another Alpine town with the same sort of milky-white river running through it as Chamonix. Cold air comes off these rivers like air conditioning.

We had dinner at a wonderful Bernese restaurant, where I got a chateaubriand and a meringue glacée that reminded me so much of Chalet Brandt in Baton Rouge.

Meringue. What I didn’t know and learned later is that meringue glacée is a classic dish of the Bernese Oberland. Also that there is a thing known as the Bernese Oberland, which we really got to know on the Via Alpina in 2022.