I had really wanted to visit Zermatt for a long time. Our camper van journey in July in Europe was designed to avoid the heat by circling the alps. We arrived in the late morning by shuttle to Zermatt, and then decided to take the cog train up to Gornergrat.
The cog train is an engineering marvel from the 19th century. The train engages metal teeth in the center of the rails with a geared pinion which allows steep ascents up to 45 degrees. When it was invented it opened up the wonders of the alps to people who would not otherwise get a chance to see the views. It is part of mountaineering history.
Part of me wished I was doing some climbing here or at the least skiing. Still, the view of the alpine mountains from the train during the ascent brought us a sense of wonder. The long run of mountains, the enormous ice and snow cornices, and the fading but still majestic glaciers sets the sense of scale off-balance. It has the effect of reframing. You feel small in a humble way.
Mountaineering is not a very old sport when one thinks about how long humans have had to relate to mountains. Peoples have had to cross them, find pastures, traverse villages, or visit them for sacred reasons for millennia. However, it is only in the mid-19th century that ascending to mountain summits became something people did for recreational reasons. Perhaps, we lacked the individual or nationalistic sense of imaginal achievement beforehand. When the sport began, to many cultures, the idea of climbing to a summit simply did not make any sense.
I did not grow up near mountains of significance in New Jersey. I only became interested in mountaineering when I started to read about explorers and the early history of the sport. The names of mountains, though, were like magic to me. Kangchenjunga, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, and of course Everest. In my mind they were places of reverence and where the extremes of light, altitude, and height had a testing effect on the consciousness. Mountains are perilous.
I started hiking up mountains in my twenties when I moved out west to Arizona. I found I enjoyed the long slogs. With a friend we crazily ascended the tallest peak in the lower 48 states Mt. Whitney in a single day (the same day from sea level in Santa Monica.) We set out at three in the morning, in May, no crampons (REI failed to hold our rentals), and went up the mountain. We hit a 1000' rise of solid snow still frozen and were ascending with others when an older climber slipped and took a fall. I watched him slide down hundreds of feet and expected to see him disappear into the void or hit rocks. Amazingly he wasn't hurt. He simply brushed himself off and turned around to go home. The views from the top of the mountain were spectacular, and I recall walking along a narrow ridge where a single slip would lead to a rapid end. I made the summit of Whitney around noon and my head hurt and I had nausea from the attitude. I was happy to descend and even found joy in learning to glissade, descending rapidly on the melted snow in a seated position, like sledding on one's rear. We got back to the car 14 hours later at 5pm. I was beyond exhausted, but I loved it.
The next big mountain challenge came by chance while I was backpacking in Ecuador. I had arrived by bus in the town of Cuenca and bored I went to sit on a park bench. A boy came up to me and pointed to a mountain (Aconcagua) and asked where I wanted to climb it. One hundred and fifty dollars later I was outfitted with some gear and on my way to the climber's hut at 15,000 feet. Overnight there wasn't easy on me though, and I was too nauseas to eat before the climb. Up we went, me and a guide, and the environment felt like the magic I had dreamed of. At one point on the standard route there is a narrow ledge, like a horizontal ladder, a foot wide or so with drop offs on either side. The effect of the thin air made the snow and ice seem like another world. I made it to about 18,000 feet, but the altitude was hard on me with nausea. Every step up I could feel my heart racing. The guide stopped me before a major push, explained he didn't want problems should I stall, and so we turned around. I didn't make the summit but I didn't really mind.
The thing I was learning with mountaineering is how risky it is, and that each person has their own relation to those risks. There are tricky passages, vertigo, changing conditions of the snow and ice, and more that risks harm. These are called subjective hazards in the sense that you have control over them or at least your continued presence on the mountain. Worse, though, with being in the mountains there are also objective hazards. These are the things outside of your control and including rock fall, ice fall, sudden weather changes, crevasses, and avalanches. The risks of these can be mitigated but they also can just happen to you. Like a bus hitting you.
I have done a few guided climbs including Mt. Baker and Rainier and learned a lot about these things from the teachers I have had. Climbing Baker I saw a whole ledge of rock fall right above a party. They all braced for impact driving their axes into the snow and lying flat on the ground (they were right above a fall off.) It seemed to me that they would be killed, but the rock face where the fall started had a gully where it made contact with the snow and luckily the falling rock simply disappeared into it. It opened my eyes to how things could just happen to you in the mountains.
So, much simpler now, to ride a cog train up from Zermatt and see these great mountains, the Matterhorn and Mt. Blanc, than to be climbing myself. Still, I love the mountains for what it feels like to be climbing them. I love the sense of self reliance one must have, the great heights of the environment, the views one has nowhere else.
I think seeing these things, but not too often, amplifies the appreciation we have for being gifted a life on the Earth.