There is heaps to read about the Matterhorn on the internet, but nothing I read prepared me for the mountain. A number of months ago at a Tuesday night Patika event at Karaf in Kaleiçi, Hasan introduced me to his friend Semra who was visiting from Rize. Hasan had been talking to both me and Semra separately about a climbing trip to Switzerland. It was that evening that we started to seriously set our eyes on the Matterhorn. Like many people, I read a little about the difficulty (it’s not) of the Hörnli Ridge route and said, “yes, let’s do it.”
Upon further research I started to regret our decision. It seems the route is very crowded, there’s a pecking order regarding who can climb first at the bottlenecks, and the other climbers, well, the guides especially, don’t seem to be very friendly to those who don’t hire their services (for 1000 Swiss Francs/day (US$1045), maximum two people). We bought tickets to Geneva for late June, knowing that was a bit early for the season and hoping that it might be slightly less crowded. Expecting to generally be able to follow the hordes, I didn’t pay too much attention to the actual route description — just follow the other groups or the fixed gear that’s abundant on the route (and, as it turns out, slightly off the route as well).
Getting to the mountain is easy if you have a fat wallet. From Geneva, Hasan, Barış, Semra, and I caught the train to Zermatt (transfer in Visp) and then a teleferique from Zermatt to Schwarzsee at ~2600m. This bit from Geneva costs more than an air ticket from Antalya to Geneva. It was windy and cool at Schwarzsee and looked windier and colder up on the mountain. We set up our base camp at about 2900m in a depression sheltered from the wind, not knowing what other options were higher up. We saw a couple people walking on the trail between the teleferique and our camping spot. The views were stellar.
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