Saturday, June 23, 2018

Another gorgeous day in Zermatt plus ...

A good weather report for next week!  Pack your bags, and I will see you in the airport. The first of the Round Lake Campus Expeditions is about to depart. 




The webcam screenshot shows folks milling around at the Gornergrat Hotel.  The mountain in the background, is the Breithorn, with its long Summit ridge. From this vantage point, the two classic routes you can see are the Younggrat which is the obvious left hand ridge curving down from a subsidiary summit. (Geoffrey Winthrop Young did the first ascent prior to World War I.  He was the leading climber of his day, Mallory's mentor, and had he not lost a leg in the war, he would have lead those early Everest expeditions. He did climb the Matterhorn again with a prosthetic leg in 1928.) 

The bulky central snow and ice face to the main summit is the Triftigrat; it was the first route I did in Zermatt in the 1970s.  The "tiny" rock Peak just to the right of the Breithorn is the Kleiner Matterhorn, accessible by the highest cable car in Europe ... I am getting psyched.