Matterhorn
At 14,685 feet, the Matterhorn's elegant snaggletooth form rears up over the village of Zermatt, larger than life and genuinely awe inspiring. As you weave through crowds along Bahnhofstrasse, the town's main street, you're bombarded on all sides by Matterhorn images—on postcards, sweatshirts, calendars, beer steins, and candy wrappers—while the original, slightly obscured by resort buildings, occasionally peers down at you. In town, it's better seen from side streets and the windows of hotel rooms. Break past the shops and hotels onto the main road into the hills, and you'll reach a slightly elevated spot where you'll probably stop dead in your tracks. There it is, a twist of snowy rock blinding in the sun. Catch it in the very early morning to witness its rare alpenglühen, when the rising sun bathes it in fragile pink light. It was Edward Whymper's spectacular—and catastrophic—conquest of the Matterhorn, on July 14, 1865, that made Zermatt a household word. After reaching the mountain's summit, his climbing party began its descent, tying themselves together and moving one man at a time. One of the climbers slipped, dragging the others down with him. Though Whymper and one of his companions braced themselves to stop the fall, the rope between climbers snapped and four mountaineers fell nearly 4,000 feet to their deaths. One body was never recovered, but the others lie in modest graves behind the park near the village church, surrounded by scores of other failed mountaineers. In summer, the streets of Zermatt fill with sturdy, weathered climbers who continue to tackle the peaks, and climbers have mastered the Matterhorn thousands of times since Whymper's disastrous victory.
