Matterhorn Glacier Hike...

Well, today was supposed to be a bit of a rest day - small hike and recovery but we were wrong! After a quick trip to the Coop for Mark to get blister fixins and a short time for me to bandage up my poor feet, we were off and running again! The weather had come in as predicted so we were fighting with the cloud cover. We thought that if we went high enough we'd get above it so 60 CHF later we were on the cable car on our way up.

Well, there was no getting above this so we made the best of it. At times visibility was 50ft which made for interesting hiking but also made for really cool pics. The goal of the hike was to get to the base of the Matterhorn and walk along the glacier and back around to the valley. Well, the weather had other ideas. We got to a point where the trail was snow covered again and this time it wasnt passable (big cliff on the right, boggy glacial moraine to the left) so we had to turn around and come back where we came from. Fun part was that we got to glissade (kind of ) down a snowy part of the trail. It was actually quite cool!

Once we got back to the lift we had a few options to get back to the valley. Since we didn't buy a round trip ticket on the tram and we had a bunch of time left in the day, we decided to walk it. Clouds or not, we still needed to get down. The long way down consisted of walking from Scharwzee to Stafelalp then on down to Zumsee and Blatten. On our way we passed Zmutt which was a quiet little alp with lots of grass roofed houses. We even passed a reservoir that looks like a big bowl of milk!

We made it down just as the sun was setting which made dinner challenging but we did manage to find a place that served Brockwurst and typical Swiss/German fare (which by this time was getting a tad old:) )

Lessons learned:
1. You can still have a fantastic hike in the clouds
2. At a place the specializes in fondue - dont get the tortellini