Day 4, 21 May 2008, Zermatt

Not much better weather this morning. The clouds hung very low and we couldn't see any peaks all day long. We hung out in the hotel breakfast room in the morning talking to our hotelier trying to figure out something to do with such crappy weather.

Our day unfolded basically like this: we reconvened out front after a few minutes and decided to walk down to the heliport to get the straight skinny from the Air Zermatt folks. During our walk down there, we walked past the "Gornergratbahn" station and decided to say "F" it and take the cograil up to "Gornergrat;" fog, rain, and snow be damned. Anyway, we got to the heliport and were told that there would be no flights today and to call back tomorrow morning to see if the weather improves enough to fly. We took the "scenic" route back into town, getting moderately waylaid by a herd of sheep, and got some sandwich stuff from the Coop supermarket.

The cograil up to the Gornergrat was amazing. The grade that that train had to go up was just relentless. It was pretty clear most of the way up so that we could get views of Zermatt and the valley in which it is located. Once up there, we were solidly in the soup and could see a maximum of about 100 yards. I was able to get a glimpse of the glacier (the first real glacier I've ever seen), but the fog quickly enveloped us and that was that. Women being women (and my friend Adam being like a woman), there was a bit of shopping at the "highest mall in the world" (which basically amounted to a Swiss Army Knife store, a watch/jewelry store, and a trinket store). By the time we were ready to come back down, it was snowing pretty heavily up there.

The rest of the day was uneventful. We ate dinner at a pretty good bar and went to bed with fingers crossed for flying weather tomorrow.