So Chris, Xing, Lawrence and I arrived in Zermatt on Saturday. We didn’t have any concrete plans… but Xing and Lawrence had never been on a glacier, so we decided that at a minimum, we wanted to get everyone up an easy 4000m peak, so we decided on the Breithorn. The weather forecast was Seattle like (unreliable, but with chances of rain), so we decided to bag the peak on the first good weather day, which ended up being the next day!

We woke up kind of late, got Xing and Lawrence setup with some rentals (boots, harness, helmet, ax, etc), and set off on the Matterhorn Express lift to the Klein Matterhorn!

The views along the way were spectacular…

After a gondola transfer, we were at 12,740-ft!!!

We went up to the viewing platform to check out the Breithorn and the views…

Then we moseyed our ways over to the glacier, and roped up! It was past noon by this point… many teams were returning from the summit. Also, it was BLAZING HOT up there…

The forecasts had called for cloud cover in the afternoon, but they seemed to be moving in sooner…

Thus, we set off for the walk up to 4164m

Climbers descending…

Not 10-minutes later, clouds appeared…

Working our way up the ridge

aaaand then…. we were at the summit!

I tried to scope out Pollux and Castor, but it got cloudy… I nabbed a shot of this couple returning from their climb. We exchanged emails, so they could get this shot!

They took a photo for us in return!

And another photo!

We started to hear thunder, so we scurried back down the mountain

We paused to remove our crampons, and some other equipment, and met a family from Berlin! What a cool family!!!

On the way down, we caught a short documentary in the lift station, then caught one of the gondolas back down, which provided crazy views of the glaciers…

Oh, did I mention we got awesome sunset views from our balcony?