Climbing The Matterhorn

After climbing the Eiger, Christian Lanley and I got another wild idea: “What if we climbed the Matterhorn?” “Well, if we get a weather window…” A couple of days later, the clouds parted, and the sky turned blue. We hopped on a train to Zermatt, duffels in tow.

We’d learned an important lesson on the Eiger: “If you’re slow, you sleep outside.” We didn’t want to sleep outside.

By this point, it was October 1st—well past the Matterhorn’s typical season. Christian and I took the gondola up; packed into the Hornli Hutte’s winter room; and went to bed early—we’d start at midnight.

It was dark and bitter cold; for the first several hours, we were the only ones on the mountain. Eventually we saw one other party.

After thousands of feet of scrambling and rock climbing in crampons, we reached the snow field, donned our piolets, and charged up to the summit ridge. The exposed knife-edge went on for forever, but we finally reached the summit. High-fived, and then high-tailed it down.

We made what seemed like 30 rappels off of giant I-hooks, pig tails, and old pitons; and finally reached the Hornli Hutte at eight p.m. Climbing the Hornligrat took us 20 hours to complete—and we didn’t even stop to eat. I subsisted the entire climb off handfuls of Haribo Gold Bears and pure determination. Regardless, we’d ticked off two test pieces unguided, out-of-season, and both within the period of a week. It was after these experiences that I began to think of myself as an aspiring alpinist.

We have almost no photos or videos from the climb because we were so determined to move efficiently, so enjoy these shots from Zermatt and the Hornli Hutte.

While I don’t have any photos or videos of the climb, Christian did, however, manage to capture these two pics of me on the lower section, and midway up the Hornligrat. No summit selfies for this one, though.