Matterhorn

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Matterhorn is a pyramid of rock on the border between Switzerland and Italy, and for centuries it made sensible people lose their composure. Edward Whymper, the man who first climbed it, wrote that those who came under its power "seemed to quit their senses, and ranted and rhapsodised, losing for a time all common forms of speech." Today it is nicknamed the Mountain of Mountains. It has been called the most beautiful mountain in the world, and it has become an emblem of Switzerland and of the Alps as a whole. Behind the postcard image lie several puzzles. Nobody can say for certain where its name came from. Its rock once belonged to another continent. It stayed unclimbed long after most of the other great Alpine peaks had been conquered. And when climbers finally reached the top, the triumph turned into a disaster that is said to have closed the golden age of alpinism.

  4549791510

• 2. Names and Numbers

  ›

  The Schalbetter map, printed by Sebastian Münster in 1545, labels the valley Mattertal but gives the mountain two other names. One is the Latin Mons Silvius and the other is the German Augstalberg. A map by Johannes Stumpf in 1548 keeps only Mons Silvius. The name Matterhorn itself first appears in German in 1682. It joins Matte, meaning meadow, with Horn, and it is often rendered as the peak of the meadows.

  The French name Cervin, which gave rise to the Italian Cervino, probably descends from the Latin Mons Silvanus, where silva means forest. That form slid into Selvin and then Servin. The change of the first letter from s to c is credited to Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who believed the word was connected to deer, cerf in French and cervo in Italian.

  A rival explanation turns the mountain's name into a Roman memorial. Josias Simler suggested in his book De Alpibus Commentarius, published in 1574, that Mons Silvius honoured a Roman leader. T. G. Farinetti later revived the idea. He pictured Silvius as a commander who passed through the land of the Salassi and the Seduni, perhaps over the Theodul Pass, and who may have been the Servius Galba whom Caesar sent to open the Alpine passes for traders. Nobody knows when Servin or Cervin replaced the older name.

  Local communities have their own words. The people of the Aosta Valley call the peak Gran Bècca, meaning big mountain, while the German-speaking people of the Valais call it Horu. Its outline was so recognisable that mountains around the world have since been nicknamed the Matterhorn of their own country or range.

  The first measurement of its height came in August 1792. Saussure stretched a 50-foot chain across the Theodul glacier, used a sextant, and arrived at 4,501.7 metres. In 1868 the Italian engineer Felice Giordano carried a mercury barometer to the summit and measured 4,505 metres. The Dufour map gave the Swiss summit as 4,482 metres.

  In 1999 the TOWER Project, short for Top of the World Elevations Remeasurement, used satellite positioning to fix the summit at 4477.54 metres. The accuracy was better than one centimetre, so future changes can be tracked. The mountain actually has two summits, at opposite ends of a 100-metre exposed crest that carries the border.

  Its topographic prominence is 1042 metres. That figure measures how far the peak rises above the lowest saddle linking it to a higher summit, here the Weisshorn, across the Col Durand at 3436 metres. The nearest point of higher ground, the Western Liskamm, is only 1 metre taller and lies 13.9 kilometres away. Among Alpine peaks with at least 300 metres of prominence, the Matterhorn ranks sixth in the Alps and Europe outside the Caucasus. On the official list of Alpine four-thousanders it stands twelfth, because that list also counts subsidiary summits of taller mountains. Four major neighbours rise above it, led by Monte Rosa at 4,634 metres, the second-highest peak in the Alps.

  151617251

• 3. Anatomy of a Pyramid

  ›

  Around 200 million years ago, the supercontinent Pangaea broke into Laurasia, which held Europe, and Gondwana, which held Africa. The rocks of nearby Monte Rosa stayed with Laurasia. The rocks destined to form the Matterhorn went with Gondwana, and the newly formed Tethys Ocean lay between the two.

  About 100 million years ago the Tethys stopped widening. The Apulian plate, a small continent that had split from Africa, began moving toward Europe. The ocean floor sank beneath it, and that sinking left a jumble of rock at the foot of the Matterhorn that geologists call an accretionary prism. Mountain building proper started only when European continental crust collided with the Apulian continent. The collision stacked the rock into great sheets called nappes.

  Up to 3,400 metres, the Matterhorn consists of layers of ocean-floor rock and sedimentary rock from the Tsaté nappe, a remnant of the Piedmont-Liguria ocean. From that height to the top the stone is gneiss from the Dent Blanche nappe. Gneiss below 4,200 metres belongs to the Arolla series, and the summit belongs to the Valpelline zone. The Weisshorn, the Zinalrothorn, the Dent Blanche and Mont Collon share this same rock. Because the gneiss came from the Apulian plate, the Matterhorn has been popularised as an African mountain.

  The famous pyramid is far younger than its stone. When the Alps began to rise, the Matterhorn was only a rounded hill, and erosion over the past million years carved it. The summit lies above the snowline, so its flanks carry ice. In summer some of that ice melts and seeps into the bedrock, then freezes and expands, splitting off fragments. This freeze-thaw cycle hollowed out four bowl-shaped cirques, and those four cirques gave the mountain its present form.

  Banner clouds often stream from the summit. The peak stands alone on the main Alpine watershed, and its great height exposes it to rapid weather changes. Air flowing around the steep body condenses on the sheltered side and spins into vortices.

  The four faces point roughly toward the four compass points. The north, east and west faces lie in Switzerland, and the south face lies in Italy. The east face is 1,000 metres high, and one description calls it "a long, monotonous slope of rotten rocks," which makes rockfall a constant danger. The north face rises 1,200 metres and counts among the most dangerous north faces in the Alps, because of rockfall and storms. The south face, 1,350 metres high, looks down on the resort of Breuil-Cervinia and offers many routes. The west face is the tallest at 1,400 metres, lies in the most remote setting, and has the fewest routes. The north and south faces are wider than the east and west faces, so the mountain is not a perfect square pyramid.

  The four ridges between the faces are the main climbing routes. According to Collomb, the Zmutt ridge, between the north and west faces, is "the classic route up the mountain, its longest ridge, also the most disjointed." The Lion ridge, between the south and west faces, is the Italian normal route, and Collomb calls it "a superb rock ridge, the shortest on the mountain." He describes the Furggen ridge, between the south and east faces, as "the hardest of the ridges." The Hörnli ridge, between the east and north faces, is the least difficult technical climb and the usual route.

  Little snow clings to such steep walls. Avalanches carry it down to glaciers at their feet, the largest being the Tiefmattengletscher to the west and the Matterhorn Glacier to the north. Along this stretch the border follows the main Alpine watershed. Water from the north side flows to the Rhone and the Mediterranean, and water from the south side flows to the Po and the Adriatic.

  The Theodul Pass, at 3,295 metres, lies between the Matterhorn and the Breithorn and is the easiest crossing between the two valleys. The Romans and the Romanised Celtic Salassi used it as a trade route between 100 BCE and 400 CE. It was still the link between Italian and Swiss villages when the first climbers arrived.

  3537383432

• 4. Poets Before Climbers

  ›

  In 1538 Aegidius Tschudi published De Prisca ac Vera Alpina Raethi in Basel, the first work to mention the region around the Matterhorn. He reached the Theodul Pass but paid the mountain itself little attention. More than two centuries passed before anyone studied it seriously.

  Horace Bénédict de Saussure, a geologist from Geneva, was filled with admiration for it. He had no wish to climb it. "Its precipitous sides," he wrote, "which give no hold to the very snows, are such as to afford no means of access." Even so he praised "the proud peak which rises to so vast an altitude, like a triangular obelisk, that seems to be carved by a chisel." He guessed that centuries of weathering had destroyed much of an ancient and far larger mountain. On his second journey he spent three days at the Theodul Pass, sleeping in a tent near the ruins of an old fort. He collected stones, plants and insects, and he puzzled over a tiny glacier fly that fluttered over the snow at such heights. He also climbed the Klein Matterhorn, at 3,883 metres, which he named the Cime Brune du Breithorn.

  In 1825 William Brockedon reached the top of the Theodul Pass exhausted. He gazed on "the beautiful pyramid of the Cervin, more wonderful than aught else in sight, rising from its bed of ice to a height of 5,000 feet, a spectacle of indescribable grandeur." Christian Moritz Engelhardt loved Zermatt so much that he returned at least ten times between 1835 and 1855, drawing panoramas and maps and recording the minerals and plants of the region.

  In 1841 James David Forbes, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, called the Matterhorn the most wonderful peak in the Alps and judged it beyond the reach of climbers. John Ball repeated that verdict in his celebrated guidebook twenty years later.

  Rodolphe Töpffer, who led young pupils into the Alps, brought his students to Zermatt in 1842. He compared the mountain to a "huge crystal of a hundred facets." His friend and master Alexandre Calame illustrated the book in the romantic style of the day, and the drawings show a mountain more exaggerated than real.

  John Ruskin went to Zermatt in 1844, and the Matterhorn did not please him at first. He returned, studied it and dreamed at its foot, and he came to call it "the most noble cliff in Europe." Ruskin was no mountaineer and no great friend of mountaineering. He drew the peaks to illustrate the beauty of natural forms, and his book Modern Painters stirred many educated people in England to want to see the mountains for themselves.

  By the 1850s scientists and artists were giving way to real climbers. In the preface to the first volume of the Alpine Journal, published in 1863, the editor Hereford Brooke George wrote that the Matterhorn "remains (who shall say for how long?) unconquered and apparently invincible."

  3145497988

• 5. Race for the Summit

  ›

  The first serious attempts came in 1857 and 1858 from Jean-Antoine Carrel and his uncle Jean-Jacques, both from the Valtournenche area. On the second try they reached 3800 metres. The Matterhorn stayed unclimbed not because of technical difficulty but because of the fear it inspired. Every early attempt started on the Italian side, even though the southern routes are technically harder than they look.

  In July 1860 three brothers from Liverpool, Alfred, Charles and Sandbach Parker, turned back at about 3500 metres. In August Jean-Jacques Carrel guided Vaughan Hawkins and John Tyndall to about 3960 metres. The Carrels reached the Crête du Coq at 4032 metres in 1861. In July 1862 Jean-Antoine and César Carrel went up as porters with Tyndall, Anton Walters and J. J. Bennen. They reached the Shoulder at 4248 metres, later named Pic Tyndall in honour of the client. A deep cleft not far below the summit stopped them.

  Edward Whymper first met the mountain in the summer of 1860. He was an English artist and engraver hired by a London publisher to sketch the mountains around Zermatt. The unclimbed Matterhorn had a mixed reputation among British mountaineers, yet it fascinated him. In August 1861 he began his first attempt from Breuil. In Valtournanche he almost hired Jean-Antoine Carrel, but he disliked the look of Carrel's uncle and changed his mind. The Carrels set off alone and reached a new high point.

  In 1862 Whymper climbed above 4,000 metres by himself but was injured on the way down to Breuil. In 1863 he persuaded Carrel to join him, and a storm trapped them halfway up for 26 hours in their tent. He then stayed away for two years. His attempt of the 21st of June 1865, his seventh, ended when severe rockfall struck the south face.

  By then the Italian Alpine Club had been founded, and its leaders Felice Giordano and Quintino Sella wanted an Italian to reach the summit first. Giordano hired Carrel and wrote anxiously to Sella about Whymper, "that fellow whose life seems to depend on the Matterhorn," who was in the hotel "suspiciously prying into everything." Giordano added that he had taken all the best men away from the Englishman. Carrel refused Whymper's request to guide him, and no other local guide in Breuil would work for him.

  Whymper crossed the Theodul Pass to Zermatt to hire guides there. He met Lord Francis Douglas, a Scottish mountaineer with the same ambition, and the two settled in the Monte Rosa Hotel. There they met the Reverend Charles Hudson and his young, inexperienced companion Douglas Robert Hadow, who had hired the French guide Michel Croz. The two parties joined forces and chose the Hörnli ridge, taking on the father and son who were both named Peter Taugwalder.

  They left Zermatt early on the 13th of July 1865. At almost the same hour, Carrel and six other Italian guides set out on the Italian ridge.

  4549444318

• 6. The Fatal Descent

  ›

  Whymper's party reached the foot of the Hörnli ridge six hours after leaving Zermatt, near where the Hörnli Hut stands today. To their astonishment, places that had looked "entirely impracticable" from below were "so easy that we could run about." They camped for the night. Next day the upper slope rose before them, in Whymper's words, "like a huge natural staircase," and the rope was hardly needed. Near the summit they had to leave the ridge for the north face, which proved easier than the broken crest. Hadow, the least experienced, "required continual assistance."

  Croz and Whymper dashed the last stretch in a dead heat. "At 1.40 p.m. the world was at our feet, and the Matterhorn was conquered," Whymper wrote. Not a footprint marked the snow. On the Italian ridge, Carrel and his men were about 400 metres below. They saw their rival standing on the top, gave up, and went back to Breuil.

  The climbers built a cairn and spent an hour on the summit. On the way down they moved one at a time in a fixed order: Croz, Hadow, Hudson, Douglas, the elder Taugwalder, Whymper and the younger Taugwalder. Whymper's reconstruction was that Croz had put down his axe and was setting Hadow's feet one by one into place. When Croz turned to continue down, Hadow slipped, fell on him and knocked him over.

  The falling pair dragged Hudson and Douglas off their holds and down the north face. The rope between Douglas and the elder Taugwalder then snapped, which left Whymper and the two Taugwalders alive. Stunned, they could not move at first. When Whymper asked to see the broken rope, he found it was the weakest and oldest of the three they had carried, used by mistake. They searched in vain for any trace of their companions. After an hour spent in the dark they found a resting place at 9.30 p.m. and continued at daybreak to Zermatt, where a search was quickly organised.

  The bodies of Croz, Hadow and Hudson lay on the Matterhorn Glacier. Douglas was never found. The three recovered men were buried in the Zermatt churchyard. English newspapers discussed the affair with bitter blame, and a German newspaper accused Whymper himself of cutting the rope between Douglas and Taugwalder to save his life. Others accused the elder Taugwalder of cutting it. The official inquest found no proof against him.

  On the 16th of July, two days after the first ascent, Jean-Antoine Carrel set out to show that the Italian side could be climbed. With him went Amé Gorret, a priest who had shared the 1857 attempt, plus Jean-Baptiste Bich and Jean-Augustin Meynet. Giordano wanted to join them, but Carrel flatly refused to guide a client. On the second day, at Tyndall's flagstaff, Gorret wrote, "We were about to enter unknown country, for no man had gone beyond this point."

  A false step and falling icicles drove them back from a traverse onto the west face, and a falling stone injured Gorret's arm. At the base of the final tower they met a rock couloir they had not seen from below. Gorret sacrificed his place, and Meynet stayed with him. Carrel and Bich reached the top on the 17th of July 1865, three days after Whymper. At Breuil, Giordano noted in his diary that in the afternoon mist he "saw our flag on the western summit of the Matterhorn."

  4548494718

• 7. Records and Risks

  ›

  On the 22nd of August 1871, wearing a white print dress, Lucy Walker became the first woman to reach the summit. Her rival Meta Brevoort followed a few weeks later. In 1876 three experienced Lancashire climbers, A. H. Cawood, J. B. Colgrove and the schoolmaster A. Cust, made the first ascent without guides on the 23rd of July, choosing a day of particularly favourable weather.

  The ridges fell one by one. J. J. and J. P. Maquignaz made the first direct ascent of the Italian ridge on the 13th of September 1867. Albert F. Mummery, Alexander Burgener, J. Petrus and A. Gentinetta climbed the Zmutt ridge on the 3rd of September 1879. The Furggen ridge came last. M. Piacenza climbed most of it in 1911 but bypassed the overhangs near the top. Only on the 23rd of September 1941, in the middle of the Second World War, did Alfredo Perino climb the whole ridge with the guides Louis Carrel, nicknamed "The Little Carrel," and Giacomo Chiara.

  The faces took longer. The west face, the most hidden of the four, was first climbed completely on the 13th of August 1962 by Renato Daguin and Giovanni Ottin. In January 1978 seven Italian alpine guides repeated that route in winter. A storm brought two metres of snow to Breuil-Cervinia and Zermatt, and one of the climbers died during the descent.

  The north face was one of the last great big-wall problems in the Alps. It fell on the 31st of July and the 1st of August 1931 to the brothers Franz and Toni Schmid, who kept their plans secret and surprised everyone. They had travelled by bicycle from Munich, and after the climb they cycled home again. Walter Bonatti climbed the North Face Direct alone in February 1965. It was not repeated solo until Catherine Destivelle did so in winter 1994. The south face was first climbed on the 15th of October 1931 by Enzo Benedetti with the guides Louis Carrel and Maurice Bich. The following year Benedetti and G. Mazzotti completed the east face.

  Stopwatches followed the pioneers. On the 20th of August 1992, Hans Kammerlander and Diego Wellig climbed the Matterhorn four times in 23 hours and 26 minutes. In 1995 Bruno Brunod ran from Breuil-Cervinia to the summit in 2 hours and 10 minutes. On the 21st of August 2013, Kilian Jornet cut the climb to 1 hour and 56 minutes, with a round trip of 2 hours and 52 minutes. Ueli Steck climbed the north face by the Schmid route in 1 hour and 56 minutes in 2009.

  The mountain's danger has not gone away. By the late 1980s, an estimated 500 people had died on it since 1865, an average of about 12 deaths a year. The toll fell in the 2000s, partly through greater awareness of the risks and partly because most climbers now use local guides. Even so, at least ten people died in the summer of 2018. Some bodies have been found long after they vanished. French skier Henri le Masne went missing in 1954, and his remains were found in 2005 and identified in 2018. Two Japanese climbers who disappeared in 1970 were found after 45 years, in 2015.

  On a summer day up to 150 climbers attempt the peak. The usual pattern is to take the Schwarzsee cable car up from Zermatt and walk to the Hörnli Hut at 3260 metres. Climbers wake at 3:30 in the morning to reach the summit and descend before the regular afternoon clouds and storms arrive. Crowding on the routes has made regulation a struggle. In 2015 the Hörnli Hut became the first mountain shelter in Europe to limit its beds.

  5153595472

• 8. Visitors and Images

  ›

  In 1871 Whymper published Scrambles Amongst the Alps, a worldwide bestseller about his first ascent. Tourists began arriving in Switzerland in summer to see the Alps, often hiring locals as guides. When alpine skiing began in the early 20th century, they came in winter too. In part, mountaineering helped turn Switzerland's mountain regions from poor rural areas into tourist destinations. The same mix of climbing, skiing and tourism later shaped Sun Valley, Vail and Jackson Hole in the western United States.

  The railway between Visp and Zermatt was begun in 1888, and the first train reached Zermatt on the 18th of July 1891. The whole line was electrified in 1930, and from that year the Glacier Express panoramic train linked the village to St. Moritz. The Gornergrat railway, opened in 1898, reached a record altitude of 3,100 metres. The cable car to the Klein Matterhorn, at 3,883 metres, is the highest transport system in Europe. Zermatt remains almost free of internal combustion vehicles, and by 2015 nearly two million visitors arrived each year.

  Some ideas never came to pass. In 1890 a contractor asked the Federal Government for a concession to build a railway to the Matterhorn itself, with a tunnel of about two kilometres under the Hörnli ridge. Only the Gornergrat line was built. In 1950 the Italian engineer Count Dino Lora Totino planned a cable car from Breuil-Cervinia to the summit. The Alpine Museum of Zermatt sent a protest letter bearing 90,000 signatures to the Italian government, which declared the Matterhorn a natural wonder worthy of protection and refused the concession.

  For more than a century travellers between Zermatt and Breuil-Cervinia had to hire guides to cross the glaciated Theodul Pass. In 2023 the Matterhorn Alpine Crossing opened via the Klein Matterhorn and Testa Grigia, and a new cable car there finally linked the Swiss and Italian sides. Trekkers can walk the Tour of the Matterhorn in about 10 days. It touches six valleys and three cultures, and it crosses seven passes between 2,800 and 3,300 metres.

  The Matterhorn became a graphic symbol early. In 1908 the poster artist Emil Cardinaux designed a Matterhorn poster for the Zermatt tourist office, often considered the first modern poster. Cardinaux also made a poster for the chocolate brand Toblerone in the 1920s, and the mountain first appeared on Toblerone bars in 1960. Painters including John Ruskin, in 1849, and Albert Bierstadt, in 1867, depicted it. It appears behind the cover of Depeche Mode's third album, Construction Time Again, released in 1983. It inspired the filmmakers Luis Trenker and Walt Disney, and large replicas stand at Disneyland and Window of the World. In 2021 the Swiss Museum of Transport opened an attraction that lets visitors climb it virtually from the Solvay Hut to the summit.

  In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the light artist Gerry Hofstetter began projecting country flags and messages of endurance onto the peak each night, a signal of hope for people suffering and for those fighting the illness.

  4939404194