How To Climb The Matterhorn

hi my name is John Gibbs I'm 53 years old now and I live in Athens Georgia which is a whopping 250 meters above sea level I thought that it might be useful for people to have a how-to video on how to climb the Matterhorn especially for Americans and people coming from a long distance where it's difficult to go to Switzerland and sort of check out the area first like it was difficult for me I basically climb the mountain sight unseen so I thought that doing a how-to video would be of more use than simply showing pictures from the trip I hope you find that useful as well definitely let me know if you agree or disagree I can always change things for the future ok so first and foremost why climb the Matterhorn I think if you're interested in climbing the Matterhorn you probably already have your reasons but I guess I might as well give mine beyond the fact that it's probably the most iconic mountain in the world I mean I think even visually it's more iconic than Mount Everest even though Mount Everest is probably more popular it certainly has that amazing look and kind of a terrifying look as well that sort of shark tooth sticking up into the blue sky in addition to that my father sort of turned me on to mountain climbing when I was a very young child and six seven years old and it was always one of his thoughts to go and climb the Matterhorn he never unfortunately was able to do that but I figured that I would climb it in his stead and so I had you know sort of family reasons to do it as well as just wanting to climb a super iconic mountain why do a how-to video instead of just sort of showing off some pictures and video well that was more along the lines of something that I wish that I had been able to get a hold of when I was looking to climb the mountain and to prepare for it I didn't see very many how-to videos in fact I didn't find any how-to videos so they may be out there but I was unable to find them so I thought that this could actually fill a useful niche for people who were interested or people who are just thinking about it and at least you would you know know the reality so that the good the bad and the ugly as far as who this is for is really for anybody obviously you can watch it if you want to but it's most particularly for people who are interested in climbing the mountain themselves I think you might find some of what I have to say useful I'm sure some of it won't be but hopefully on the balance it's useful okay first of all my experience so that you can sort of gauge where you are versus where I am I am most assuredly an amateur climber I am NOT a professional climber by any means I have previously climbed the Grand Teton three times I believe once with a guide and twice with a friend I've also climbed Mount Tiwa not a couple of times once with a Gaiden once by myself and climb Mount oh and before with a guide I've also climbed Mount Rainier in Washington State and done a whole bunch of smaller less technical peaks as far as like rock climbing itself I would say you know top rope wise I can certainly do 510 I can try 511 down to like trad climbing where I have to place gear myself I'd probably say five seven five eight is what I'm comfortable with it depends so much on the route and the protection at that point I'm kind of a chicken when it comes to climbing vertical overhanging stuff with trad and so I'm usually don't push my you know ability levels that hard but certainly that puts me in whatever position that is you may be better or worse at any of those different things as far as conditioning is concerned I am 53 years old son definitely well past my prime of life but I do a lot of strength training and I also do a lot of aerobic work in particular I like to go cycling and Athens is a very I just challenging cycling environment it's incredibly Rolly it's in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains Appalachian Mountains and it is very very rolling there's hardly any flat ground around here so there's a lot of up and down that's not particularly useful for mountain climbing it would be better honestly if I live someplace nearer to mountains obviously because I have more altitude for one thing but for another I could get more sort of straight up climbs and straight down climb then you know on the bike and that would actually be useful but as far as training is concerned there are mountains about an hour and a half to the north so I'm able to go up there and work there as well what did I do in particular for training for the Matterhorn beyond just sort of general conditioning I the biggest thing I did was I stuffed my backpack with starting with 30 pounds of weight and went up to 65 pounds and walked my dogs 2 miles a day again it's very hilly around here so there's a lot of up and down I also went up north a couple of times and climbed up the there's a pretty good sized hill around the Unicoi gap in North Georgia on the Appalachian Trail so a few of those with the dogs I've Huskies so they don't mind they'll go as long as I want to go but those kinds of things were very important for extra training in addition I think mentally it's important to Train too it's something where I would watch a lot of videos and I really thought about the climb a lot it turned out that that was actually pretty useful in this case you don't want to underestimate the Matterhorn it is a very serious mountain it is by far the most difficult mountain that I have personally climbed on to preparation the first thing I think that's really important to understand is how expensive it's going to be to climb the Matterhorn again if you're like an American like me where you're used to going and paying like I think it's 20 or 30 dollars to get into like say Grand Teton National Park or whatever national park sometimes you can go in the backwoods and just you know in the Sierras you can just go climb for free basically there are a lot of expenses that you don't have to incur but that you're likely to incur one of them of course is just getting to Switzerland but I'll ignore that for now so assuming you're already there Zermatt is an incredibly expensive town you could certainly climb from the Italian side and save a great deal of money on that front it's not as classic of a route but you could also do it Traverse potentially and go up the Italian side and come down the Swiss side and then you know take a car or train or something like that back to Italy again so you could save some money that way we also saved some money in terms of where we stayed we stayed at an Airbnb which was substantially cheaper than a lot of the hotels in the area but the trade-off for that was a 85 meter hike up a hill every afternoon to get back to the place so it was significant it was a significant climb to get back up to the place that we stayed in addition eating is extremely expensive in Zermatt getting a meal it's about as expensive any place that I've ever been just for getting standard meals so be prepared for that in addition there is also gondola fees and train fees and any other kind of fees whether you're climbing anywhere in the area to sort of get back up into the mountains if you don't want to do a several hour uphill hike you're gonna want to take gondolas and the gondolas are quite expensive we did not do this but unfortunately we didn't know about it until afterwards but there's a thing called a Swiss pass which I think I would highly recommend you pay a certain amount of money I think it's a hundred or a hundred and twenty dollars but then all of the gondolas are half-price and the trains are half-price and lots of things are half-price so that would ultimately save a great deal of money on the trip so I would highly recommend that in addition the huts are quite expensive the currently Hut is I believe right around 150 dollars I'm just quoting in dollars the swiss franc is so close to the dollar that they're basically the same amount and food and things are included there but there is no water is not included and so its $9.94 oh if you took a SteriPEN or I saw your filter or something like that which I did not do but I would highly recommend taking that with you and you could sterilize the water yourself and I'm sure it would be perfectly fine to drink in addition everyone in Zermatt drinks bottled water but that's ridiculous because they actually have some of the best quality water that I've ever tasted it comes straight off the mountains it's spring water it's delicious don't spend money on bottled water in Zermatt that would be stupid because the water is delicious there you go next up is the perennial question to guide or not to guide I originally had thought about doing this with a friend of mine who is a quite a good climber and much more experienced than I am he couldn't make it and so I was semi forced to go with a guide but honestly on looking at the climb itself I thought it was probably a good idea and so Jeff Witt who there's a picture of him a super nice guy from the United States he now lives in Sean Mooney so it's fairly easy for him to get to Switzerland in the Matterhorn he was an excellent guide and in retrospect I absolutely would not have made the climb without him it just would have been impossible it was basically pushing it to the limits even with him there so I highly recommend getting a guide it is going to be expensive you're going to have to pay for it the entire thing guiding this is not including room and board and so forth but but including the huts and the guiding and so forth was about $3500 so and it could be more expensive than that potentially also so these are the kinds of things you need to know about beforehand in addition if you don't have equipment you're gonna have to pay for whatever equipment you need to purchase before then too so it is a very expensive trip not including airfare not including where you stay in town in Zermatt not including the food that you eat ins Armand so you just sort of need to be prepared for that and to save up if that's what you want to do equipment so I'm not going to go through an absolutely complete list of this if you would be interested in that I certainly can put it in the comments below so you're welcome to request that if you'd like I think the most important thing of course is shoes I went with the La Sportiva trango waterproof version the I think they're called ice cubes they're the crazy colored ones they worked really really well for me a lot of people wore like La Sportiva and nepal's which are heavier boots or you know the Scarpa version of that I can't remember the name of those right now I honestly given the fact that I climbed it in late July and the weather was actually pretty decent and pretty warm the nepal's were definitely overkill for that and as they're heavier and they have less feel that's not there it wouldn't be useful under those circumstances now if the weather had been colder or if it had been icy are on the route then I think the nopales would have been a good choice so unfortunately you kind of have to make a commitment about one of the other unless you have both in which case I guess you can take them both and just see what works best at the time as for other things clothing it's basic mountaineering stuff you just want a ton of layers synthetic probably wool otherwise no cotton nothing like that definitely a good pair of sunglasses definitely with some sort of keeper on the back so that they don't fall off because you could seriously get snow blind up there it's very high altitude and there's a lot of snow even with all the global warming there's still quite a bit of snow up on the top part in addition a good pair of climbing gloves something that's very thin but and has leather palms but it has good insulation quality and a couple of pairs of socks some I wore wool underwear but certainly synthetic underwear would work as well so things like that also ice axes I have a standard length ice axe and that's what I brought and my guide had Jeff had asked me to bring a short ice axe which I didn't really understand until I got there and indeed a short ice axe would be a good thing so you probably want one that's about half the length of your standard ice axe it's just the slopes where the snow is is so steep that it's a pain in the rear to have to lift up the ice axe as far as you have to go drive it down something I would definitely recommend getting a short ice axe I wish I had done that although certainly it did not affect the climbin tirely it just made it more of a pain to get up there a couple of other equipment sundries first of all I had a 33 liter osprey pack and that was a perfectly adequate you don't need to have a sleeping bag the Swiss Hut's even though they're very expensive are basically three-star hotels so they have very nice beds you just need a sleeping bag liner or something because they don't tend to wash their stuff I think except once a season and in terms of crampons really just make sure that they fit your boots that's the important part because you definitely will need crampons on the upper slopes training I think the things that perhaps I could have done better number one would be dealing with low altitude and I think what I am going to do for the future would be or is going to be to purchase a high altitude training mask and attempt to train with that to kind of mimic high altitude training because that is the number one most difficult thing to deal with coming from an basically sea level trying to deal with how my body is going to react at high altitude in addition I would recommend doing more step ups especially weighted step up so you know take those little thing at the boxes that are at the gym or heck at home doesn't really matter and just step up and down those things over and over and over again because that would be the one motion that my legs just were not particularly good at it happens every single time I climb a mountain and I always think to myself gee I really need to do step up so next time I'm going to do it one other very oddball thing which I think is pretty specific to the Matterhorn is that I wish I had done some rope climbing to prepare for the climb there are a lot of fixed ropes I think maybe 15 16 17 sets of fixed ropes going along and there's there's a big section of it at the top that's just right in a row around a dozen of them right in a row and it was very tiring on my hands fortunately it wasn't that tiring but it definitely was especially having to wait because they tended to get clogged up on the ropes so oftentimes you'd have to climb halfway up and then kind of hang there for a while so my hands were definitely cramped by the end and I would highly recommend doing some rope climbing just to get your upper body and your hands in shape for doing that okay now we're in Switzerland so a few things to think about there number one is on-site prep you don't just show up and climb the mountain unless you're in fantastically good shape in which case I don't know that you necessarily need to be watching this thing how many days should you be there I would say as many as you can afford both time and monetarily I ended up climbing the Matterhorn on the second and third day I was there because of weather issues and that definitely hurt my performance because I did not have as much time to acclimatize me so what did i do to acclimatize well the biggest thing that Jeff and I did was we climbed the egg climbing route on the South face of the refill horn that was a lovely I think it was about a 6 pitch climb nothing too terribly complicated but it had some really nice exposure actually quite a beautiful climb and it was good for me especially because I was climbing in my boots as opposed to rock shoes so it was a good opportunity to you know get a little bit of ahead for the altitude and a little bit of a head for Heights and a little bit of a head for with what my shoes would do versus regular rock shoes that I'm used to climbing in so all of that was very useful the plan originally was to climb the bright horn the next day or castor and pollux potentially and do some snow work but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate speaking of weather the best thing to do is to have some time so that you can be flexible about how you want to climb the mountain it turned out to be a really good thing that we were there for a week including travel days because even though I ended up climbing the mountain early it was something where I could have climbed it a couple of days later and as I climbed the mountain early with Jeff we were able to do the via ferrata on another day which is an awful lot of fun and also go paragliding another time so as it was my honeymoon my wife was very appreciative of being able to do some things with me so so now we're finally to the climb which is generally a two-day affair the first day is relatively easy it's just a hike up to the horn Lee Hut plus a gondola ride to get to the hike up to the horn Lee hunt you can certainly walk out of Zermatt I guess if you want a more ambitious and vigorous first day but it's a pretty good vertical ascent to get up there and even taking the gondola it's about a two-hour walk up to the hut from where the gondola is so it's a pretty substantial undertaking if you want to climb out of Zermatt to it so again that's where the Swiss pass comes in very useful if you have a Swiss pass then you can get the gondola for a half price as it turned out Jeff had taken care of all these things for me so I you know it was all just sort of in the fees so that worked out nicely too because it was just sort of one lump sum and I didn't have to worry about each individual thing as I went one thing that we did that I think was actually excellent was that we did a partial climb on the first day so we got to the Huntley hut around 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon and then climbed up the first maybe hour or so of the climb as a way of acclimatizing since I'd only been there for one climbing day previous to it but also just as a way of kind of looking around and getting a sense of the route because of course when you get up at 3 o'clock in the morning and start climbing before 4 it's very dark and it can be challenging to wrap find and it was extremely useful to sort of have a mental picture of what the route looked like from the day before some other recommendations for day one the first thing I would say would be to relax I know that can be rather difficult because you're looking forward to a climb and that's very exciting and scary and also given where the hut is you kind of look straight up onto the mountain onto the flanks of the mountain and the ridge rocks are going to take and that's a a bit over Alling I suppose it's a rather impressive sight from the the second thing I would recommend would be to drink a lot certainly because altitude it's going to get rid of a lot of liquid you have in your body and you're going to get dehydrated the second day third thing would be to have everything ready like seriously ready the night before when you go to sleep so that you're able to get up and not think about it just put your harness on eat some breakfast and be ready to go out the door I would also recommend bringing some melatonin with you a couple of those might help you sleep a little bit better I between drinking so much and the altitude and the nervousness I maybe got three hours of sleep the night before and now today too which is the big day it was about 11 hours that we took I think 11 hours and 15 minutes to climb up and down so it will be a marathon for sure definitely the first thing you want to do is get up on time we got up at a little before 3 o'clock in the morning I don't know how to put this delicately but you should definitely use the facilities especially for number two if you need to that's you're not going to have anywhere I guess you could go in the Solvay hunt up above but you really don't even have time to go because you're just pushing so hard to get up through the top so if you can use the facilities then you should definitely do so you should also eat quickly and be ready to go out the door when the rush happens the picture that I have here was taken ready quickly but you can see that it's you know kind of like an amusement park line basically what you need to get out the door so you want to be ready to go so that you're not at the very end of the whole thing and there is an order the swiss guides get to go first and then other guides who are not the local guides go and then the non guided parties go but you know it's all kind of a big mass of people that go out right away here I've got a picture of the route that you can see it goes straight up the ridge for a long ways and then it kind of tips over to the shoulder what's called the shoulder and then the upper snow fields that are just below the summit ridge it's it's an impressively long climb the bottom from from the force perspective view doesn't look like it's that long but there's an awful lot of traversing sideways horizontally as you go up so it's not as short as it looks and it's also quite sluggy at the bottom so there's a few things that you can think about to get ready number one is to understand that you're going to do a short brief hike but the climb itself really starts with a couple of fixed ropes and so you need to be ready to go you know at four o'clock in the morning 3:45 in the morning to hit the ropes and start climbing immediately it goes instantly there's no kind of warm up to the climb the next thing that I would recommend would be to try to keep up with the local guides with people who really really know the route don't blow yourself out however you need to maintain a pace that you can keep up so that's something that you have to internally figure out for yourself I know for a fact that I watched Jeff have to slow down like about three notches in order to slow down to my pace and he would have been able to keep up with the guides no problem but he's also a guide and between being older and not being able to train at altitude and only having one day to acclimatize basically I was rather slower than I would have wished but anyway it's it's especially if you go without a guide it's very useful to try to keep up with other people who know the route because that's critical to climbing this mountain efficiently which is pretty important it's it's definitely a slog getting through the bottom part of the climb because it is more horizontal so there's not a lot of places where you kind of get to do more technical climbing you're just kind of wandering through big old rock fields for sure enjoy the brightening view as it comes because as the Sun starts to come up and it gets lighter it's absolutely gorgeous and it's you're already way way way above the valley once you get up there and you're climbing on kind of the eastern face and so the sun's coming up behind you and it's really just smashing views so that's definitely worth keeping track of don't get so focused on the climb that you're not looking around and enjoying yourself because I mean that's why you're there right safety on the lower slopes there's not a huge amount of fixed-gear placed for the lower slopes there are two places where there's fixed ropes at the very very beginning of the climb and then a little ways up there's a few fixed ropes that kind of take care of the more difficult parts for the most part safety at that point is just keeping track of where you are and really concentrating because even though the climbing is not technically difficult it's on extremely steep slopes with scree and so if you start a default you're not going to stop so you really want to keep you know track of where you are and really concentrate so that's more or less the safety of the lower slopes the mostly slabs is where things really start to get a little bit more technical and fun it's the with the fixed ropes it's the crux of the entire climb technically I guess it was not a particularly difficult section but it was a lot of fun because you know you're climbing with a lot of exposure um finally vertically as opposed to a lot of horizontal walking and so forth and the other thing is that you have a goal because once you get through the lower mostly slabs you are up to the Solvay hut at 4000 meters which is kind of the halfway point of the climb even though it's more vertical distance the the rest of its a little more technical so it takes longer to get up the last five hundred meters or so the Solvay hut which is just about 4,000 meters is the really the only place where you get to take a significant break and by significant I mean like five minutes so it's not exactly a huge break but at least you get to sit down and and it's hanging over a vertical area so the views are fantastic but you there's a bench there's a flat ground you can sit for a minute take a drink get ready so forth so get ready for the upper slopes the upper slopes are where it really starts to get fun the lower part of the climb I thought was kind of slogging but the whole thing starting with the Mosely slabs was just fantastic this was the reason why I was there was climbing the upper slopes there are some more slabs up above the Solvay Hut I believe those are the upper Mosely slabs and then you get to where at least for us we needed to put crampons on because we started to get into snow fields there's a huge section of fixed ropes on the upper slopes I had a guess there maybe a dozen of these things in a row and it was extremely tiring it was it was it was shocking how cramped up my hands got and I guess I just hadn't really thought that for a mountain climb I was gonna have to be worried about you know rope climbing abilities as far as safety on the upper slopes is concerned there are a number of iron pins that stick out sometimes with curlicues sometimes just iron and there's stanchions in the slopes in the snow slopes up above so there are a lot of places to throw a rope around there are not very many places where you have to pitch anything out I think Jeff pitched out maybe two to three pitches on the upper ice fields snow fields at the top but aside from that we could pretty much Simon I'm and he could keep me well secured through these little pins and stanchions that came out from the from the rock as far as safety is concerned on the upper snow fields there are stanchions but at some points like I said Jeff actually pitched out a few of the pitches on that climb because it is certainly the most dangerous portion of the climb and so it's something where you have to pay attention and now as we finally approach the summit at forty four seventy eight meters you really start to enjoy the view and so forth first of all going up it is the statue of st. Bernard which by tradition you're supposed to rub his head if you come up from the Swiss side good luck who knows I'll take I'll take whatever it is but rubbing the head of st. Bernard is not a bad thing to do as you get there the summit ridge is quite spectacular and actually rather terrifying because you're looking at a you know a sixty to seven degrees 70 degree slope going down one side and actually an in cut slope on the other side so and the ridge itself is you know half a metre wide maybe ish actually as we approach the summit I knew that we were going to be serious about the whole thing because Jeff turned around and said if you start to fall you yell which direction so I can jump the other way it's literally that small of a ridge and there's nothing to be done there's no way to safety-wise you there's no way to bolt yourself into anything you're just up there so it did not feel nearly as scary as it looked in the videos but it was definitely something where you kind of want to concentrate you don't want to just be enjoying the views too much on the other hand definitely enjoy the views because of course that's one of the reasons why you're there and definitely enjoy the moment there's not a lot of time to be up there because again there's nowhere to sit there's really nowhere to kind of even rest at the top so it's it's more of a get up there and look around take some pictures kind of take a deep breath and think to yourself wow I you know actually got to the top of this thing and now I got to get back down again for sure take a moment enjoy it but also realize that you're not going to be sitting up there for an hour or two enjoying the views and relaxing and eating lunch and so forth I think we beat The Scotsman - yeah there's a + exactly hey man I was just happy to get to the top oh that is a mean-looking peak and the descent the big thing to understand about the descent is don't underestimate it it's by far the hardest descent I've had to do it actually took us 15 minutes longer than the ascent to get down the mountain in most mountains there are kind of escape routes off of it where you can rappel or abseil down on the Matterhorn that's really not an option and of course the top is very very steep and very very dangerous and going down is much more dangerous than going up it so it's something where you can't just speed down off the top you have to really take your time and you know you're going faster than on the way up but you can't just like run down the mountain route finding on the way down is perhaps trickier than on the way up the big reason is probably that people have kind of spread out at that point so they're whereas there's kind of a group of folks going up at least if the weather is good and it's prime season so that you can sort of follow them on the way up on the way down people have spread out and so they're all over the place and so the route can be particularly tricky to find on the way down in addition I would highly recommend bringing three liters of water as opposed to - Jeff and I each brought two liters of water and we were extremely dehydrated by the end of it we you definitely don't want to bring gallons and gallons of water with you because you'll be weighed down but I would say three litres would be a good idea if not probably what I should have done on when I was at the summit was to get some snow and put it in my now gene bottles and let it melt so at least we had a little bit more water when we got down to the lower altitudes another thing to think about is don't rest time is pretty critical even on a beautiful day you never know the weather could get bad any second but in addition the gondola that takes you back to Zermatt stops running at five o'clock and it's a 70 to 90 minute walk from the Harley hut to the gondola so you want to make sure that you have time to get down to the gondola itself before it stops running or else you get a nice long walk down in to Zermatt we got back about 3:15 I believe and so you know we we got back to the gondola with about 15 minutes to spare so and we were pushing the whole day so it was it was one of those now again if you're in better shape and you're basically running up and down the mountain like many people can do then you're not gonna have to worry about that so much but for someone like me and my sort of conditioning and being an amateur climber and doing it for the first time it was definitely something that was on our minds towards the end was to make sure that we made the gondola so we didn't have to walk back to town so what are my takeaways from climbing the Matterhorn the first thing is you cannot have too much prep I'm definitely buying an altitude training mask and I'm going to do weighted step ups before I attempt the next one of these things so that would be some big ones to do but again aerobic conditioning aerobic conditioning aerobic conditioning you don't have to be that fantastic of a climber it's not particularly technically challenging but it is very aerobic ly challenging so that's the big thing to focus on if you can spare the time and the money be in Zermatt longer acclimatizing is crucial and there's a ton of other things to climb and to do while you're there so it's not like you're gonna be bored ever so for sure you should spend as much time as you can't afford to spend there what I climb the Matterhorn again absolutely I would climb the Matterhorn again it would be a really fun thing to do especially a second time because I would probably know it better and feel more comfortable doing it and probably even enjoy it more I think I would rather climb the Eiger the Jungfrau and some other iconic Swiss mountains first however if and when I get back to Switzerland just to sort of mix it up and to you know go see different parts of the country and climb other mountains first what's next for me a trekking and non-technical climbing trip to Nepal I have been looking forward to this for years and in addition to the views and the fantastic opportunity to just be in Nepal and be in a different culture and be in the Himalayas I'm also curious to see how my body holds up with above 6000 meter climbing since the highest I've ever climbed it's been about 4,500 meters so we will have to see how that goes and hopefully next summer I will post a video of that so if you're interested make sure you subscribe even though it'll be a while before the next video comes out that way you'll get a notification and you will be able to join me on the trip thank you

Channel: Whole Nuts And Donuts

Views: 116,549

Rating: 4.8609357 out of 5

Keywords: Mountain, Matterhorn, Mountain Climbing, Sports, Mountaineering, How To, Switzerland, Zermatt, Climb, Climbing, Summit, Europe, Rock Climbing, Alpine, Guide, Guided, Snow, Ice, Rock, Skiing, Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, training, How-To, The Matterhorn, Matterhorn Mountain

Id: q3r_IjfkOC4

Length: 31min 28sec (1888 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018