Emily's first overnight camping

Over the weekend, Emily got her first taste of camping, on a glacial moraine. For Sonja, it was not the first camping trip, but she doesn't remember the other ones, so it might as well have been. We lucked out with the weather, or rather, we believed the forecasters that the weather was going to improve (it was raining before), and it did. And then it went back to raining as we were leaving in the afternoon the following day. But in the morning, there was almost not a cloud in the sky, and the view was amazing - mountains and glaciers, and more mountains and more glaciers. And a dozen steinbock (mountain ibex) grazing not too far off.

We have no pictures to show unfortunately since our camera is on strike. It appears the lens does not want to communicate with the rest of the camera. No auto-focus. Sometimes it does take a picture on the manual setting, if we are nice to it. But it is enough non-functional that we didn't bring it with.

The setting was fabulous. Just google Gornergletscher to see some pictures. It is one of the glaciers near Zermatt, visible from the end of the mountain railroad leading to Gornergrat. We got off before the last stop, at Rotenboden, then hiked about an hour along a pretty good trail set in a steep slope, to where the people Martin works with here in Zurich have set up their camp. They are studying the mechanisms of how a glacial lake drains, and are drilling holes into the glacier. We spent the night with them, then Martin helped the following morning out, before we hiked back out to the railway, and headed out.

What we saw in the morning out of our tent, courtesy of www.myswitzerland.com, the swiss tourism website:


Location, courtesy of google maps (camp was diagonally to the lower right from the "Gornergrat" label, on rock, not ice):

Größere Kartenansicht
A nice picture of the glacier and the lake, as well as the hiking path near which the campsite is: http://www.swisseduc.ch/glaciers/alps/gornergletscher/flug_1982-de.html?id=1