Since arriving in Switzerland in April, I have seen the Matterhorn's image used everywhere, even on the Toblerone chocolate box, it seems to be somewhat of a national symbol.

During my visit in May to lake Como, with my mate Reto from work, I found out that it was infact possible to hike up the mountain from the town of Zermatt; which I was told had no cars and was a really beautiful.

I decided that I had to visit and try and climb the mountain. I climbed mount Fuji in Japan with my uncle Adrian in 1999, and it was little more than a long high altitude hike, although very wet and quite cold it wasn't a tough challenge. I wrongly assumed that it would be much the same for the Matterhorn, and as I read up a bit more on this mountain, I realised that ascending it was not to be taken lightly. People frequently die on it, and I couldn't help thinking to myself of that Simpson's episode where Homer climbs the Murderhorn assisted by the pure power of apple sauce power bars.

Anyway, enough of the Simpson's, I took a half day off work in August 2006 and took a 5 hour train ride to Zermatt, via Bern and Brig, and managed to book myself into a shared room at the local YHA.

As I went down the Gornergrat railway, I saw an enourmous glacier, through a clearing in the clouds, only 2 stops down from the top at approx 2,500m. I got out of the train, and walked down to a hiking path, where I spotted a mountain goat, or Alpine Ibex to use the correct name.

I saw one, and changed lenses to my 75-300mm lens which I had last used to take pictures of Kangaroo's at Tidbinbilla park, near Canberra in April. My results had been fairly mixed then, and I was very keen to get a not blurry shot, and changed the auto focus points to the centre in my SLR. I think the fact that Ibex's don't bounce may have helped. I spent a good hour following an Ibex that joined a herd and I hope managed to some really good ones of it in front of the glacier, which was just awesome in scale.

The cloud was definitely clearing, so I decided to head back to the funicular stop slowly, so as not to feel lightheaded as well as sick from last nights drinking. I decided that I would go back to the top of Gornergrat and try and get a shot of that so far elusive mountain, I had been in town nearly 24 hours and not seen the mountain yet.

I spent approx 2 more hours at the top waiting.

At the top of the Gornergrat are a couple of dome's and a solar neutron instrument, run by a Japanese and Swiss partnership. I am very into Astronomy and Cosmology and was disappointed not to be able to speak to anyone about what they were doing with the kit here.

Whilst waiting for the mountain to pop through the cloud I talked to a few people, one of whom was a middle aged German man and his wife. We started talking about the mountain, and he told me that he had climbed it as a young man in 1962 with his best mate. They climbed most of the other mountains in preparation, including Castor and Pollux, and then climbed the Matterhorn together. Two years later his mate fell off the mountain on the way down, and he hasn't been back to Zermatt since then.

He had decided to come back and visit 44 years later, and had been to the graveyard with his wife to find his friends grave. He took out his digital camera and showed me a picture of it, it was from the graveyard I had visited earlier in the day I discovered. This was a really touching story, and really quite sad, that for all these years his mate had been dead, whilst he had carried on living and had got married, had children and 40 plus years of living, it seemed very sad tragic to me, though I was very pleased to hear such a personal story.