Day 4

13 miles

Marmotte sightings: 2

Vulture /eagle sightings: 1 false alarm (was a helicopter!)

Another day, another VK to get up and out of Zermatt!  This time following a beautiful river gorge to Trift on the Northern side of the valley. 

We’d been chuckling at a translation we’d seen somewhere in a leaflet or tourist office about the floristic and faunistic highlights of the area, and today’s route delivered.

We turned a corner early on and saw two marmottes playing in the morning sunshine.  It’s always a highlight.

As we climbed higher the flowers were also fantastic, lining the path, adding to the spectacular setting.

We’ve been really impressed by the brilliant signs, which add nice reassurance when you are about to head off up or down some steep path, and the thought of turning back would not be good.

From Trift, we had an initial steep climb and then a contour path, gently rising to a high point of 2,741m at Schwarzläger.  On the map, there were numerous panoramic viewpoint icons and it couldn’t have been better – amazing views, very good runnable tracks, cloud 9 running!

At the far point of our loop, we plummeted down to the river, passing a stunning waterfall on the way.

We then headed back much lower down along the river valley through Stafelalp and Zmutt (opposite direction to day 1).  Sometimes it can be tricky to pick out the exact gradient on the map, so slightly gratuitously we found we had opted to climb back up again (rather than what we call the ‘Zmutt Highway’ that leads into Zermatt along the river) but it did give us a spectacular finish dropping down into Zermatt, straight to the finish tap on the golden Marmotte.