The Alps

And....here's another snowshed shot. :-)

The end of the first leg of my trip, which involved a ride on the BOB narrow-gauge (which I have video of but no photos on the way in) ended in Grindelwald, in Switzerland. This was only my second visit to the Swiss Alps, as the Alps are spectacular but expensive. On the left is one of the many hotels in Grindelwald, which is a tourist town, and then of course the church on the right. I don't know the name of it.

Also speaking of unknown names, I don't know the names of these mountains, so any help in identifying them would be welcome. As always, the view was hard to match anywhere.

This is on the train out of Grindelwald, which is run by the Berner Oberland Bahn narrow-gauge railway, which connects to the BLS and the SBB in Spiez and Interlaken.

This is another of the shots I took along the way. I don't know the name of the river.

This is Interlaken, where we ended up changing for the SBB to Spiez.

Judging by the other photos that I have, it doesn't look like I had any good photos between Spiez and Visp on the SBB, and I can tell from the shape of the train that this was the narrow (1-metre) gauge BVZ that would take us the rest of the way to Zermatt. If someone could identify that mountain, it might help verify the location. We were headed to Zermatt, ultimately, but I'm assuming this was too early in the trip for it to be the Matterhorn. It isn't steep enough anyway.

This appears to be the same mountain, so this location would also be roughly the same.

I'm taking the location from the sign on that building, which may be the station, although I can't really tell. If it's not, the station would have to be behind it, as you can see the platform clearly.

Many cog (or rack) railways in Switzerland, and for that matter the world, only use cog technology for banking, running conventionally. The BVZ Zermatt-Bahn is one such railway.

Here's a look at one of the more moderate grades in the world to use a cog. I took this seconds after Picture 1.

I'm not certain, but this may in fact be one of the less-known faces of the Matterhorn (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). I make this assumption based on the fact that we were approaching Zermatt by this point.

This is one of my better shots of the train, which was an EMU like most of what the BVZ runs.

This shot portrays a rockier part of the area we were in.

The Matterhorn may be my favorite mountain. To me, it looks more extreme, dramatic, and unique than any other. It's so steep that it's cartoonish, yet otherwise its proportions are, at least from this angle, almost as perfect as they could be. In fact, if it weren't for those kinks on the side, making it resemble a shark's tooth, it wouldn't be so distinctive anyway. On this trip, I wasn't prepared to summit it (The Matterhorn is 4,478 meters, or 14,690 feet high, and the steepness of some of the faces, particularly the summit, is obvious here.), so I began hiking up it, but gave myself (and my Mom) a time limit of about a half hour. This is one of the photos I took.

This was another photo I took. As with most very high mountains, the Matterhorn is harder to photograph as you get closer to it, so the later photos didn't come out as well.

I think these are technically viaducts, given the arches, although at least the one in the foreground looks like it could be for a road. I really know nothing about these, other than that I took this photo from the Glacier Express shortly after leaving Zermatt.

Actually, the "Visp District" is a bit of a guess, since film shots don't have EXIF data. This was one of the better shots that I got, showing the train on a curve. The Glacier Express is, of course, designed for photography, but a problem that I had for the whole trip was that the glass reflected too much, as you can sort of see on the right here. The previous shot of the bridges has a bit of a reflection in the middle, too, but I posted both of these anyway.