Our guide had a nice warm-up hike planned for us today, but unfortunately, the Zermatt-Sunnegga Funicular (an amazing underground cable car - more later) was out of service. So we ended up picking a different trail to hike on, which, it turned out, was much more than a ‘warm-up’ 😀.

With our awesome Peak Pass, we hopped on the train heading downriver to the small town of Randa. Our hike started up through the town, quickly steering us into the forest - up we went. Looking at the map on this page, you can see our trail branching to the right and going up and up and up (luckily, it went along the mountainside instead of straight up). Once we hit the sharp turn before the suspension bridge, the trail eased up some. No one complained about that.

For those who don’t know me, I have a small fear of heights (OK, outright terror in some cases). Normally, a small suspension bridge is no real problem for me. I have been known to help the bridges swing to scare others. For the really high, short ones, I do get a bit tense, but I can handle them. But…

The Hängebrücke Suspension Bridge just happens to be the second longest one in the world (494 m / 1627 ft). It is definitely not short. At its highest point, it is 85 m / 279 ft above the ground. Its width is 65 cm / 2.13 ft. I read in the bridge information this sentence: ‘It is an advantage to not be afraid of heights for the crossing’. Really?

Being the nice guy that I am, I let everyone else go across ahead of me. Just in case my legs might decide to stop me in the middle of the bridge, I didn’t want to hold anyone up behind me! Once the group was on the other side, with my camera strapped tightly to me and my hiking poles in one hand, I started across…

After many hours suspended above jagged rocks that were so far below me, it was hard to tell what size they were. I made it to the end (at least it felt like hours). At that point, I finally started breathing again and just sat there until I quit shaking (literally, I was shaking). Our guide looked at me and said, ‘It looked like you were having fun with that big smile you had on your face.’ I had to explain to him that it was not a smile but a look of stark terror.

By the way, the entire reason for the bridge being there in the middle of nowhere is that the original trail across the rock slide area below it was constantly being damaged from slides and avalanches, resulting in it being closed often. They had built another bridge earlier, but that also was destroyed. Now they have this very long and very high bridge - if it is ever destroyed, they probably have much bigger problems to worry about! Oh yes, the bridge was built entirely by donations - no tax money.

Once we finished our break (and my recovery), we headed further up the trail to the Europahütte, a wonderful mountain hut and restaurant with amazing views. And amazing food, which was made even better when we were able to eat it on the balcony in the sun overlooking everything. Note: if you order anything with cheese in Switzerland, you get lots of CHEESE! I don’t recall exactly what I had, but it was very good. It did take my system a couple of days to process all that cheese.

I also discovered the Swiss drink Rivella, which is 2nd only to Coca-Cola in Switzerland. The sugar-free version was more than refreshing and became my drink of choice for the rest of the trip.

During lunch, our group started a new thing - Apricot tarts! Everyone seems to serve them in the Zermatt area, and they are awesome. One of our guys finished his lunch first and ordered a tart. We all decided to finish our meals before we ordered ours. Only to find out that they were sold out when we tried to order. From that day on, we were on the hunt for apricot tarts every chance we could. And of course, we had to harass our friend for the rest of the trip, who ate his really, really delicious tart in front of all of us!

Once we finished lunch out on the sunny terrace, down the mountain we went. Happily, there was a route that did not include the bridge to get back to town. The route was much steeper going down, but fortunately, all our knees were still fresh and able to handle it.

As you can see by the pictures, our first hike was just beautiful. The weather was nice, the views across the valley to the glacier coming off the peak were amazing, and everywhere we looked, it was just stunning!