At the top of Klein Matterhorn – a 3,883-metre peak that sits above the Alpine ski resort of Zermatt, in Switzerland – the air is thin, crisp and cold. There are panoramic views of 38 “four thousanders” (mountains over 4,000 metres) including the dramatically slashed, Toblerone pyramid of the 4,478-metre Matterhorn itself, and the bulky, neckless summit of the Dufourspitze – a less famous neighbour that, at 4,634 metres, is actually the tallest mountain in the country.
Thanks to the Matterhorn Glacier Ride, Klein Matterhorn is the highest point in Europe that can be reached by cable car. The Glacier Ride was built last year by Zermatt Bergbahnen, the biggest lift operator in Switzerland. It’s a "3S" cableway, meaning it travels on three lines, to provide stability in windy conditions; and it consists of 25 28-seater cabins conceived by Ferrari designer Pininfarina, fitted with ergonomic heated seats. In addition, four of the fleet are gilded with 280,000 Swarovski crystals and glass floor panels that automatically defog as the gondola passes over the glacier. “When I heard about the bling bling I thought, ‘Oh no’,” says Markus Sigrist, the project manager of the Glacier Ride. “But honestly, today, I’m very happy because it gives us that other level.”
We are talking in a self-service cafeteria located above the Trockener Steg cable-car station, accompanied by the faint waft of chip fryer fat and a few glum-looking ski instructors. There is a brutal white-out beyond the broad windows, and downstairs you can hear ghostly howls as the wind blasts into the new station's wooden beams and photovoltaic panels. The conditions have closed most of the upper lifts – and all 25 Glacier Ride cabins (“My babies,” Sigrist jokes) sit unused.
The Glacier Ride was one of the most audacious high-altitude construction projects ever accomplished and Zermatt Bergbahnen is now initiating a second phase of the project, called the Alpine Crossing. This will be a brand new 3S gondola connection, crossing a comparatively short 1.2km from a to-be-constructed station in Switzerland and into the 3,480-metre Italian station of Testa Grigia.
If plans go ahead, it would be a gleaming, infrastructural charm offensive, aimed squarely at the 1.5 million Chinese tourists who visit Switzerland each year (a number that has more than tripled since 2011 and is expected to rise dramatically in the wake of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing). “Guests who visit Europe would be able to travel from Italy to Zermatt without skis,” says Markus Hasler, CEO of Zermatt Bergbahnen. “And so our hope was that these travellers would come from Milan, cross the Alps in Zermatt, stay overnight and go on to Paris.”
However, there’s one hitch to this grand plan: a man called Raimund Rodewald. When I first mentioned his name, Sigrist – perhaps in an unguarded moment – put his hands to his head, made an exasperated noise and muttered, broadly, about “the nature guys” being “a pain in the ass”. For decades Rodewald, a Swiss environmental lobbyist and director of the Bern-based Swiss Foundation for Landscape Protection, has launched public campaigns and filed official motions opposing Zermatt Bergbahnen’s plans. “What Rodewald does is admirable but I wish sometimes that he wouldn’t be so nitpicky,” Sigrist says.” He pauses, clear eyes dead ahead. “That he would look at the big picture rather than just one thing.”
Now, the years of disagreement between these two fiercely opposed parties have reached a critical point. Zermatt Bergbahnen’s attempts to make Klein Matterhorn as comfortable and accessible as possible for a coveted new class of tourist had set them on a collision course with Rodewald, someone who believes that shops and restaurants and luxury gondola stations have no place at high altitude. In the face of a powerful corporation changing the face of mountains that have stood for 50 million years – and an Alpine tourism industry intensifying development to plan for an uncertain future – one man was going to do what he always had done. Say enough is enough.
Founded in 2002, Zermatt Bergbahnen was born of a historic merger between the region’s three controlling cable-car operators – Matterhornbahnen, Zermatter Rothornbahn and Standseilbahn Zermatt-Sunnegga. In the 17 years since, Zermatt Bergbahnen has become known for splashy investment in transport (£193 million since the merger) that routinely eclipses other ritzy Swiss resorts like St Moritz or Verbier. In Zermatt, you can pay to have your gondola stocked with champagne or even fondue.
The company's first headline-grabbing idea came in early 2006, when the then CEO, Christen Baumann, signed up to a project whose goal was to synthetically raise the altitude of the Klein Matterhorn by 117 meters, which would turn the 3,883-metre peak into one of those fabled “four thousanders”.
The idea originated during a design competition whose aim was to improve facilities in the 27-year-old cable-car station at the top of Klein Matterhorn. Heinz Julen – a Zermatt-based artist, furniture designer, hotelier and self-taught architect – was one of those to put forward a vision. “What fascinated me most about the Klein Matterhorn,” he says, “was that there were no restrictions to what you could build up there.”
Born and raised in the area, Julen – a rangy man with long features, a wavy black ponytail and thick-rimmed black glasses – has a decent claim towards being Zermatt royalty; his film-maker father helped popularise winter tourism here, skied with the Kennedys, and named his only son in honour of his ketchup-scion friend Jack Heinz.
Julen’s proposal for Klein Matterhorn was a giant, jagged pyramid made of glass and an untreated steel designed to gradually resemble the rust-coloured slabs of rock on the mountain. At the top, there would be a pressure-controlled set of ultra-exclusive hotel rooms. “It would be a very special place where you go to spend just one night,” explains Julen. “I thought it was a similar project to Virgin Galactic in a sense; you see the sunrise and the sunset at 4,000 metres.” He called it the "Dream Peak". His £70 million sky-scraping ambition impressed Baumann and, in April 2006, Julen was announced as winner.
Shortly after, Julen received a call from Raimund Rodewald. With his frameless spectacles, vast array of brown blazers and flyaway tufts of tawny hair, Rodewald suggests the physical stereotype of a biologist. (He graduated with a doctorate from Zurich in 1989.) However, far from being a stuffy academic, Rodewald is renowned for his tenacity when it comes to defending the environment against big corporations.
In 2002, he opposed Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher’s plans for a 15-hectare estate in a conservation zone of the idyllic Swiss municipality of Wolfhalden. “It was a completely protected zone, but of course, at the time, he and his wife were saying they were so important that they needed high fences and distance between them and ordinary people,” Rodewald recalls. A media circus ensued and things particularly intensified when Rodewald had to be given police protection during hearing sessions in Wolfhalden. “I had a shitstorm,” he says, gravely. “A terrible one. People called me up to threaten me and endanger me. There were threats of death and there was a demonstration of local people flying Ferrari [Schumacher’s F1 team] flags against me.” Rodewald laughs a little at the memory of that detail. “Such things happen sometimes.”
When he called Julen, in early 2007, Rodewald had already had some encounters with Zermatt Bergbahnen, having previously opposed plans for new pistes. He found out about Julen’s design after the project was leaked to a Swiss TV channel.
“He just said, ‘You’re absolutely crazy building such a thing,'” says Julen. “[So] then I gave him my opinion about this project. Because I hate this philosophy of Disneyland where, all across the Alps, we build hotels and make them look like old stables. To make something new and pretend it’s old is such bullshit. This mountain is occupied by us humans but now we should go up there and hide a restaurant in a rock? Pretend it doesn’t exist?”
“I was the first to say no, it’s not possible,” Rodewald recalls. “That we needed to have respect and not put man over nature.” After the call, Rodewald embarked in what he calls “a battle of public relations” with Zermatt Bergbahnen. He gave interviews to publications such as the Italian newspaper Corriera della Serra, appeared on Japanese TV and was featured in Switzerland’s German-language paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which dubbed the tower "Project Megalomania".
Rodewald’s public invective (“The campaign said ‘the Mona Lisa doesn’t need hair extensions’,” notes Julen admirably) whipped up popular anger. Soon people were writing letters to Zermatt Bergbahnen from all around the world to express their horror about the project, and contacting Zermatt’s tourism department with threats to never visit the region again. Julen recalls one day stepping into the gondola station elevator only to be confronted by "FUCK YOU JULEN" daubed on the wall.
By June 2008, the Zermatt Bergbahnen board had announced it was scaling back the plans. It was over. A new gondola station designed by Julen, angular and slate grey, was built – but nothing more. No official reason was given for the reversal of the Dream Peak decision, but Julen is clear as to who he feels killed a project that he still talks about with a wistful, hopeful air. “It was Rodewald,” he says, firmly. But there was something else as well. “They were afraid they would not get the money to build the 3S [the new Klein Matterhorn gondola],” he adds. Julen’s dream had been crushed to protect a bigger prize.
Rodewald remembers the cloudy day in autumn 2014 when he first visited the Klein Matterhorn, looked around and was horrified by what he saw. “It was really an ugly place and I was very shocked,” he recalls. “You look around at these restaurants, these buildings, this stuff up there. It’s not what you want to see at nearly 4,000 metres.” Rodewald and his team had been invited along by Markus Hasler, the CEO of Zermatt Bergbahnen, to discuss the new construction: a glass-floor “skywalk”, stretching out from the mountain’s east face and over a sheer drop to the Theodul glacier, a scar of ice, rock and snow that flows down Klein Matterhorn and is the site of Zermatt’s perpetually skiable summer pistes.
“It would have looked like a bridge with a dead end,” explains Hasler. “The first part would be partly transparent [meaning the early section of the Skywalk would have an opaque floor], to get you used to it, and then the second part would be completely transparent so you get this thrill.” Just the sort of thing to draw gasps and trembling selfies from the 425,000 visitors that make the trip up every year. Hasler’s hope was that he could show Rodewald and his retinue that this jutting gangway was a reasonable, unobtrusive addition to the Klein Matterhorn. “We even made a photo montage to show that what you could see from below, in Zermatt, wasn’t much” he adds.
It didn’t work. Rodewald made an official complaint and, by late 2014, the project was shelved. “They wanted to turn the summit into a kind of touristic construction zone – the kind of heavy construction you expect in a town – but they had to restrict this due to our opposition,” Rodewald says. “So it was quite a success.”
Hasler’s take is that there were more practical reasons for the skywalk’s demise. (“There was a big problem with rock stability and we didn’t find a solution,” he says.)
When, in late 2015, Zermatt Bergbahnen announced plans to embark on the construction of the Matterhorn Glacier Ride, Rodewald initially didn’t oppose it, reasoning that as there was already an existing cable car route, the Swiss Foundation for Landscape Protection had little chance of success.
That route, which the Glacier Ride was intended to replace, had been built in 1979. It was a "jig-back" gondola: a utilitarian but trusty lift that used the ballast of a descending gondola – seesaw-style – to help pull another cabin up the mountain, and vice versa. These phased shuttle trips offered a route from a busy, 2,939-metre mid-station called Trockener Steg to the top of Klein Matterhorn and then (with skis or a snowboard) 13km down to the Italian village of Cervinia. But its slowness often represented a hassle to tourists, particularly for Italian travellers who visited Switzerland for piste runs and a lunchtime raclette meal, only to find themselves in an ill-tempered, oversubscribed tin can, a wait that could reach 90 minutes, and the stressful prospect of an unplanned night in Zermatt – a circuitous, 227km drive away from Cervinia. “It was a really important link for our guests from the Italian side,” stresses Hasler.
Work on the Glacier Ride began in April 2016, with construction workers abseiling down the rock face from nearly 4,000 metres, manually chipping away surface rocks and safeguarding four separate areas, each 200 metres squared. The engineering demands and physical tests on the team were daunting. “You have to remember that at 3,800 metres above sea level your work pace will be about 70 per cent,” says Sigrist. Silver-stubbled with clear blue-grey eyes, Sigrist is a former rollercoaster designer. “The first two or three days you get terrible headaches because you have less oxygen available. I was always amazed because some of these guys were securing the rock by pinning these giant steel nets in minus 25 degrees, and they would continue as if there were no challenge.”
After the rock was secured and a crane installed, the next phase involved 90 days of rock excavation, with workers setting explosives to free space for the new Klein Matterhorn station. “[They] blasted a football pitch out of the mountain,” says Sigrist with some pride. Following that, in the summer of 2016, a 4km cableway was fitted to lift equipment from a temporary depot at Lake Cime Bianche in Italy (at 2,812 metres high) up to Testa Grigia, and onwards to Klein Matterhorn (or, to other destinations, by snow-grooming machine).
Next came the three towers that were placed at crucial points along the Glacier Ride route (installed between autumn 2016 and summer 2017); and, in September, the laborious transfer of the five 80-tonne spools of cable required to actually pull the cabins. These were driven 461km from a factory near Zurich to Cervinia, where each giant bobbin was loaded on to a pair of tethered trucks to be transported to Lake Cime Bianche. Here they were ported on the temporary cableway to Trockener Steg, re-spooled on to even larger bobbins and threaded into the gondola system, before being winched up to Klein Matterhorn. This process alone took seven months.
In early 2018, extreme weather buried areas of the construction site under metres of snow – slowing the pace of work even as the first gondola cabins were helicoptered in during March. “We would continuously shovel snow for two hours,” says Sigrist. “[Then] the guys would go in to warm up, and come back out to another metre of the same mess.”
The Glacier Ride opened to the public on September 29, 2018, before the start of the 2018/19 winter season. After the completion of the project, Zermatt Bergbahnen pre-emptively left a crane, a material cableway and other pieces of equipment on the Klein Matterhorn, to speed up the next phase of the project — a £22 million lift called the Alpine Crossing.
Rodewald only became aware of the Alpine Crossing plan in 2017 when, sitting in his Bern office, he stumbled on a newspaper report detailing Zermatt Bergbahnen’s newest proposal. The Alpine Crossing was a previously undocumented second phase to supplement the Glacier Ride. Rodewald was incensed.
“I wrote to Markus Hasler that I was a little bit afraid and not really glad to be hearing about these projects from newspapers and not by them,” Rodewald says. “They really promised to inform us more but there are always these problems.”
Frustratingly for Rodewald, it proved difficult to build a case to protect the area affected by the Alpine Crossing: namely, the mountainside between Klein Matterhorn and Testa Grigia. For one thing, the project would not require the erection of any towers. “The federal offices said there are no protected sites or protected animals at nearly 4,000 metres’,” he says. “They thought it was just a continuation of the project started in the 1970s [the old jig-back cable car opened in 1979] – which for me was quite delusional.” There was an awareness, also, that the case had failed to stoke the same local fury as Julen’s Dream Peak. “Now [people in Zermatt] say [Zermatt Bergbahnen] are up there already and whatever is good for us economically we are in favour of,” notes Rodewald sadly. It is a reminder that buoyant tourism is critical to businesses in Zermatt. What’s more, three-quarters of the lift company’s investors are also members of the local community who receive a financial dividend every year.
On February 5, 2018, Rodewald managed to meet Hasler, and make a plea for more specific information about the Alpine Crossing. “This was without success,” he says. “There was no cooperation. And this is one of the problems of Alpine tourism. The cooperation with an NGO is quite weak.”
On May 18, 2018, Zermatt Bergbahnen finally published full plans for the project. By that time it was too late for Rodewald to commission an environmental report. He implored the Swiss Federal Office of Transport to deny a construction permit, complaining about “the Disneyland-ification of the highest Alpine summits”.
After months of hearings and discussions, Hasler and Rodewald came to an agreement in February 2019. The company will go ahead with the construction of the Alpine Crossing, but Rodewald will have an opportunity to give feedback and approval of the final design plan and construction of the cable car. “We were able to make an agreement that both sides are happy with,” said Hasler.
Rodewald, too, was choosing to see this conclusion as a victory. “Of course a happy outcome for me would be that they reject this project, but I am happy,” he says. “There will be no illumination of the cables, we have agreed the removal of an old lift and there will not be any more construction in untouched areas on the Klein Matterhorn. No thrill walks or platforms or things like that.”
As far as he is concerned, his three decades watching the evolving, increasingly aggressive approach of mountain resort companies have given him a unique perspective and clarity on the real motivating factors behind innovations like the Alpine Crossing. “It’s the typical idea of endless, limitless development of tourism in the Alps, where you can make every high mountain accessible for people in tennis shoes,” he says, disdainfully.
In his view, there has been a particular boom in development in the last five years. Increased competition between resorts has led to the mountains themselves caught in the crossfire. And you can see the truth of this in projects away from Zermatt: in the forthcoming £380 million Eiger Express railway link from the Swiss village of Grindelwald up to the Jungfraujoch station (at 3,454 metres, officially the highest in Europe); or in the surreal plans to – at some point in 2019 – begin construction on a £54 million Dubai-style indoor ski slope in the snow-sure French resort of Tignes.
Of course, in this part of the world tourist corporations — pillars of an industry worth over £12 billion to the Swiss economy (just £3 billion less than watchmaking) — hold great sway. But equally, these corporate Goliaths remain answerable to Davids like Rodewald. With a noisy enough campaign and a convincing enough argument, the latter can halt the rumble of approaching excavators.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
