Matterhorn: Switzerland’s Most Famous Mountain

Elevation: 14,692 feet (4,478 meters) Location: Valais Alps. Also called Penninie Alps. Border of Switzerland and Italy. First Ascent: First ascent on July 14, 1865 by Edward Whymper, Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas, Douglas Robert Hadow, guide Michel Croz, and the father and son guides Peter and Peter Taugwalder. Fast Facts: Matterhorn, the German name, is from the words Mattemeaning "meadow" and horn meaning "peak." Cervino, the Italian name, and Cervin, the French name, derive from the Latin words cervus and -inus meaning "place of Cervus." Cervus is a genus of deer that includes elk. The Matterhorn is the tenth highest mountain in Switzerland, and one of 48 Swiss peaks above 4,000 meters in height. The four faces of the Matterhorn face the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west. First ascent on July 14, 1865 by Edward Whymper, Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas, Douglas Robert Hadow, guide Michel Croz, and the father and son guides Peter and Peter Taugwalder via the Hörnli Ridge, the most common route of ascent today. Just below the summit on the descent, Hadow slipped, knocking Croz off. The rope came tight and pulled Hudson and Douglas and the four climbers fell down the north face. The elder Taugwalder was belaying with the rope over a rock spike, but the impact broke the rope thereby saving the Taugwalders and Whymper from certain death. The ascent and accident is recounted in Whymper's classic book Scrambles Among the Alps. The second ascent came three days after the first, on July 17, 1865, from the Italian side. The party was led by guides Jean-Antoine Carrel and Jean-Baptiste Bich. The dreaded North Face, one of the great north face climbs in the Alps, was first climbed on July 31 and August 1, 1931 by Franz and Toni Schmid. The usual climbing route is up the Hörnli ridge on the northeast, which is the central ridge seen from Zermatt. The route, graded 5.4, involves 4,000 feet of climbing, mostly on rock (4th Class) but with some snow depending on conditions, and takes 10 hours round-trip. Some of the climbing is very exposed and climbers need to be skilled at climbing rock with crampons on their boots. The route, often guided, is difficult but not for adept alpinists. Fixed ropes are left on difficult sections. Routefinding is tricky in places, especially on the lower section which is usually climbed in the dark. The descent, when most accidents occur, takes as long as the ascent. Most climbers begin their ascent by 3:30 in the morning to avoid summer thunderstorms and lightning. On September 6, 2007 Zermatt guides Simon Anthamatten and Michael Lerjen ascended and descended the Hörnli Ridge in a record time of 2 hours 33 minutes. Their ascent time was 1 hour 40 minutes and the descent 53 minutes. Compare that to the usual seven to nine hours required by fit climbers. The previous record of three hours was set in 1953 by guide Alfons Lerjen and Hermann Biner, 15-year-old Zermatt boy. Over 500 people have died climbing the Matterhorn since 1865's tragic accident, many on the descent. Deaths average now about 12 annually. Deaths are due to falls, inexperience, underestimating the mountain, bad weather, and falling rocks. Many of the mountain's victims, including three from the first ascent disaster, are buried in Zermatt's downtown cemetery. Disneyland in Anaheim, California features a 1/100 scale replica of the Matterhorn that is 147 feet high. Matterhorn Bobsleds is a popular ride on the peak. Disneyland's website says, "Scale the snowy summit in your racing toboggan and then speed, screaming down the slopes, to a sensational splashdown." Also Mickey Mouse and friends, climbers in disguise, sometimes climb it. The Matterhorn figures in two Warner Brothers cartoons. In Pikes Peaker, a 1957 cartoon, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam race each other to the summit of the Schmatterhorn. In A Scent of the Matterhorn, a 1961 cartoon, the skunk Pepe Le Pew pursues a female cat, who he thinks is a fellow skunk, past the Matterhorn.

History

Called Helvetia in ancient times, Switzerland in 1291 was a league of cantons in the Holy Roman Empire. Fashioned around the nucleus of three German forest districts of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden, the Swiss Confederation slowly added new cantons. In 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia gave Switzerland its independence from the Holy Roman Empire. French revolutionary troops occupied the country in 1798 and named it the Helvetic Republic, but Napoléon in 1803 restored its federal government. By 1815, the French- and Italian-speaking peoples of Switzerland had been granted political equality. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna guaranteed the neutrality and recognized the independence of Switzerland. In the revolutionary period of 1847, the Catholic cantons seceded and organized a separate union called the Sonderbund , but they were defeated and rejoined the federation. Read more: Switzerland: History, Geography, Government, and Culture — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108012.html#ixzz1BnbzfHUx

Historical emigration

Although today Switzerland is a rich country, life has not always been easy, and until World War II there were more emigrants than immigrants. Most of those who left were seeking relief from poverty; some of these had marketable skills. Some left only temporarily, while others made a new life abroad for themselves and their families.

For about 450 years Switzerland's best known exported skill was soldiering. It has been estimated that between 1400 and 1848 more than two million Swiss mercenaries were employed by foreign powers.

Starting in the 16th century, some Swiss emigrated to escape religious persecution. As oppression of the radical Protestant Anabaptists spread, followers - who came from several European countries - migrated ever further. They are best known today as the Mennonite and Amish communities in the USA.

In all some 400,000 Swiss emigrated between 1850 and 1914. In some places in North and South America they founded Swiss colonies, often naming them after their place of origin. Bern alone has 26 towns and villages named after it in the US, Lucerne has 16.
•The chocolate manufacter Milton Hershey (1857-1945) was the descendent of Swiss Mennonites. His ancestry is not entirely clear, but his roots were probably in Appenzell, from where several members of the Herschey family fled to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s.
•The founder of the Amish community was the Swiss Jacob Ammann, who broke away from the Mennonites in 1693, because he believed they did not interpret the Bible strictly enough. He and his followers took refuge in the Swiss mountains before moving to America

Religious landscape

Membership of Christian churches has shrunk in recent years. In a wideranging poll of Swiss attitudes taken in 2000, only 16% of Swiss people said religion was "very important" to them, far below their families, their jobs, sport or culture. Another survey published the same year showed the number of regular church goers had dropped by 10% in 10 years. Among Catholics, 38.5% said they did not go to church, while among Protestants the figure was 50.7%. Only 71% of the total of those asked said they believed in God at all. The demand for church baptisms, weddings and funerals has fallen sharply in the last 30 years. The 2000 census showed that the Roman Catholic and the mainstream Protestant church (the Reformed-Evangelical) had lost in both absolute terms (the number of members) and in relative terms (their share of the total population.)

On the other hand, the smaller offshoots of these two churches were proportionately the same as before. The free evangelical churches accounted for 2.2% of the population; the Christian Catholic church made up 0.2%.

The Jewish community also remained more or less unchanged. Recent immigration has brought members of other faiths to Switzerland, in particular Islam and Orthodox Christianity.

Even if the churches are no longer relevant in many people's lives, both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have played a key role in shaping modern Switzerland and the way in which Swiss people see themselves.

Language distribution

Switzerland has four national languages, but they vary greatly in the number of speakers.

German
German is by far the most widely spoken language in Switzerland: 17 of the 26 cantons are monolingual in German.

French
French is spoken in the western part of the country, the "Suisse Romande." Four cantons are French-speaking: Geneva, Jura, Neuchâtel and Vaud. Three cantons are bilingual: in Bern, Fribourg and Valais both French and German are spoken.

Italian
Italian is spoken in Ticino and four southern valleys of Canton Graubünden.

Rhaeto-Rumantsch (Rumantsch)
Rumantsch is spoken in the only trilingual canton, Graubünden. The other two languages spoken there are German and Italian. Rumantsch, like Italian and French, is a language with Latin roots. It is spoken by just 0.5% of the total Swiss population.

Other languages
The many foreigners resident in Switzerland have brought with them their own languages, which taken as a whole now outnumber both Rumantsch and Italian. The 2000 census showed that speakers of Serbian/Croatian were the largest foreign language group, with 1.4% of the population. English was the main language for 1%

Tobacco

Tobacco consumption is widespread in Switzerland. In 2003 the Federal Office of Health put the number of smokers at about one third of the population aged between 15 and 65. The World Health Organisation's figures for 2002 showed that the Swiss smoked between 6 and 8 cigarettes a day. In Western Europe only the Irish smoked the same, and only the Dutch and Spanish smoked more.

However, the long-term trend in tobacco consumption is downwards. Annual per capita consumption among Swiss aged 16 and over fell from 2644 in 1996 to 2036 in 2005.

Health experts attribute the fall to growing awareness of the health risk and a rise in prices.

Anti-smoking campaigns are gaining ground. The Swiss Federal Railways banned smoking in all their trains in December 2005, and in March 2006 Ticino became the first canton to ban smoking in public places.

The issue was so widely discussed in 2006 that the word Rauchverbot, "smoking ban", was declared word of the year in German speaking Switzerland. It was selected by a jury of journalists from more than 2000 suggestions submitted by the public.

Young people are also smoking less. A survey published in 2007 showed that about 15 per cent of 15-year olds smoked at least once a week, down from 23 per cent in 2002.

Over half of all smokers say they would like to give up.

Family life

People marry relatively late; they concentrate on their training and career before they start a family. Swiss women are among the oldest in Europe at the birth of their first child.

The majority of couples have only 1 or 2 children. In 2004 the average number of children per woman was 1.42, less than the EU average of 1.5. The world average is 2.65.

Surveys have shown that parents put financial difficulties as the main reason for restricting family size. Large flats are expensive, and there is a shortage of affordable child care.