Matterhorn Ultraks - a photo story

A recap of how the trip to the Matterhorn went to photograph the Ultraks trail running event.

First, my favourite photos from the day:

There were quite a few different reactions crossing this bridge - a lot of people didn’t know it was part of the course. Some were very relieved to get across it, quite a few stopped to get a selfie.

And now a peek into my thoughts and musings over the course of the 2 days..

Switzerland just needs to stop!

Of course it was a beautiful drive towards Zermatt.. but then all of a sudden we were driving onto an open train that would take us through the mountains.

It was like the Eurostar, but it was open, so you could see outside. Ok, for most of it we were in a tunnel, but stilllllll. So cool.

We got to the campsite just before dark, and got the tents set up.

Sat around the imaginary campfire with 2 other photographers, eating my sandwich, nuts and cookies. (I have started having the problem on a 2 day shoot, where I eat all the snacks on day 1).

This is very cool.

Mountains all around us, the moon behind the clouds.

Lightning in the distance, no thunder.. for now.

Well that would change.

Thunder, lightning, heavy rain - that was the story of the night.

But I actually slept very well, woke up a couple of times to the sound of heavy rain and thunder, but not too bad.

And mostly dry - quite strange, the only thing that was wet was my bivvy bag, which I was using as a warmer layer - maybe it was too much? The inside of the tent was dry, so it wasn't from dripping or a leak.

5am wake up, pack up, luckily it wasn't raining, then off to the train to Zermatt.

We got our lift passes and had a tea from the media tent, then waited for the cable cars to start to take us closer to our spots.

My spot seemed good - a suspension bridge over the canyon, but it wasn’t as amazing as the mountain landscape shots I had at the last Ultraks (that will be hard to beat). I would need to play around a bit to get some cool shots.

I got set up and then had some breakfast whilst waiting for the first runners.

The sun popped over the mountain in front of me, and it started to warm up - it was time to take some layers off and put sunscreen on.

My mind wandered off to something silly - thinking it would be fun to have walkie-talkies to chat to the other photographers, since we are normally alone at the spots.

“How’s your spot, over?”

“Pretty cool! How’s your spot? Over”

The first runner arrived, and then it was shooting on and off for the next 6-7 hours as all the participants came by.

Over 2000 photos later, some sun, some rain, some clouds, some thunder - that's a wrap.

It wasn’t as much fun as the last Ultraks, but the people were super nice - so many athletes saying thank you to us for being there to take their pictures, that was really nice.

Part of the race was rerouted and made shorter because of the weather, which means we get to leave earlier - pretty good since it started to get cold and wet.

I had 2 side missions for this photo trip.

The first was to document the behind the scenes on instagram stories, and by doing that have enough content to make a short video reel of the event.

That worked fairly well, even though the story couldn’t be in real time since I don’t have mobile data turned on in Switzerland ($$$).

The second was to get some sequence shots that I could then turn into short videos for reels / shorts, but I kind of forgot to do it until the end of the day - and then it didn’t work so well, the people at the front of the race tend to move quite a bit faster, which provides a cool action sequence.. Oh well, next time!).

The next event is also in Switzerland, a bike race starting and ending in Adermatt, taking on some very hard climbs on mountain passes.