#alpine-views

#alpine-views

Ortovox is launching its first-ever mountain bike collection, the Sequence series, which includes two distinct lines: Trail and Free, aimed at integrating alpine values into biking.

Owl's Head has officially joined the Indy Pass, a fantastic news for Townships locals and travelers alike. It remains fiercely independent since Fred Korman opened it in 1965 with just three lifts.

The 2025-26 winter saw extreme weather, with the eastern half experiencing consistent cold and heavy snowfall, while the western half endured record warmth and a lack of snowfall.

Vail Village is where it all started... The original vision of creating a ski village, similar to what our founders envisioned from their experiences in Europe-particularly while serving as 10th Mountain soldiers-formed the foundation of a car-free, walkable street base village. Here, you'll find chalet-style buildings with detailed wood carvings and flower-filled window boxes.

The alpine luxury aesthetic has been whitewashed with bleached timbers, disciplined schemes in varying shades of snow, and bouclé furniture that politely receded into the background - all designed to quiet the senses after a day on the slopes. It was a look that mirrored the landscape outside: serene and elemental. But something more decorative is carving fresh tracks. A new generation of designers is embracing pattern, color and ornament at altitude, with chintz leading the mountain-maximalist charge refreshingly off-piste.

There are some variations. So we know yodeling with text. But we have also - mostly we have yodeling without text, and this yodel we call naturjodel. And this kind of yodel works like dialects. So it depends on the region you grow up. So if you grew up in eastern part, it sounds very melancholic. When you grow up in middle part, center part of Switzerland, it's quite loud and sometimes also a little bit fast.

Dozens are dead, and more than 100 are injured after a deadly fire at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. Many of the dead are believed to be young men and women. They were celebrating the new year at a bar that caught fire. Switzerland's President Guy Parmelin has called the incident one of the worst tragedies in the country's history.

Standing among the Alps, it's easy to believe that they will last forever. They seem too big to fail, too old to change. This illusion of permanence has long entranced travelers who have visited to experience the intoxicating feeling of being daunted and dwarfed by a landscape's authority. But even mountains move: This past May an avalanche of ice and rock tore through the Lötschental Valley, erasing the village of Blatten in less than a minute.

The sport originated thousands of years ago in Europe by necessity when hunters used long skis to travel and explore over mountain passes, placing animal skins on the bottoms of their skis for traction when climbing. Military units used similar gear to patrol the Alps in the late 1800s, sometimes engaging in speed competitions, which were likely the prototypes for the format of the Olympic skimo debut this February.

On the approach to Arosa in the Graubunden Alps, the road is lined with mountain chapels, their stark spires soaring heavenwards; a portent, perhaps, of the ominous route ahead. The sheer-sided valley is skirted with rugged farmhouses and the road twists, over ravines and round hairpin curves, to a holiday destination that feels like a well-kept secret. On the village's frozen lake, young families ice skate, hand in hand.

In November 2024, travel booking website Omio shared its findings after researching and ranking more than 6,000 ski resorts around the globe. It ranked these resorts based on 11 factors, including the cost of an adult, youth, and child ticket, customer ratings, whether there was access to a ski school, the distance of each trail, and the number of events at the resort during the season.

"At the top of that lift, I met my travel companion ( Travel + Leisure's own Nina Ruggiero), where we dined at Schafalm, a ski hut so charming, you'd think it was a movie set thanks to its crackling fireplace in the center, cedar walls, and lederhosen-wearing staff. "Are you guys going to the concert tonight?" three more strangers-turned-friends asked as BSB blared over the speakers, sitting down to join us for our cocoa break."

Last week alone, parts of western Switzerland were buried under 1 to 1.5 meters (3 to 5 feet) of snow. Another meter fell this week in some regions, pushing fresh storm totals to as much as 2.5 meters (8 feet). The new snow has helped erase what had been a snow-poor winter in the west, with snow depths in some areas now well above seasonal averages.