Bettmeralp

From Ried-Brig to Betten valley station is about a quarter of an hour's drive; the cable car then takes seven minutes. Bettmeralp is car-free and sits at around 1,970 metres, with snow right up to the front doors. It's the village you see on postcards of Valais: the Maria zum Schnee chapel with the mountains behind it, and around three hundred sunny days a year to take that photo.

The Arena pass applies here too: 104 kilometres of piste, thirty-five lifts, 1,845 to 2,869 metres, ski-in ski-out from the village itself. The gondola to the Bettmerhorn dates from 1995 and sets you down at 2,647 metres; climb another half hour and you reach the true summit at 2,872 metres, with views of the Matterhorn, Dom and Weisshorn. Besides skiing, there's a 2.7-kilometre toboggan run over the Moosfluh, a free cross-country loop of almost two kilometres around the Bettmersee, and winter walking paths such as the five-kilometre-plus Waldpromenade. The Snowgarden welcomes children from age three.

The glacier platform at the Bettmerhorn mountain station is where most people fall silent for a moment. You look out along the full length of the Aletsch Glacier, more than 22 kilometres of ice that has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2001, with a core zone of 824 square kilometres.

In summer the Bettmersee takes centre stage: a 5.5-hectare alpine lake at 2,006 metres that you can actually swim in. At around two thousand metres, the Baschweri rope park is Switzerland's highest-altitude climbing park, with six courses plus a two-hundred-metre zip line, accessible from age four. Mountain bikers ride the Wurzenbord flow trail, and climbers find more than thirty routes at the Hohbalm below the Bettmerhorn. And the Aletsch Forest, a protected four-hundred-hectare nature reserve since 1933, is within walking distance.