Grindelwald-Wengen

Nowhere else in the Alps do you ski under a wall like this. The north face of the Eiger rises straight out of the pistes at Kleine Scheidegg, the pass at 2,061 m that joins Grindelwald and Wengen, and the Mönch and the Jungfrau line up beside it. The area is reached the old-fashioned way: cogwheel trains have been climbing to the pass since 1893, and they still carry skiers, though since 2020 the Eiger Express gondola gets you from Grindelwald to the foot of the face in a quarter of an hour.

The skiing on the Kleine Scheidegg and Männlichen side is long, open and mostly red, with the Lauberhorn — at around 4.5 km the longest downhill on the World Cup circuit, raced every January since 1930 — as the headline piste. Grindelwald-First, on the sunny side of Grindelwald, is a separate sector of easier terrain with views back at the wall. Altogether the Jungfrau region, including Mürren, counts around 200 km.

The two villages could not be more different. Grindelwald, at 1,034 m, is a busy resort town at the bottom of the valley; Wengen, at 1,274 m on a shelf above Lauterbrunnen, is car-free, reached only by train, and has kept the calm of a village that closes its shutters early.