Disentis, Switzerland

Disentis, Switzerland 24 inches. It is about three hours by train from Zurich, but the more dramatic approach is to fly into Geneva and then take the five-and-a-half-hour train ride on the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn, which uses the same tracks here as the famed Glacier Express between St. Moritz and Zermatt.

From New York Times piece: In the early 1990s, Powder magazine, the proudly die-hard ski rag that has weaned countless future ski bums, published an article in which the author spoke of a mystical ski area of unprecedented off-piste challenge. So paranoid was the writer that this mountain’s pristine slopes and elevator-shaft chutes would soon be overrun by, well, the rest of us, that he wouldn’t even name the place. He would only call it — tantalizingly — Valley X.  Read more of the New York Times piece on Disentis