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This Swiss region honors its heritage with a witch's ski race. The annual Alpine event pays homage to a local legend about a sorceress and her hapless husband. The legend goes like this: in the 15th century, a witch lived in the Valais region of Switzerland, and was unhappily married to a local farmer named Sepp vom Hegdorn. She was reclusive and mean, with a loud piercing laugh, and rumors swirled among the villagers that she possessed supernatural powers. At night, they said, she transformed into a raven to visit her lover in a nearby town. By contrast, vom Hegdorn was sweet and unassuming, and ignored the villagers who said his wife was a witch. He enjoyed raising his sheep and goats and drinking cherry brandy.
But when he was found dead after falling from a cherry tree, villagers accused his wife of killing him. She had transformed into a raven, they said, and pooped into his eye, blinding him and causing him to fall from the tree. Vom Hegdorn’s wife was charged with murder and “raven flight,” and burned at the stake. Over the next few centuries, the legend of the unnamed sorceress spread across the Swiss canton, and in 1983, the Belalp Ski Club decided to create a downhill event to pay homage to vom Hegdorn and his story. Christened the Belalp Hexe, the nickname by which the witch was known, skiers from all over the Valais we re invited to participate in a downhill race called “the Witch’s descent:” racers zip down a 12-kilometer course from Hohstock to Blatten, while amateur participants take it at their own pace. Dressed as witches with green faces, pointy hats and brooms, they stop along the way to sip on cherry schnapps—vom Hegdorn’s favorite drink—and eventually cross the finish line. As they descend the slope, a panel of judges votes on which group of witches deserve to win the award for best costume. The racers who place win a coveted prize: witch masks. (This year’s winners, Mathias Reber and Nicole Eiholzer, completed the race in 2 minutes and 21 seconds and 2 minutes and 39 seconds, respectively......Check it out https://www.
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Mont Blanc shrinks over two metres in height in two years.Reuters Geert De Clercq and Manuel Ausloos October 9, 2023 A team of topographers who perform measurements every two years told a news conference in Chamonix in the French Alps the mountain was now 4,805.59 metres (15766 ft) high, 2.22 metres lower than their last measurement of 4,807.81 metres (15773 ft) in September 2021.
"The top of Mont Blanc is like a dune, it moves, and it is not the first time we have measured height variations of more than two metres," said Cecile Taffin of the UNGE surveyors union. She added this year's particularly low level was probably due to a lack of rain and a hot summer. Between 2001 and 2013 it ranged between 4,808 and 4,810 metres with a record 4,810.90 metres (15,783.79 ft) in 2007, but from 4,810.02 metres in 2013 it has been on a downward trend. When precise GNSS satellite measurements started in September 2001, the Mont Blanc stood at 4,810.40 metres.
The Mont Blanc's rocky peak culminates at 4,792 metres but total height depends on its snowpack, which typically increases over summer, as rain on its peak turns into snow. Farouk Kadded at Leica Geosystems said that this year, for the first time since 2015 - when scientists started measurements in June too - Mont Blanc's snowpack in September had remained virtually unchanged from June."Normally, Mont Blanc gains one metre from June to September, but that did not happen this summer because several days of positive temperatures, even a record of 10 degrees Celsius," he added.......read on https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/mont-blanc-shrinks-over-two-metres-height-two-years-researchers-2023-10-05/
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The forest had gone’: the storm that moved a mountain. On a small ledge in the Swiss mountains, 200 people were enjoying a summer football tournament. As night fell, they had no idea what was coming Guardian Jonah Goodman 5 Aug 2025 In the wake of a natural disaster, certain metrics are used to categorise the event: the buildings destroyed; the cost of repair to the nearest million; a single number for the loss of human life. Yet these figures obscure the truth of such events. They make the outcome seem fixed, somehow proportionate. But disasters are chaotic. Their extreme violence magnifies the consequences of every decision: to stay or to move; to run or to hide. Things could have turned out another way. And how would we talk about them then?
In Locarno, Switzerland , on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore, lies the mouth of the Maggia river. Follow it north-west and it winds past sandy, tree-shaded beaches, through rocky gorges and into a broad, glacial valley where, for much of the year, long waterfalls drop down forested mountain sides. Just over 20 kilometres upstream, at the foot of the Pizzo di Brünesc mountain, the river splits in two. This is the upper Maggia valley. To the west runs Val Bavona, with its historic villages of stone-roofed houses. To the east, equally steep and green, is Val Lavizzara. And in the upper reaches of Val Lavizzara, at an altitude of 1,000 metres, is Campo Draione. Campo Draione might be the most beautiful football pitch on Earth – or, at least, in Switzerland. It fills a thin shelf of land above a mountain stream, curtained from the road by forest and surrounded on all sides by peaks blanketed with pines. It was laid in the 1950s, on rubble from nearby hydroelectric projects, and since 1970, for one weekend every year, it hosts one of the most popular events in the Maggia valley: a two-day, eight-a-side football tournament of 18 teams from across the canton of Ticino.
Most years, the tournament is on the first weekend in July, but in 2024, it was brought forward, to avoid clashing with a fireworks event in Locarno. So it was on 29 June, a warm Saturday morning, that hundreds of people gathered on and around Campo Draione. There was a family atmosphere; those who weren’t competing were eating ice-cream, buying drinks in a marquee, or swimming in the stream at Piano di Peccia, a village 10 minutes’ walk away, across a narrow car bridge over a deep, green gully. The highlight would take place that evening: a party under the stars with an outdoor stage and lighting rig, three bands and a DJ, stretching into the early hours, when revellers would drift off to tents set up along the edges of the pitch or in farmland nearby. But that morning, the lead organiser of the event, Daniele Rotanzi, kept looking at his phone. The app for MeteoSwiss, the federal weather office, was forecasting a level 3 storm warning – a “significant hazard” – for the canton. “There was certain to be rain,” remembers Rotanzi, an athletic man who looks younger than his 40 years. He consulted the tournament’s 10-person organising committee – all volunteers – and they decided to build a makeshift stage inside the marquee: a 50cm-high wooden platform. Less glamorous, but sensible, they felt, given the situation.
The MeteoSwiss office for the southern Alps sits on a steep hillside north of the centre of Locarno. From the windows of its forecasting room, the curve of the Maggia delta spreads out below: a giant fan of land pushed some 2.5km into the lake. Few rivers in Europe are as sensitive to rainfall as the Maggia, or swell as fast. Months earlier, in September 2023, the waters had surged 17-fold in a matter of hours; it was the kind of deluge the landscape took in its stride. But at lunchtime on that last Saturday in June, the meteorologists were worried. One week earlier, a thunderstorm in their territory had triggered a debris flow that devastated the hamlet of Sorte, Graubünden. Two people were killed; one was still missing. Sorte was uninhabitable. Now, they saw low pressure moving from France to southern Germany, just as hot air pushed northwards from Italy. In spring 2024, the surface temperature of the Mediterranean had been six degrees above its 30-year average, and in recent days, it had set new records for June. When those currents of hot, wet air collided with the massive concave barrier of the Alps, they would either be deflected or converge and climb, creating the conditions for another major storm.
At 13.30, the meteorologists held a video call with police, the fire brigade, the civil protection agency, the transport network and the cantonal experts on hydrology and geology. For the first time in the Ticino canton, they were raising the thunderstorm threat to its highest level: a “severe” hazard, level 4, with risks including flash floods, tree-toppling winds, landslides, giant hailstones and lightning. Radar maps showed heavy rain in the alpine valleys of upper Ticino, and violent thunderstorms in central and southern parts of the canton: Locarno, Bellinzona, Lugano.Warnings went out on local television, radio, social media and the widely used MeteoSwiss app........read on https://www.theguardian.com/