Swiss Alps

A pre-dawn earthquake with a magnitude of 3.8 jolted the Swiss Alps in the vicinity of the ski resort of Crans-Montana on Saturday, but no major damage was reported, authorities said.

At a glance TODAY National Assn. of Realtors releases existing-home sales for December. Quarterly earnings reports due from Amgen, Apple and Halliburton. TUESDAY Conference Board releases its consumer confidence index. Standard & Poor's/Case- Shiller releases an index of November home prices. Quarterly earnings reports due from Yahoo, Corning, Delta Air Lines, Travelers, U.S. Steel and Verizon Communications. WEDNESDAY President Obama delivers the State of the Union address.

Traveling through Europe on limited funds doesn't mean that skiing in the Swiss Alps is an impossibility. Two free publications, available through the Swiss National Tourist Office, offer information to help the budget traveler determine what ski rentals and lift fees will cost, and which resorts offer low-cost accommodations geared to young, international travelers.

It'd be hard to find an isolation as splendid as this one. The mountains are swathed in snow, the trees are flecked with white and the ski lodges are getting ready for high season. Film director Roman Polanski traded prison for a veritable winter wonderland Friday as he began an indefinite period of house arrest up in the Swiss Alps. Instead of a jail cell, Polanski now has free run of his three-story villa here in Gstaad. Instead of fellow inmates, the people around him include his wife and their two children.

It's a pageant of devils and demons, virgins and Pontius Pilate. But this is no horror story or nightmare -- just a taste of the Alpine legends that lend their names to Switzerland's high mountains. It's unlikely that many visitors to the Alps, or even residents, give much thought to the names of the rocky heights. But closer investigation reveals tales of derring-do that add depth to darkly forested valleys and greater clarity to airy ridges.

Two Matterhorns in two weeks? The inspiration came at Disneyland on the occasion of the fifth birthday of a small friend, and just prior to a summer vacation in Europe with his mother. It was my first trip on Disney's version of the peak since the days when it was an "E-ticket" ride; it was the little boy's first trip ever on the ride, and he was understandably apprehensive.

Seven people were killed in rock and ice slides in the Swiss Alps, and a German climber was found dead on France's Mt. Blanc. A four-person mountain climbing party perished in an ice avalanche as its members climbed the northwest wall of the Taeschhorn at almost 14,000 feet above sea level, police said. And in another accident near the town of Zermatt, also in the southern Swiss canton of Valais, three workers were killed by a rockslide at 9,200 feet as they cleared a footpath, police said.

We took a dark-green train from Zurich to Chur, a bright-red train from Chur to Samedan and, finally, squeezed into a skinny, cherry rail car with wood slat seats and windows open to the warm smell of hay. The little engine whirred up to the Swiss mountain village of Pontresina and dumped us off--me, my husband, Tao, my mom and dad--hiking boots slung over our shoulders. It was summer. We had come to walk the Alpine paths while the wildflowers were in bloom.

Get out the alpenhorn, maestro, it's one of those rare Sundays we devote to romantics. With the Alps as a backdrop, make it the theme from "The High and the Mighty." And excuse us if we get a trifle carried away. It's difficult not to become emotional in a setting that takes in Alpine meadows with magnificent peaks and clouds and the melody of cowbells ringing beside waterfalls that tumble eternally into valleys so distant they appear illusory.

The massive mountains towering over Walenstadt inspired Johanna Spyri to create the beloved tale of Heidi and her life in the Swiss Alps. Now, 125 years after the children's classic was first published, a group of London and Swiss producers is staging "Heidi" in a new outdoors musical.

At least one country already has a healthcare plan roughly similar to the one President Obama and the Democrats have proposed, with universal coverage, a mandate that everyone buy insurance and a major role for private insurance companies: Switzerland. So I used part of a vacation last week to head for the Swiss Alps to observe the system in practice. Dr. Jean-Oscar Meile, 53, runs a tidy one-man practice in Melide, a suburb of Lugano in Switzerland's Italian-speaking south.

Riot police fired tear gas and water cannons at bottle-throwing leftist demonstrators in Geneva who protested against the annual World Economic Forum meeting in the Swiss Alps. Police chased black-clad protesters through narrow streets. The rally by hundreds of people was largely peaceful until police blocked a group from walking to the center of the city. The violence was far from the target of the protesters' anger, the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of the world's business and political elite.

It's cold in the snow at 6,500 feet, even with sunshine pouring down from almost cloudless skies. Skiers schuss their way down for well-earned lunches. There's a smile on almost every face in this winter wonderland. Yet looking over the colossal sweep of the Aletsch glacier, a remnant of the Ice Age snaking down through a deep valley below the peaks of the Bernese Oberland, the picture appears far different -- and warmer. The river of ice has retreated 2.

It's a pageant of devils and demons, virgins and Pontius Pilate. But this is no horror story or nightmare -- just a taste of the Alpine legends that lend their names to Switzerland's high mountains. It's unlikely that many visitors to the Alps, or even residents, give much thought to the names of the rocky heights. But closer investigation reveals tales of derring-do that add depth to darkly forested valleys and greater clarity to airy ridges.

The massive mountains towering over Walenstadt inspired Johanna Spyri to create the beloved tale of Heidi and her life in the Swiss Alps. Now, 125 years after the children's classic was first published, a group of London and Swiss producers is staging "Heidi" in a new outdoors musical.

Heading home in the afternoon shadows cast by the surrounding snow-clad peaks, schoolchildren throng the streets of this remote Alpine town, chattering in what sounds like Italian spoken with a Swiss German accent. They're actually speaking Romansch, a direct descendant of Latin. But experts fear that it faces the same fate as the Roman legions that once occupied this corner of the Alps.

It's cold in the snow at 6,500 feet, even with sunshine pouring down from almost cloudless skies. Skiers schuss their way down for well-earned lunches. There's a smile on almost every face in this winter wonderland. Yet looking over the colossal sweep of the Aletsch glacier, a remnant of the Ice Age snaking down through a deep valley below the peaks of the Bernese Oberland, the picture appears far different -- and warmer. The river of ice has retreated 2.

Earth An Intimate History Richard Fortey Alfred A. Knopf, 430 pp., $30 Standing on a narrow footpath high in the Alps, Richard Fortey invites us in "Earth: An Intimate History" first to take in the visible scene, then to visualize the vaster picture of which it is a part: "[W]e can see the Mediterranean Sea with its pattern of islands, and the great boot of Italy hanging downwards. We might even make out a plume of smoke from one of the classic volcanoes.

Seven people were killed in rock and ice slides in the Swiss Alps, and a German climber was found dead on France's Mt. Blanc. A four-person mountain climbing party perished in an ice avalanche as its members climbed the northwest wall of the Taeschhorn at almost 14,000 feet above sea level, police said. And in another accident near the town of Zermatt, also in the southern Swiss canton of Valais, three workers were killed by a rockslide at 9,200 feet as they cleared a footpath, police said.