A wedding in June, a honeymoon in March — that was the deal one couple struck, and after reading their story in Ski Magazine, you might start pushing your own post-wedding trip back a season too.

The writer and his wife Rita are lifelong skiers who met through climbing and built their lives around the mountains — working lift jobs for free passes and doing everything on the cheap. The idea of a week at an all-inclusive in Cabo (which a friend swore by after her own wedding) just didn't appeal. Instead, they waited for winter and booked the trip they'd been reading about in ski magazines for a decade: Engelberg, Switzerland.

The delay turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Post-wedding exhaustion faded, and by the time the snow fell they were genuinely excited to plan. They hired an IFMGA guide, Joseph Hobby, and spent a week skiing almost entirely off-piste — a first for them despite years of ski touring in North America.

Their timing landed during a stretch of good snow stability, which opened up the whole mountain. Most days they climbed under 2,000 vertical feet but skied well over 10,000, riding trams and lifts to Swiss summits and then heading out of the resort boundary to find soft snow on any aspect. The Engelberg and Andermatt lifts drop you into terrain with 4,000-foot sustained lines of 40 degrees or steeper — and the freedom to skin wherever you want from the top. The runs finish in valley villages with cafes where you can sit outside with a beer and look up at your own tracks.

Switzerland is famously expensive — the writer notes it beats even US resort prices — so they kept costs down where it didn't hurt: cooking most nights, breakfasting on train station pastries. But they also let themselves splurge on the spa, good wine and cheese, treating it like the honeymoon it was rather than another barebones ski trip.

The takeaway for ski-obsessed couples: a honeymoon doesn't have to happen immediately, and it doesn't have to be a beach. If both of you light up at the first cold snap of autumn, postponing the big trip until winter might get you the best holiday of your life — with a few months of married life to settle in first. And for anyone who has only toured for turns in North America, tram-assisted freeriding in the Alps is pitched here as a genuine bucket-list experience, one vivid enough to make you consider rearranging your whole life around it.