Once a year, skiers dressed as witches with green faces, pointy hats, and brooms race down the mountains in the Valais region in Switzerland. The Alpine event is an homage to a local legend about a sorceress and her hapless husband. Called the Witch’s Descent, the competition has ballooned into a magical week-long event with 1,000 participants—and photographer Tomas van Houtryve was on site to capture this year’s unique spectacle.

Biologist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton descended into the sea’s cold depths in 1931 to see a “world of life almost as unknown as that of Mars” and pioneered a new age of underwater exploration in the process. Pictured in the bathysphere (above) after returning from descent, the duo recalled in a feature for the magazine seeing mysterious creatures and otherworldly colors like never before.

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