Flying into Paris and looking for mountains / awesome views

There will be plenty of regional parks with forested areas outside Paris, but to find real mountains of significant height you must travel far. Northern France is largely flat or at most with some sort of rolling hills.

Seeing the Swiss or French Alps in March is highly doable. It is the height of ski season. There will be direct TGV trains from Paris to Bourg St Maurice in the high Alps, with busses to the big resorts. You don't have to be a skier to ride the lifts up the mountains for lunch and sun-worshipping.

Thank you! The Swiss Alps are doable? Cool! What areas of Switzerland do you think we should explore over about 5 days. I know it will take about 4.5 hrs to get to Lucerne. My kids are great skiers but I think we'd like to keep the itinerary to charming smallish towns and awesome mountain views.
I might never see my son again if I let him unleash on those trails! LOL

45 minutes south of Luzern is the village of Engelberg and Mt Titlis. Yes they have skiing, like most idyllic Swiss mountain villages.
And there is always the villages of the Berner Oberland, like Muerren and Wengen. no cars in these villages, access is only by train or cable car. Scenery is pretty well unmatched.

You answered my next question ... how to get around between the small mountain towns. Thanks! I'll check them out.

Trains, buses, and cable cars connect these small mountain towns.

If your goal is mountains why would you fly into Paris? Fly into Switzerland. If you are flying home from Paris then fly into say Zurich, do your Swiss mountain thing, and then fly home from Paris so you finish your trip there. Otherwise you waste one of your best days on the logistics of getting back to Paris for your flight home. This is an open jaw ticket and you book as a multi stop ticket -- it doesn't cost more than the average of the two round trip tickets.

We are doing this next week -- we fly into Milan and train to Florence, then fly from Florence to Paris and will fly home from Paris. If we had not changed parts of the trip late we would have flown into Florence or Rome in the first place.

You could also fly into Basel, go up into the mountains, and then either drive or train to Paris through Alsace - Lorraine and the Vosges Forest.

We had snow this past year in March, so take that into consideration.

We have to use miles to fly to Europe for our family of four so we got the best deal flying into Paris (40K miles/person roundtrip direct!). Plus, my kids have never been to Paris. They just our nature and outdoorsy kids so I want to get them to beautiful scenery for 5 days or so. I know that's difficult in March but that was the spring break restriction.

Swiss Alps are beautiful when covered in snow. Mid-March is past European winter school breaks, so a good a time to go as any.