A ski adventure that’s on the level

Twenty-five years on from her first encounter with the slopes, Kate Humble relishes the freedom of a cross-country skiing holiday in Switzerland

The first and only time I have ever been skiing was 25 years ago. My then boyfriend was a mad-keen downhill skier and couldn’t believe that I had never tried it. Generously he paid for me to go along with him and some friends to the Austrian resort of Oberlech. I enrolled in ski school and while they all whooped up the ski lift and disappeared into the wild white hinterland I was left shivering with cold and terror on the nursery slopes.

At the end of the day they would return, bristling with tales of derring-do and I did my best to pretend that I had had just as much fun trying to do snow ploughs Kate Humble, above, enjoyed the entrancing landscape, right, and the hearty fare, below right while hordes of tiny, fearless children whizzed around me in a way I found so irksome it was all I could do to prevent myself sticking out a skipole and garrotting the lot of them. I left at the end of the week bruised and flummoxed as to why anyone would spend so much money on what amounted to a lot of queuing, aching muscles and eye-watering bar bills.

I would never have considered going skiing again if it wasn’t for one thing. I was utterly entranced by the landscape. I’d never seen so much snow, such huge mountains, such majestic, icy, monochrome beauty, ever. So there was a twinge of regret that my inability to ski meant I had precious little reason to return to the wintery mountains of Europe or anywhere else. “Have you ever tried cross-country skiing?” asked a Swedish friend. “No queues, no lifts, really quiet, you would love it.”

I thought she was probably right, but did nothing about it until I was offered a job in America, where, I was told, it would be very handy if I knew how to ski cross-country. I did some research and discovered that there are lots of places where beginners can learn but it was the Goms Valley in Switzerland that caught my eye. It is high – over a thousand metres – a bit off the beaten track and beautiful. So with my old skiing partner, Ludo, who despite my failings, married me, we took a plane to Zurich to begin our first skiing holiday together in quarter of a century.

Snow was falling in Zurich but it was wet and didn’t settle. From the airport we continued our journey on a series of trains that took us from the slushy suburbs, through farmland and then up into the mountains where the snow was settling. The view became increasingly dramatic. Pine trees, heavily encrusted with snow, clung to precipitous slopes. Waterfalls tumbled through rocky ravines, icicles hung from roofs and if we craned our heads at the right angle we could just make out in the mist the towering peaks that overshadowed the valley.

“This is our stop!” said Ludo, and we heaved our bags off the train on to the snowy platform. There was no station, just a building not dissimilar to a bus shelter with the name of the village, Blitzingen, on a sign above the door. We phoned Peter, who owns Blitzingen’s only hotel. “My wife will be there in a few minutes,” he said.

The Hotel Castle sits perched at the top of the village up a steeply winding road. Peter and his wife Brigitte have owned it for 30 years. Peter, who has scaled many of the world’s highest peaks, including Everest, is also famed for his cooking. Our first dinner – four perfectly judged, mouthwatering courses – made us both hope that we would master the art of cross-country skiing enough to be able to justify another such dinner the following night. “It’s hard,” Peter warned us. “The people who do it make it look so effortless, but don’t be fooled. You will fall over, your muscles will hurt, but it is a wonderful way to see the valley.”

We woke to clear skies and a winter landscape of almost clichéd beauty. Fitted with boots and skis, Nicole, our instructor, spent an hour running through the rudiments of classic crosscountry skiing. “There are two styles,” she explained, “skaters”, and on cue an unbelievably fit-looking Lycraclad group swooshed past like speed skaters on skis, “and the classic style which follows these tracks.”

Carved into the surface of the snow were three pairs of tracks, one for skiers heading up the valley, one for those heading down and an overtaking lane. Once we had learnt the rudiments of moving, stopping, and overtaking, it was simply, Nicole said, a matter of practice.

“The tracks run for 20 kilometres up the valley to the village of Oberwald. They follow the river and the train line, and there are stations in every village. Your ski pass includes train travel, so if you get tired, you can just get on the train and come back.”

So within just an hour of getting on skis we were setting off on our own. We didn’t have to be in a group, we didn’t need a guide and despite the