It may have taken me an hour of slog for every minute of sliding, but the slog was fun too

Some backcountry enthusiasts refer to it euphemistically as “combat skiing”. Others simply call it “grass skiing”. In most of the countries where snowsports are possible, it is traditional to wait until there is at least a modest covering of white stuff on the ground before going out and sliding around on it. In Scotland, however, if you kept holding out for perfect off-piste conditions you might go entire seasons without getting out there at all, so learning how to deal with “variable terrain” is all part of the fun.

Ski and snowboard touring in Scotland can be glorious, but it can also be... well... marginal. There will be days when you will get to romp like a dolphin through a pristine sea of soft white powder, but there will also be days with all kinds of partially-obscured obstacles sticking up in your path, just waiting to take a chunk out of the base of your skis or board (or you), and there will be days when, in order to get from the top of the hill to the bottom, you will need to connect a couple of patches of decent snow by pointing yourself in a straight line across an area of semifrozen turf and hoping for the best.

To those who have long since been seduced by the idea of what the French rather romantically call “le ski sauvage,” all of the above is a price worth paying for a few half-decent turns on a quiet, empty hillside. To some hikers, though, it apparently seems like utter madness, and on a recent snowboard tour to a hill which should probably remain nameless as it isn’t a particularly well-known snow-sliding destination, I got an insight into just how bonkers some of them seem to think we are.

I was walking back to the car with my snowboard on my back after a below par but still enjoyable day on the hill when I caught up with a

group of hikers heading in the same direction.

“Was that worth the effort then?” one of them asked me, pointing to my board.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a bit bare in places but there’s still some good snow near the top.”

The hikers had presumably been to the top of the hill too, or at least near it, so they must have known there was still plenty of snow up there, but that didn’t stop them giving me the kind of indulgent look you give your eccentric neighbour when he tells you he’s about to spend 30 grand on a loft extension so he has somewhere to put his collection of antique bottle tops.

I said goodbye to the hikers and walked on, and as I continued down the trail I started to question what I’d been doing all day. Had the snowboarding I’d done really been worth the effort? True, I’d fallen hard near the top when my board hit some hidden booby trap – that wasn’t much fun – and towards the bottom I’d had to ride over more grass than I would ideally have liked in order to link up the strips of deeper snow that lay in little hollows running down the hillside. But still, there had been a couple of places where the snow was just the right consistency to let rip with a few almost-full-speed turns – hadn’t those few moments of weightlessness made everything else worthwhile? Didn’t those few seconds of fun justify the total expenditure of effort and calories?

Suddenly I wasn’t sure, so I started to calculate how many minutes of climbing I’d needed to do for each second of descent. The answer was somewhere in the region of an hour of slog for every minute of sliding. On balance, I reflected, chairlifts were a decent invention.

But then I realised I’d got the equation all wrong. One of the most enjoyable things about snowboarding off the beaten track is trying to work out the best line of descent. Any idiot can follow a marked trail in a ski resort, but plotting your own route down an empty, blank-canvas of a hill requires a little imagination, particularly when there are obstacles to overcome like, for example, large and inconveniently positioned patches of grass. The route planning, then, is all part of the fun, and then, of course, there’s the pleasure of just being up in the hills. The hiker’s question “was it worth the effort” implied that the act of walking up and down a hill with snowboard gear was somehow unpleasant, but I reckon I’d probably enjoyed my walk about as much as she had.

As I was nearing the car I met another snowboarder heading up the hill, probably in his mid-20s. “What’s it like?” he asked. “Better than you’d think,” I told him. I pointed out a couple of hazards, but stopped short of suggesting a route. That would have been like giving away the ending of a film to somebody in a cinema queue.

Plotting your own route down an empty, blankcanvas of a hill requires a little imagination