Skiing on the slopes of Austria

For a mountaineer accustomed to toiling laboriously uphill, skiing is the great escape. I love the effortless ease of it all, the speed, the instant adrenaline rush, the pure hedonism. I enjoy big, steep, hard slopes.

But at times the braying crowds and the sheer industrial scale of the big glitzy resorts do pall, inducing a nostalgia for the kind of intimate skiing I grew up with in the 1960s. Then, we stayed in a remote chalet, collecting milk from the farm nearby and driving each day past snow-laden pines to a tiny resort with just two ski lifts, where we were the only English speakers. It was in a Proustian search for that kind of idealised childhood memory that I set off last March to spend four days in the Styrian village of Ramsau in Austria.

The search got off to a good start at the family-run Hotel Matschner, which was reassuringly unstuffy and gemutlich. I once asked a German friend to explain this untranslatable concept and he said: "Imagine a hut in the mountains. It's snowing outside, but inside there is a cosy fug and people are sitting around drinking coffee or beer - but not getting drunk: chatting in a relaxed, unthreatening way, or perhaps playing cards."

That unhurried ease pervaded Ramsau, which sits at 1,100 metres on a wooded plateau above the Enns Valley. There is a cable car up the famous massif of the Dachstein, immediately behind the village, and a comprehensive downhill network at Schladming, on the far side of the valley; but Ramsau itself concentrates on langlauf - cross-country.

I had always been rather scathing about skiing on the flat. Now, however, arriving fresh from England, with a langlauf track right outside the hotel, I decided to shrug off prejudice and give it a go. I even booked an hour's lesson with Krystel from Finland, who talked me through the basic gliding stride and herring-bone climb and said I was doing very well. For an English person.

Then I was off, gliding alone through the twilight, with a pungent hint of cow dung wafting from farmhouses and the lichen gleaming jade on the gnarled sycamores. The warm fohn wind was blowing from the south and rain began to fall from a yellow sky, sending me scurrying back to the hotel; but overnight the rain turned to snow and in the morning I set off again, a zealous langlauf convert.

There were several loipen (prepared twin-groove tracks) to choose from and I decided on the Kulmbergloipe - a medium-grade route circling 14 kms around the forested hill which dominates the village. It was like going for a cross-country run, except enjoyable. Even exhilarating. And how liberating to replace clodhopping plastic boots with delicate shimmying slippers and featherlight skis, gliding through a silent landscape.

For lunch I tried one of the village restaurants, guessing - in the absence of an English translation - that the grated golden kren with my Steirische Wurzelfleisch was cheese, only to choke on what turned out to be a mouthful of neat horseradish.

Weisbeer soothed my burning throat and after lunch I returned to the langlauf centre for another lesson with Krystel. This time I tried skating. Done by experts, it is an incredibly powerful, efficient, elegant way of travelling across snow. Attempted by me, it was an exhausting struggle, particularly as I was using the fish-scale gripping skis designed for klassisch langlauf, not the smooth-soled skating models.

I finished the day with another glide round the traditional Kulmbergloipe, stopping half way to drink gluhwein in a farmhouse smelling of old pine, leather and the milking parlour, redolent of those childhood Swiss holidays. Later, in the gloaming, I missed a signpost and ended up thrashing through the forest, but eventually I picked up a path back to Ramsau. Having clocked up over 30 kms that day, it was wonderful to soak my stiff limbs in the luxurious hotel sauna.

The weather was abysmal in the morning. A keener langlauf convert might have persisted in trying to master the elusive skating stride. I returned to my roots and went downhill skiing at Schladming, seeing nothing through the driving snow. However, on my final day the whole of Austria was blessed with a sunny reprieve. The mountains glittered under a coat of fresh powder and at last I got my first sight of the Dachstein, with its famous South Face - a huge limestone precipice first climbed by the Steiner brothers in 1909. Rumour has it that five years after that historic ascent, when Georg Steiner was sent to fight in the First World War, he came back on leave to Ramsau complaining: "It's horrible - there are men actually killing each other." He spent the rest of the war hiding in the wild, remote country just north of the Dachstein.

Nowadays, sightseers and ski addicts can get up the Dachstein in a cable car. When snow conditions are safe there is an exciting 'freeride' off-piste run back down to Ramsau called the Edelgries. For serious langlaufers there is a loipe on the glacial plateau close to the summit. It wasn't open when I was there, but I saw aerial pictures of the 30 kms track in summer, white snow banked up on the grey ice in elaborate geometric patterns worthy of the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, with hundreds of earnest athletes toiling back and forth.

Myself, I was content just to admire the Dachstein from across the valley while enjoying a final blast round the interconnected pistes of the Schladming network. For all my nostalgia for 1960s low-tech simplicity, I have to admit that it was a treat to whizz so seamlessly from piste to piste. Apart from one themed chairlift sporting folksy music and giant cartoon animals popping up out of the trees - kitsch on a truly Disneyian scale - it was all charmingly peaceful. Few of the runs broke above tree level and the mountains all around were on a modest, domestic scale.

Perhaps, after the awesome grandeur of Chamonix or Zermatt, it was a bit tame, and the scarcity of black runs might disappoint some; but I warmed to the good-natured, uncrowded feel of the place, even on a fine Saturday - so different from the jostling self-regard of the big resorts. I liked, too, the combination of downhill and langlauf and thought what a good holiday it would make for young children. And also for grandparents, who might have tired of the planks but could be tempted by a gentle snowshoe walk along a prepared trail through the trees.

I had to leave that Saturday afternoon to meet friends in Innsbruck, but I thought Ramsau and the surrounding area perfect for a week's escape. As for longer trips, gazing out across range after range of Austrian mountains that I have still not explored, I longed to return equipped with touring skis and skins, knowing that there would be scope for several lifetimes of adventure, crossing pass after pass and staying overnight in those well-appointed gemutlich mountain huts.

l NOTE: Stephen Venables made his name as the first Briton to climb Everest without bottled oxygen. He's currently on expedition in South Georgia, see www.stephenvenables.com.