Come February, every year for at least the past four, we have talked of skiing in Gulmarg. Nerves held us back — was it really the place to go when I hadn’t skied for 20 years? My husband had last snowboarded 10 years ago and our children didn’t know a ski from a chopstick! It turns out we needn’t have worried. But to prepare ourselves, we sneaked in a few days of skiing — and cheese and chocolate eating — in Switzerland this January.

It was with confidence then that we boarded our early flight from Delhi to Srinagar. In Tangmarg, we negotiated a car change into a jeep equipped with snow chains — as we skidded our way up the icy road we were thankful for these. If a little nerve-racking, the journey was also beautiful, like driving through the wardrobe door into Narnia. Snow lay deep by the sides of the road and all around a forest of pines, laden with so much fresh snow, it was more white than green.

By the following morning we were skiing through such a forest. We had hired skis, boots, poles, helmets and snowboard from Yasin Khan, the pink-cheeked and twinkly eyed proprietor of Kashmir Alpine Adventure, possibly the world’s smallest ski shop. We had also hired guides and, inadvertently, a porter. (My daughter was thrilled; there are no porters in Switzerland.) After a first afternoon on the crowded nursery slopes, where we were almost flattened by a middle-aged beginner in an out-of-control schuss, we decided to head up the mountain.

The Gulmarg gondola, a “Master Piece of French Technology,” would take us to the middle station at about 3,100m. From here, you can take a chairlift up a further 500 odd metres, or to the second phase of the gondola at almost 4,000m, at the top of the Apharwat. To ski from this point is not for the layperson or faint of heart.

Out of our gondola window, we could see tracks woven through the pines beneath us. It looked steep and we panicked. Help! Is this the only way down? But it was just one of the ways down. The piste is a long trail that meanders through the immense trees with pleasing variations in gradient — alternating between short, steep sections and long, gentle slopes and flats. Once you have skied far enough from the gondola, it is deeply silent as well.

Several times, I found myself pausing on my own in a whitened glade, listening to this silence and gazing in wonder at the glints of sunlight on snow. Not only were the skiing conditions ideal — there were no patches where the snow had worn through to the ground (as you tend to get on easier lower slopes at the European resorts), and very few icy bits where skis skid rather than glide.

The next day my daughter and I decided to venture further up the mountain. As the chairlift carried us skywards, we admired perfect figures of eight carved out of fresh powder by skiers far more expert than us. (Gulmarg has become something of a Mecca for off-piste or powder skiing — we had noted a kind of yearning in the eyes of our Swiss guides when we mentioned our plan to come here and our hotel was full of foreign experts with weathered, worn faces returning each evening with stories of boarding all day on “untracked powder.”)

The top of the chairlift seemed alarmingly close to the peak of Apharwat. As we set off, I felt like a speck on a vast whiteness with a very long way to ski to the middle gondola station — not visible as yet. My daughter’s nerve was holding; so I had to hold mine. The first part of the run is narrow and steep, and we kept close to the guide’s tracks. Lower down it opens into a glorious wide piste — with remarkably few people on it — inviting greater speed and lavish turns. Just as we reached this point though, clouds closed in, and with only inches of visibility, we were forced to slow down.

Cloud turned into falling snow as we skied on through the forest, reunited now with the rest of the family. At the bottom, a little girl was making mini-snowmen using icicles for noses and arms. Soon my husband’s “One last run?” was greeted with a unanimous “Yeah!” so we took the gondola back to the middle station. By now the snow had stopped, leaving a layer of fresh powder, and the lowering sun was piercing through the smoky clouds. It was the most beautiful yet.

Within an hour, we were nursing cups of kahwa and hot chocolate and munching on pakoras with a feeling of deep contentment in the bar of the Highland Park Hotel. It’s a bastion of stately, old-world charm: an expanse of warm carpets and comfortable sofas, traditional carved rosewood ceilings and panelled walls, wood-fired bukharis and faded prints of Scottish golf courses. The children watched Chhota Bheem with friends in a room hung with old hunting trophies.

There were a few things we liked more about Switzerland like the ice-free roads and electronic ski passes. But once you’re on the mountain in Gulmarg, the quality of the snow, the sense of space and freedom, and the sheer beauty of it, is exceptional. And I guess goshtaba is a pretty good substitute for fondue. And Gulmarg’s certainly a lot closer to Delhi not to mention a great deal cheaper. This might be the beginning of a beautiful tradition.

(charty dugdale is based in Delhi for most of the year. She writes on travel, art and social issues)

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