I went skiing for the first time. I ended up in a blizzard, dislocated a shoulder, and fell in love with the snow

The first time he clicked into skis at Falls Creek, he spent most of the descent sliding on his bum. The second time, he put a leg either side of a toddler's Poma lift stanchion. At speed.

That day, his girlfriend — now wife — Fiona, who'd been a slalom and giant slalom racer as a kid, burst out of a cloud, leapt 100 metres off a snow bank, landed perfectly, and showered him with snow. He was hooked.

Two decades later, the author has skied Mammoth in California, Aspen, Vail and Breckenridge in Colorado, Coronet Peak in New Zealand, and Australia's Thredbo, Hotham and Perisher. Every winter for almost 20 years he's spent time with mates at Guthega, a tiny village in the Snowy Mountains.

But the skiing itself has never been the point. What he treasures is waking in a mountain lodge to snow piling against the windows, the stillness outside bewitching. Science says snow traps sound waves, he notes, but the hush after snowfall is something else.

His most memorable lesson came when he insisted that foul weather at the top of a ridge would clear in the valley. Fiona told him it was a blizzard. He argued. She let him learn. Up high, the world turned white. Red dots swirled before his eyes. Wind shrieked. He couldn't tell if his skis were on snow or if he was upside down. A gloved hand grabbed his. They descended. She said nothing.

Another time, he toppled over a cornice at Perisher, dislocated a shoulder, and broke a metacarpal. Neither Fiona nor their two daughters were impressed.

The author has shared the mountains with his daughters too. One travelled with him through Vermont in winter, the cold ravaging their lungs, the snowy plains as beautifully formed as a Robert Frost poem. Another joined him on the highest road in Scotland's Cairngorms, where the wind nearly blew them to Norway.

Once, he woke in the tropical heat of Solomon Islands, flew home to Canberra aboard Paul Keating's VIP jet, jumped into his car, and reached freezing Perisher Valley in time for one late afternoon run. That was the day he broke his shoulder.

He came late to the high snowy country, he says. As a kid on a farm, the hump of Mount William in the Grampians would shine white on frosty mornings, launching a longing to know what snow felt like. He found it — and a lot more besides.