Postcard from Switzerland: an off-piste adventure. . . in June

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On Wednesday morning last week, Heathrow Terminal 2 was busy with passengers heading off on summer holidays everywhere from Stockholm to San Francisco, but I think I was the only one carrying skis.

Skiing, as I've written before, is a slippery slope. It starts as an innocuous family vacation, one week a year, but can quickly become an obsession, pushing you to dark places and extreme lengths in search of snow. Social media has made the situation worse: from December to Easter, feeds are full of photos of mountains, guaranteeing near-constant Fomo for those stuck at their desks.

This year, even though most alpine ski resorts closed their doors in April, the images kept coming: fresh snow piling up on outdoor tables, tree branches bent under a white coat, skis throwing up plumes of powder in the sky. A series of late storms means winter seems to refuse to let go of its grip on the Alps. Engelberg in Switzerland received more than two meters of new snow in late April; in May, more snow forced the Giro, Italy's national cycling race, to be modified.

I was on a beach in Cornwall, on summer holiday with my children, when I received a message from Dan Loutrel, a mountain guide friend based in Switzerland. The conditions looked good for the following week, shall we go skiing?

So on June 5, I found myself packing Gore-Tex and down jackets into a bag that still had sand in it, and flying to Zurich for a disconcerting three-day break. Of course, there are a handful of ski areas that operate each summer, usually a few runs on a high glacier, usually used by slalom racers for training (ironically, the opening of one of them, Stelvio in Italy, was delayed this summer because too much snow closed the access road). Our trip would be much different, an off-piste adventure, using skins attached to our skis to climb high mountains in search of cold snow and wild slopes.

At Zurich airport, I left my travel clothes in a locker and took the train to Zermatt in an eccentric outfit: flip-flops, shorts and backpack, skis and boots in hand. A warm breeze blew through the open windows as the train made its final stop in the Mattertal valley, clouds of wildflowers covered the banks, but above, the mountain peaks shimmered white.

The next morning, Europe's highest cable car took us up to the Klein Matterhorn (3,883 meters above sea level), plunging us straight back into winter. From there we headed east into the Monte Rosa massif, crossing vast snowfields, my skis falling at a steady pace behind Dan's. On the right we could look out over the green valleys of northern Italy, the villages of Champoluc and later Gressoney, visible thousands of meters below us. From the pure white summit of Castor we made our first real turns, steep and challenging but as gentle as the dead of winter.

But in the afternoon, the wind picked up and the weather got worse. By 4pm we were in a whiteout, fresh snow was blowing around us and Dan was using the GPS to navigate through the storm to find Rifugio Gnifetti. Odd that it was only a fortnight before midsummer, but I had now given up thinking about the real world below.

A refuge has stood at this location, at an altitude of 3,600 meters, on a rocky ridge, since 1876; the current structure, built almost entirely of weathered wooden planks, dates from 1967. We climbed over metal rungs embedded in the rock to reach it, then gratefully fell through the door. Inside, the uneven floor and my lack of acclimatization meant that I couldn't help but feel like we were in a moving ship, but as we were just on the other side of the Italian border, it was simply civilized. Bottles of red wine lined the walls behind the bar, a blackboard offered platters of charcuterie and cheese, and €8 Aperol spritzes (already dizzy, I settled for water). Later there was a long four-course meal, served at a convivial table that we shared with climbers from Chile and France, then a very short night.

We woke up at 3:30 a.m., left an hour later and climbed to Zumsteinspitze, about 4,500m. We considered what would have been the descent of a lifetime, into Italy's Anzasca Valley, but ruled it out because the wind and fresh snow from the day before made it too risky. Instead, we took a long, gentle run back to Zermatt down the Grenzgletscher – slaloming between ice cliffs and crevasses for 9 kilometers, alone in a dazzling white world and with the Matterhorn looming ahead.

When the snow became too soft, we climbed over the moraine and climbed up to the Rotenboden cog railway. During the entire descent the only movement we had seen had been the flow of rivulets of blue meltwater over the lower part of the glacier and the running of a lone marmot, but at the top of the ridge we now found dozens of tourists posing for selfies. the rocks around the station. We joined them on the train to Zermatt, in thick, sticky summer air, but Dan pointed to the clouds forming on the horizon – “the next front coming”. The ski season could last a few more weeks.

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