Excerpt from The Snow Tourist printed in the Guardian's Weekend magazine

'YOU FEAR DEATH,
MISTER JOURNALIST. WHY?':

A restless quest to travel the world and find out all he could about snow taught Charlie English more about himself than he bargained for. He tells his story

A few weeks before my father died, he gave me a photograph of him as a young man on his skis in an Austrian resort, framed by a bank of spring snow. After his death, I kept this picture by my bed, as I believe he intended. He had already made plans to kill himself, but he wanted me and my brother to remember him by this image of youthful euphoria. The photo was taken before we were born, in the 60s. My father wears a chic, black ski top with a racing bib tied to his chest. His teeth are bared in a happy laugh. Even in monochrome, he looks tanned. He was an enthusiastic skier at a time when few people could afford to be. He died when I was 10.

Other artefacts have survived the intervening decades, but this image of the skier remains the most powerful. It reveals the joy he found in exertion and speed, in the amplified light and sharp air of the mountains. By all accounts, he was a romantic with the predilection for grand gestures that is the hallmark of those who want things to be simpler than they are. In the end, of course, he chose the blankness of oblivion over life's complicated greys.

My first snow arrived on the day I was christened. A snowstorm blocked the main road into Beverley, the town in northern England where I was brought up. It snowed more often in the 70s. I remember growing up with snowball fights and snowmen, and momentous days when school was cancelled, when we would drag the sledges down from the attic.

The Easter after my father died, my mother took us skiing for the first time. By then we were hard up, so it had to be on the cheap. We drove to Scotland and stayed in an unheated caravan many miles from the mountains, learning to ski in jeans and anoraks. When we returned to the caravan each night, my mother would put our gloves and socks under the grill to dry. At first this sport seemed beyond me, but it wasn't long before we were flying down the slope, faster than we knew was safe, shouting with excitement, a great wide, white softness before us.

It was the intensity of skiing that got me hooked. Up there in the snow, all the troubles of the lowlands seemed irrelevant. Every autumn now my thoughts return to snow. Like my father, I am a snow person. The longing for landscape is something I have inherited. When I first arrived in London from what city people call the provinces, I fled back to the countryside at every opportunity. It took me two years to get used to being a Londoner, but the feeling of dislocation never entirely left me. Fifteen years later, London life became claustrophobic.

I needed to get out, to somewhere I could find some freedom. I envisaged a simple existence among windswept uplands and immense skies, where I could push the children out of the back door and into a rustic, Arthur Ransome idyll. My wife Lucy saw it differently. While I wasted my life shuttling back and forth from the stockbroker belt, she would be stuck among career housewives organising coffee mornings. She had come to the capital for a reason. She did not want to go back to provincial life. To her, my dissatisfaction was a state of mind that would move with us wherever we made our home. The sense of being trapped did not go away. Instead, it gathered momentum so that I began to wonder if these were the feelings my father had felt. Would I deal with them any better? Escape was a priority. It was a question of survival. I could see only one way out: I would plan a trip, an expedition.

The expedition I decided upon, one grey day in London, consisted of a series of journeys linked by a single natural form - snow. I would travel to the best snow in the world, discover how people lived with snow, and what they did with it. It was a good time to document snow's story, because it was becoming so much rarer with climate change.

Almost by definition it was a selfish expedition. After months of negotiation, list-making and packing, the day finally came when the first part of my journey was to begin. That morning I kissed my family goodbye, closed the door on the warm house and walked away under a sky the colour of dull lead. Slowly, I felt the weight of the city begin to lift.

Guilt overcame me before I reached the tube station, but to compensate I had a fistful of plane tickets that in a few days would take me farther north than I had ever been, to the Inuit territory of Nunavut in northern Canada. I was travelling to a place populated by bears and swept by blizzards. I wanted to understand what snow meant to the Inuit, and to learn some of the survival skills they had perfected over a millennium. Canada, I had read, is the coldest country in the world.

On a cold day in early winter, I landed at Iqaluit on Baffin Island, on the shore of Frobisher Bay. Iqaluit, which in Inuktitut means "place of many fish", lies on the northern shore of the bay named for Martin Frobisher, the explorer, pirate, Yorkshireman and all-round scoundrel who discovered Baffin Island for Queen Elizabeth in 1576.

The Inuit had a host of different uses for snow, and a hundred different tricks for living with it and travelling through it. They made snow platforms to keep meat out of the reach of dogs snow walls to act as windbreaks when fishing snowmen for target practice with spears and bows. They made children's toys and household furnishings from snow: beds, tables, chairs. Best of all, they made their houses from it.

Their transport - the qomatiq, or sled - was built from driftwood or bone, and the engine that drove the sled was the Inuit dog, a shaggy-haired cousin of the wolf that could keep warm even in the coldest temperatures by burying itself in the snow.

The invention I was most keen to find out about was the igloo. And Billy was the man to help me - an Inuit, now in his early 60s, who makes his living in Qikiqtarjuaq, a small island off the north coast of Baffin Island, guiding expeditions of tourists, fishermen and hunters around his homeland.

Until the middle of the 20th century, Billy's family had been nomadic, living in snow houses throughout the winter and in tents in the summer. Gary, Billy's son, had built his first one when he was 12. In his grandfather's day it had been a rite of passage. Men who couldn't build igloos well and quickly would be refused permission to marry by the parents of their intended bride.

Billy agreed to show me how it was done and we would spend the following night out on the sea ice. He looked at the Gore-Tex snow trousers I was wearing. "Thin, eh," he said, before giving me a vast pair of jogging bottoms to put on top and his old goose-down coat, essentially a thick sleeping bag with a hole cut in each end. Even with my new gear, it took only a short snow-machine tour of the island to show just how differently we coped with the cold. Billy sat in front, without goggles or scarf, in the 40mph stream of -30C air without apparent discomfort. Within minutes I was in pain.

Back in the house, Gary gave me a quick lesson in self-defence against polar bears. "If a bear comes at you, you hold your arm up like this," he said, adopting a crouched position with his arm and wrist curled in front of his face. The bear couldn't bite your head because its jaws wouldn't open wide enough to eat the forearm, end on. If this ploy wasn't successful, Gary said, I should curl up into a tight ball and keep very still.

The next morning we set out for our night on the ice. Billy's youngest son, Raymond, helped us load up the sled with all the gear we would need, including extra fuel for the snow-machine, a toolbox, a first-aid kit, a radio, a tent in case the igloo didn't work out and a rifle to protect us from bears. We hitched up the snow-machine, and Billy and I rode down the white beach and out over the harbour, heading south. Snow lay on the ice in dunes, sculpted into soft waves by the wind.

Some kilometres out we came upon a lead in the ice and followed it, looking for seal holes. Ahead, we saw a black thatch of ravens on the ice. "A hunter must have killed something," Billy said. As we approached, the birds lumbered into the air and flew unsteadily to a pressure ridge a short way off, where they sat and examined us. There was a bloody hole in the ice, and a seal's corpse, now little more than a thick skin from which protruded a rack of ribs.

We turned inshore. It was mid-afternoon and we needed time to build the igloo before dark.

As well as being aesthetically pleasing, the shape of the igloo is highly efficient, providing the greatest interior volume for the least amount of wall area. The tendency of warmed snow to metamorphose into something akin to concrete means that igloos grow stronger with time - they can support the weight of a polar bear. When a layer of ice has built up on the interior walls, the shelter becomes as airtight as a bottle - you need a breathing hole in the roof.

Building a good igloo requires good snow, and Billy had been anxious at our camp from the beginning. Although the winter so far had been very cold, there had been little precipitation. The best snow for building, Billy told me, comes from a single storm, a bank containing only one layer. It will be neither hard nor soft, but gently compressed by the wind into a cohesive mass, strong and sticky. With that kind of snow, an expert could make an igloo in less than an hour. Unfortunately, the snow we had to work with had been lying around for weeks, perhaps months. Even so, we were both keen to have a go.

We marked out a circle two metres across by staking a string in the middle and walking around the radius, stamping down a broad indentation where the foundation blocks would sit. Then we began to build, cutting large blocks out of the deepest snow we could find, using the saw Billy had brought for the purpose. We worked upwards in a spiral and as he placed the snow bricks, staggering them as a bricklayer would, I filled in the spaces between them.

We worked hard, my arms aching from the weight of the snow. Still the bricks were too thin and the roof we'd created began to fall in. At last we had to admit that our igloo wouldn't support the key snow block at the top. We would have to put up the tent.

I climbed inside the almost-completed snow house and lay down. Even though it was small and unfinished, with a rough floor and gaps in the walls, it was comforting to be inside, protected from the wind and polar bears.

Now that we had stopped work, I was beginning to feel the cold. It was time to light the cooker, eat and get warm. But try as he might, Billy couldn't get the rusting old stove to work. There would be no hot food, or heating for the tent. I retreated to my sleeping bag fully clothed, hoping that I could warm the bag by thrashing around inside it, but everything was too cold. Outside I could still hear Billy crunching about.

What was he doing? I had known the man for two days, and had trusted him with my life. How stupid could I be? When I heard him start the snow-machine, my fear turned to panic. He was going to abandon me. I imagined the long march back. I would get lost and walk until I dropped, or run into a bear, gesturing futilely with my extended forearm.

I was on the point of rushing from the tent and hurling myself at the retreating snowmobile when I heard the engine cut out and Billy came back in with a broad smile. He had sliced the side off the naptha can and managed to light a fire by burning oil in the open tin, and with that he lit the stove. He cooked the spicy sausages I had bought in Iqaluit, and dropped some snow into the kettle. Soon the tent was filled with the smell of grilling pork. I gulped down the hot, garlicky flesh as if it was the best Spanish chorizo, swallowing the lukewarm water like fine wine. Though it was still not late, we lay in our sleeping bags, the stove filling the tent with a fug of warmth. I turned on to my back and stared at the canvas ceiling. As I listened to Billy's stories, with a full belly and warm limbs, my eyelids closed and I drifted off to sleep.

It is hard to exaggerate the effect of the first big mountain on a lowlander. Since my own first overwhelming introduction to the Alps, I have travelled back as often as possible, principally for the snow and skiing, but also for the scenery.

Each time I tried to push myself just a little bit further: off-piste one year, heli-skiing the next, glacier-skiing the year after that. Now my friend Nick and I had our most adventurous plan yet. We would travel the haute route that leads over the cols and glaciers from Chamonix in France to Zermatt in Switzerland. We had hired Philippe, of the prestigious Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, to show us the way.

As we set out early on our first morning on what Philippe said was to be a training day, I was just grateful to have him to instruct us. On our backs we carried a range of tools for traversing snow: snowboards, snowshoes and crampons, along with telescopic ski poles, climbing harnesses, carabiners, shovels, avalanche probes, water, food, and all the clothing we would need for a week in the high mountains. We hadn't been told where we were going, so we obediently followed our agile little leader in single file as he climbed up from the top of the Flegere ski area to the bottom of a sheet of rock. To our left the slope steepened sharply towards a ridge that scraped the cloudless blue sky. "OK," said Philippe. "Bon. So we go up there a bit."

Philippe moved off uphill, Nick followed, and then me, stepping into each footprint with as much care as I could muster, leaning in towards the snow-covered slope, digging in with the ski poles, trying not to look down, trying not to imagine the fall. Halfway up, the slope began to steepen further, and Philippe took out the rope and joined us together.

It did not occur to me that we were going right to the top until we were almost there, and then we were over the col, stumbling down out of the wind on the northern side of the ridge. The snow was some of the stickiest and deepest I had encountered. Philippe rapidly became agitated. "Merde," he said, as I fell over for the fourth or fifth time. I had tried to keep my height - there were cliffs at the bottom of the slope - but kept slipping down. "You must be efficient now," Philippe said, in a voice clipped with anxiety, as he tramped back over towards me on his skis. "Take off your board. Give it to me. Now walk uphill, on your knees."

The snow was so deep that when I put my boots in it I sank up to my waist, but moving on my knees seemed to spread the load. "Now, put on your board." After a difficult half-hour we reached the end of the traverse, the junction of a new valley that led back up towards the group of mountains we had crossed. But there was no let-up in our guide's mood. "There is a danger of avalanches," he said. "Because it is warm we have little time. Put your snowshoes on quickly. We must move." We reached the second col around noon.

We looked north-west at the valley we had just ascended, a beautiful, snow-filled trough which I knew now to be full of hidden danger. We sat on some tufts of grass and talked about avalanches, about the fact that you don't hear an avalanche until it hits you. "But if you are here," Philippe said, gesturing at the nearby mountains, "you accept the risk."

I thought about this on the way down. When had I accepted the risk that day? I had not even known where we were going. Back in Chamonix, the confidence I had felt before we had started our trip began to slip away.

The next night we spent at 2,800 metres in a refuge built into a slope above the Argentiere glacier. In the morning we were to climb 600 metres higher, over a pass that appeared a narrow, near-vertical slick of snow between two jagged cliffs, then across the glacier of the Trient plateau, over a second col, and down a long valley. As I thought about this col, I found myself rolling over in my dormitory bed, shrugging off the blankets, eyes opening in panic.

Breakfast was at 5am and I watched enviously as gesundheit Swiss and Germans swilled coffee and munched cereal. "Eat," Philippe said. "It is important." I couldn't. I felt sick.

It was still dark when we left the refuge. With our snowboards on, we set off across the glacier, Philippe setting a good pace at the front, me following. The going was flat and hard for a kilometre, then the route twisted and turned between great lumps of ice and crevasses. The white strip of the col and its steep-looking approach glared at me from afar, and the belief rose within me that this was a journey to self-destruction that must stop. The granite giants seemed to be sucking me towards their precipices and rocky shoulders.

"I don't know if I can do it," I said.

"I don't know if you can do it," Philippe said icily.

My eyes were wet as I said, "Stop!"

When we had skied back down to the bottom of the mountain, Philippe seemed to be in a strange state of ecstasy. It occurred to me that he might have been glad that I had refused at the first hurdle, that his beloved mountains had defeated the flatlander who had arrived with his snowboard and his plan to conquer them.

He would take us elsewhere, somewhere easier, to do some basic mountaineering, he announced.

In the high valley of the Wildstrubel, over the border in Switzerland, mountaineering boot camp began. The days were characterised by a 6am departure and a fast ascent. We attached our snowboards to a cord and dragged them behind us - even on the steepest slopes it was easier than carrying them.

Although the setting was idyllic, the sense of alarm I had felt on the Argentiere glacier had not left me, and the mutual suspicion that had been sown between Philippe and me on our first day had hardened into dislike. One day, as we approached the summit of the Daubenhorn, he turned to me. "You fear death, Mister Journalist," he said. "Why?" We were resting below a ridge at the highest snow-covered point on the mountain, and the path he had chosen for us was rocky and precipitous. I had told him I did not wish to follow it, and would stay there until he and Nick returned. He interpreted my obstinacy as a great failure on both our parts, but mostly on mine. In an attempt to lighten the mood, I said that I wanted a few more years yet - bringing up the children, repaying the mortgage - but mainly, I told him truthfully, looking up at the loose shale path and the murderous drop beyond it, I was scared.

"I know you are frightened of the mountains," Philippe said. "I understand that. Maybe, if you make a mistake and fall, you die, yes. But didn't you come here to challenge yourself?" I made a face. "I think you are dead while you are alive," he said. "More and more, I think, society is made up of people like you. You take risk unconsciously. When you are in the town, or driving your car, you take risk but you don't think about it. Now you are with me, and this is a conscious risk, you say you will not take it. But if you do not come, you will feel bad. Will you take it?"

I shook my head and stayed put.

For a long time afterwards I saw myself through Philippe's eyes. Everyone must draw their own line which they will not cross. I had drawn mine, and it lay far short of where I had expected it to be. I felt hollow. I thought about my father, and how I was nearing the age at which he had died. To try to escape a particular bout of depression, he would change something in his life. My parents moved right across northern Britain, as he took different jobs, from Newcastle to Edinburgh, Hull and York. It must have been harder to move when my brother and I were born, so he changed the house instead. He dug a swimming pool in the back garden, laid a huge patio, buil t an extension and a summerhouse. When he'd done that, he changed the car. In the end, there was nothing left to change except his family.

Sometimes we follow the same paths as our parents, and can't help it. We fall into the same traps. Unless I made a conscious effort, giving up could too easily become a habit.

If anyone could teach me how to live safely among the mountains, it was a ski guide named Matt, one of the great snow survivors. He had skied for decades in one of the most dangerous avalanche areas in the world, alone for much of the time and beyond the reach of any rescue service. That winter, I set out to meet him, in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska.

Matt's method for staying alive, I discovered, came down to his knowledge of the local area and the snow, combined with a caution and patience that most people would have had difficulty sustaining. The technique that protected him most of all was his constant measuring of the slope angles with an inclinometer. By knowing the steepness of the slope, you could eliminate much of your uncertainty about whether the snow would slide, he said. Slab avalanches, the type most off-piste and back-country skiers get caught in, can reach speeds of up to 150mph. Almost all of these occur on slopes angled between 30 and 50 degrees. Above 60 degrees, the snow tends not to stay on the slope in the first place below 25 degrees, the snowpack will tend not to slide, however unstable it is. So the most important tool you can carry, said Matt, is the one that measures the angle of the slope.

Later, as I left Matt and his wife Tabitha's log cabin, I thought about their life in this remote place. Among the moose and ptarmigan and bears, it seemed to me they were not too far from the stripped-down living experiment Henry David Thoreau had embarked upon for two years in the 1840s. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived," wrote Thoreau. Matt and Tabitha similarly had created a home on an empty patch of land with very little but the resources they discovered there. Matt had looked for somewhere he could settle and live freely, and he had found it.

Matt made me believe that the contest with the snow-clad mountains could be fairly balanced that I, too, had a chance. The following day I set out into the interior. The sun was out and the mountains were spectacular. Once over the other side of the pass, I pulled off the main highway and followed an unploughed side road that led to the foot of the route the prospectors had taken across the Valdez Glacier in the gold rush days. These were my last hours in Alaska, and I was damned if I wasn't going to walk out in the snow one last time.

The top of the scrub was visible through the surface of the snow. I heard the call of a ptarmigan, and thought about the wolverines and the moose - and didn't the bears sometimes wake from their hibernation to look for food? My route over the curved land suddenly levelled out and I realised I was at the edge of a wide, glacial lake. The only way ahead lay over the water. Surely, in deep winter, the ice must be thick, but with the humidity I couldn't be certain. I put my boot on it and heard a clicking sound.

I imagined the walk in my mind's eye, the crack I would hear too far from the edge, my scrambled attempts to get free, the broken ice tilting under my weight, the impossibility of getting a handhold, the water soaking my clothes and freezing where it met the air. Nobody knew where I was. How long before they would come looking? They would find the car first. In the Pipeline Club, they would talk about the English guy who had told no one he was going for a walk alone by the glacier. Damned tenderfoot, they would say. My cheeks flushed despite the cold.

Then I remembered Philippe and his admonishment on the Daubenhorn. I think you are dead while you are alive, Mister Journalist. I know you are frightened... Take this risk consciously now, with me. There had been a time when I was not afraid of death. I would boast to myself after my father's death that I had witnessed it close at hand and knew the empty hole it left behind. It did not hold any terror for me. I knew that to really live I needed to take the risk of not living. But somewhere along the line I seemed to have forgotten all that. Now was the time to start to make amends.

I took off my gloves so that when the ice broke I could better grab on to its fractured plates. Then I stepped out on to the lake's surface. I walked 30 careful metres on to the lake, every hair on my head alive to the first cracks, envisaging the unknown black depths beneath the white crust. I stood in the middle for a few seconds then walked back, taking the last steps deliberately slowly. My fingers felt a painful heat, but I didn't care. When I reached the shore I was shaking with adrenaline. "Fuck you!" I yelled as loud as I could - at the bears, the ptarmigan, the moose and all the unknown fears beyond, but mainly I shouted it at Philippe.

My snow tour ended shortly after my 40th birthday. I no longer feel the desperate need to travel in fact, I rather want to take a rest from it and be with my family. I have had enough of freedom for a while.

We are not going to move to the country, you may have guessed. I still long for open space, but have also been persuaded of the benefits of life in the city. I have followed Philippe's advice and signed up for a class at the climbing centre up the road, so that I can become proficient with ropes and carabiners and practise being up high. Nick has a plan for us to climb Mont Blanc, and maybe one day we will.

Meanwhile, I will try to pass on my love of snow to our boys. In the top room, I dig out the picture of my father in his racing bib, with the Austrian Alps behind him. Being a father is about being there, I decide if you don't manage that, you haven't even begun. We are not the same people, my father and I, just as my sons are not the same as me.

I put the picture away in the desk drawer. It's time to go. We are off to buy some skiing clothes. We have booked a late deal to the Alps. In no time, I am sure, the boys will be flying down the slopes, oblivious to the rest of the world.