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The usual welcome one tends to get when arriving in North American ski resorts is: “You guys should have been here last week – the snow was perfect!” So it made a change when we reached the delightful little Québecois waterfront village of Baie-Saint-Paul to be told by Louie Bouchard, the long-serving Maitre d’ at the Maison Otis Auberge: “You don’t know how lucky you are to be here this week. Two weeks ago, it was minus 38, and windy too. It was hard to persuade people to be in the mountains!”

Quebec, of course, can be cold. Very cold. So cold that it’s said that once winter arrives, some people just sit by the fire and wait for spring to arrive. Indeed, the Québecois poet Gilles Vigneault observed: “My country is not a country - it is winter”. My Swedish wife Vivianne, who has skied as far north as Riksgränsen in the Arctic circle, had been apprehensive about her first visit. I feared it might have been her last. But here we were enjoying a ‘vent chaud’ (which to my ear, relatively unpractised in the Québecois accent, sounded more like a mulled wine than a warm wind).

We had realised as soon as we had arrived in Quebec City, en route for Baie-Saint-Paul and the nearby ski slopes of Le Massif, in Charlevoix, some 75kms east of the city (there is no on-mountain accommodation), that we had indeed been fortunate. In mid February the St Lawrence River is normally pretty much frozen solid. But from the bedroom of the Auberge Saint-Antoine, a quaint old inn near the waterfront of the 18th century old city, we could see ice-floes on the move right the way across the river. They were going north-east, but when the tide turned, they would sweep back towards the south-west.

This can produce some bizarre side-effects, sometimes caused deliberately, sometimes by chance. Some citizens find it tempting to discard objects on the ice-pack, either to get rid of them, or – rather like an icy version of leaving a message in a bottle – to see what happens to them. During the festive season, more than one Christmas tree which disappeared in the general direction of the Gulf of St Lawrence was back again seven or eight hours later. There are even tales of cars somehow finding their way onto the ice and doing much the same thing.

In such convivial weather, our day at Le Massif – the most scenic of Quebec City’s ski areas (which include the better-known Mont Sainte-Anne, and Stoneham, with which Le Massif has a joint-lift pass arrangement) – was a delight. The ski area has the biggest vertical drop (2,645 feet) in Eastern Canada, and certainly among the most challenging slopes. It has a good snow record too: legend has it that if you glimpse the Grand Pic - a woodpecker - it will snow for 24 hours. We were unable to put this to the test. But the snow was good, and it was strange to think that 2350 miles or so to the west, near Vancouver, Whistler, Canada’s premier resort was suffering humiliating amounts of rain.

Le Massif’s slopes may not be in the same league, but they are genuinely spectacular – not so much because of the gradient or snow quality, although these are undeniably impressive – but because of the truly breathtaking juxtaposition with the St Lawrence. As you swoop down runs like La Martine, La Lavoie or La Petite Rivière, it’s difficult to keep your eyes from switching to the slope ahead to the magnificent St Lawrence benath you. To this was added the unexpected bonus of Diane Boissonnault’s company.

Mlle Boissonnault, who had joined us at the invitation of our ski host, Louise, almost made me fall out of the quad chair returning us from a spectacular run almost down to the waterfront on the La Bouchard run when she told us what she did for a living. Having heard me mention that I wrote the occasional ski book, she volunteered: “I write books too”.

“What about?” I asked innocently. “Sex” she said. And laughed as an inane grin spread across my face. Well, this was all a bit sudden. We had only done one run and already I felt this was too much information. “What sort of sex books?” I ventured, hardly daring to anticipate the reply. “I write about the sexual adventures of Lili Gulliver” she said. “They’re armchair sex-guides, I suppose: Lili in Paris, Lili in Greece, Lili in Thailand. Lili in Paris was a best seller.”

Before that, she had run a dating agency. Now, in a cottage on the waterfront at the bottom of the slopes near the village of Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, she churns out Lili books. You never know who you are going to meet on a chairlift.

We continued to explore as many of the 42 slopes of Le Massif as we had time for together, the runs down savouring the excellent snow and the ravishing scenery, the lifts up giggling over further tales of Lili Gulliver, including 1001 Raisons Pour Prendre Un Amant, which had a Japanese translator so confused that she had to call Diane for explanations.

Daniel Gauthier, a co-founder of the world-wide Cirque du Soleil enterprise, purchased Le Massif after leaving the organisation in 2001, and has injected some $25 Canadian to wipe out existing debts and revitalise the resort with new lifts and runs. The new La Charlevoix run, which runs parallel with the old La 42 piste, is a storming double-black diamond used for official races. Until this new run opened, La 42 (before they were given names, the runs once had only numbers, and this trail has kept the original title) was the resort’s signature run – a steep, moguls-all-the way trail from top to bottom - more than 2,000 vertical feet of thigh-burning terrain.

Apart from racers, few skiers try to ski La Charlevoix in one go: it’s well worth stopping to gaze at the remarkable view of the northern shore of the ever-widening St Lawrence as innumerable chunks of ice drift gently upstream, glittering the afternoon sun.

After such an exhilarating day, we contemplated our good fortune over a sensational meal at the Maison Otis, where the chef, Bernard Tapin, has been knocking up specialities like langoustine marinée au lait de coco, ballottine de faisan farci au foie gras and moules marinières with sauce à la vanille for many winters.

Quebec may not be the Rockies, but with meals like that, it could easily grow on you.

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