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There is a card by my bed on the 27th floor of Salt Lake City’s only AAA five-diamond hotel, the Grand America. (I don’t need to draw the curtains or wear clothes – at this height no-one can see me). It is briefing me about the weather tomorrow (March 1). ”The expected temperatures will range from the high 40s to the high 20s” it says, “with AM rain/snow showers. Good night, Audrique.”

So it could snow. This is helpful of Audrique. But not quite helpful enough. Where, exactly, does she think the snow might fall? I need to know. It’s been a drought-buster year, but that doesn’t mean the snow has been that great. So where to go?

There are eight ski resorts within an hour of Salt Lake City airport. And a further four within two hours. What could be simpler than sticking a pin in a map of northern Utah, and heading east or north east? But you might care to use a little science too: tracking the best snow.

Travelling at night to the resort of your choice can be tricky, especially if you are new to the area. You can even take the wrong road straight out of the airport, resulting in an anxious drive past an extremely eerie, sinister and desolate looking establishment which turns out to be a nuclear waste disposal site. (“You only have a split second to make up your mind which way to go” confirms one taxi driver I mention this problem to.) Of course, being male, I persevere. Until a road sign telling you it’s 550 miles to Reno confirms that something is wrong. It’s U-turn time, and you head back towards the city.

Alta, Brighton, Deer Valley, Park City Mountain Resort, Snowbird, Solitude and The Canyons are all close at hand, you could be cunning and base yourself in Salt Lake City, and cherry pick your destination for the day depending on which canyon in the spectacular Wasatch mountain range has the best snow.

Some years back, writing in America’s Skiing magazine, Peter Oliver described how to get the best out of Salt Lake’s cavalierish snowfall distribution like this: “The sun is up, spilling its light over Millcreek Canyon, the narrow slip between Parley’s Canyon and Big Cottonwood. The man on the radio says it’s nearly 50 degrees already, and half the city is still in bed. The man also gives me a canyon report. A snow hiccup has left six fresh inches in Big Cottonwood, so I toss my skiing tackle into the back of the truck, and head for Solitude. The first axiom of the urban ski bum’s life: go with the snow!” Easier said than done.

Sometimes Little Cottonwood Canyon (the home of neighbouring Snowbird and Alta) will have better overnight snow than Big Cottonwood Canyon (where the lesser-known resorts of Brighton and Solitude are located). And sometimes Park City and its swanky next-door neighbour, Deer Valley (close to Parley’s Canyon – where Parley Pratt collected $1,500 in tolls from travellers en route to the Californian gold rush) might have better snow than either Little or Big Cottonwood. The way you determine this should be simple. You set your alarm in your hotel (in my case the Grand American in downtown Salt Lake - a hotel built by the wealthy oil magnate Earl Holding, who owns America’s iconic Sun Valley resort, as well as the newly-fashionable Snowbasin, where the 2002 Winter Olympic downhills were staged).

There you attempt to read some clues into Audrique’s weather forecast, and, most important of all, check the local TV weather updates first thing in the morning. That probably means 6am, which, with jet-lag, isn’t such an ordeal. Mind you, getting news about actual snow can be like getting powder out of a rock.

“The winds are out of the north-east, with a touch of rain” says a Robert Redford look-alike on the KUTV 2 news channel. “And there’s fog around again in the Cache Valley. It’s 37 in Provo, with a 52 high. It’s looking good in Little Cottonwood – you’re good to go.” Yes, but where is the snow?

“They’re calling for a high of 43 in Park City and 50 in Salt Lake. There’ll be a couple of disturbances coming through – just wimpy little things.” Disturbances? Is that the best they can do to describe a fall, however brief, of the “Greatest Snow On Earth”? Flipping to CBS Channel 2, there’s a man talking about “snoozy” snow and “sleepy” showers. He’s referring to overnight weather developments. “Friday looks gorgeous,” he says. “Good for golf all weekend.” That doesn’t help either. Nor does hearing on NBC’s Today Programme that across in New England March has “come in like a lion” and there are “big wet flakes” arriving from North Carolina to New York on the back of a nor’easter

It’s not just the snow that can vary from resort to resort. The individual ski areas could hardly be more of a contrast. There can be no stranger skiing bedfellows than Snowbird and Alta. As neighbours, less than two miles apart, and with linked ski areas, they have almost nothing in common except this alleged “greatest snow on earth”. Alta, where the first lift opened as long ago as 1938, is funky, cheap, and traditional, but with considerable old-fashioned charm. There is almost no trace of the bustling mining town in which there were countless brawls and shootouts at bars with such evocative names as The Bucket of Blood Saloon. The old town was finally destroyed by both fire and avalanches in the 1920s when a huge landslide came churning down the mountainside and wiped out the entire village.

Today Alta, with just a few lodges scattered around its base area, has little international cachet (although it deserves some) and most skiers from outside Utah (Alta still doesn’t allow snowboarders) often only get to know it by chance when they ski across from Snowbird, a modern, purpose-built ski area that could have been transplanted from the French Alps.

Alta, as one description would have it, “is home to nine hotels that will never ask you to return your bed to a full and upright position.” Although the village, which opened officially for skiing as long ago as 1938, is a totally different animal, with rather ancient lifts, the skiing is just as exciting. Most of the easy slopes, with green (easy) trails like Crooked Mile, Sweet’n Easy and Sunnyside, are reached from the Albion side. There’s tougher skiing from Point Supreme, and in the big valley area that divides the ski area, which is dotted with all kinds of gullies, chutes and cruising runs.

Snowbird’s two “trams” (cable-cars) – one blue and one red, and said to be the fastest in America – take 125 skiers and boarders quickly to the top of Hidden Peak at 11,000 feet (3352 metres). There is only one (fairly) easy way down: Chip’s Run, which returns all the way to the base. Beginners and early intermediates do better by ignoring the tram and skiing the lower slopes and mid-mountain where there is plenty of more suitable terrain.

There’s a similar contrast at Park City, where, although Deer Valley and Park City Mountain Resort are neighbours, they are surprisingly different in character and provide skiers with very contrasting experiences. Unlike Snowbird and Alta, they are not linked but do share a common perimeter. And strangely perhaps, Deer Valley, by far the more upmarket, bans snowboarders like Alta, the downmarket partner in the Snowbird-Alta alliance.

Long before it gave its name to one of the three local ski resorts, Park City, known during the recent Winter Olympics as "The Alpine Heart of 2002”, was the site of the largest silver-mining camp in the country. (It was big on lead, zinc and some gold too). Jupiter Peak, where today skiers and boarders swirl through the powder in chutes and gullies in Puma Bowl, McConkey's Bowl and East Face, was once at the centre of this huge bonanza: ore worth more than $400 million was extracted from mines on the mountain, and 23 men became millionaires as a result. They included George Hearst, founder of the Hearst mining and newspaper dynasty, whose son William Randolph Hearst was famously depicted by Orson Welles in the film Citizen Kane.

When Park City Mountain Resort opened in 1963, it was known as Treasure Mountain, and skiers were transported to the Silver King Mine Depot, where they boarded mining cars for a train journey through the Spiro tunnel (just west of where the Park City Golf Course is today) for a three-mile journey into the mountain. After a 25 minute ride, everyone boarded the mine hoist elevator for a short trip to the surface in Thaynes Canyon, followed by a ride on the Thaynes chairlift to the ridge above the Summit House.

To this day, there are still something like a thousand miles of old silver-mine workings and tunnels beneath the slopes at Park City Mountain Resort, and old mining buildings and relics can still be seen on some of the slopes. For hard-core skiers and boarders, the chair to the top of Jupiter Bowl at around 3050 metres (10,000 feet) is the key to the really interesting terrain, accessing steep tree-skiing in Fortune Teller, Silver Cliff, 6 Bells and Indicator, as well as Scotts Bowl and Puma Bowl.

Right next door is Deer Valley, the most up-market (and expensive) ski area in Utah, with a reputation for some of the most meticulous grooming in the country. It was even said that no matter how elderly or infirm the skier, the slopes were so smooth that it was impossible to fall over. Smarting from another joke which suggested that the resort had “lots of diamonds, but not enough black ones” (black diamond runs are difficult) the resort changed its image by opening up tougher skiing areas. The grooming is still superb, but there are now some “serious” runs to get your teeth into.

That night, after returning to Salt Lake City and my luxurious command ski bunker at the Grand America, there’s a miniature chocolate piano on the table. They put one there every night, and I eat the contents (more chocolates) but not the piano. I might as well though, as they never re-cycle them, even if they are untouched. I don’t feel like chocolate, so I check out the mini-bar. Nothing really alcoholic, but a few low-alcohol beers. (Even the duty manager that night is called Todd Light). I’m not looking for a three-Martini lunch, but something stronger would be nice. Oh yes, there’s an “Intimacy kit” as well (two ‘prophylactics’, one package lubricating jelly, two obstetrical towelettes) - $6, courtesy of www.inroomplus.com. And a note from Jessica, another in-hotel chambermaid-cum-meteorologist. She’s forecasting “a few showers”. But she doesn’t say whether these will fall as rain or snow. I may or may not be woken up by the howl of an early morning Salt Lake freight train, so best set the alarm then, for the TV weather-man. I’m hungry for some of this greatest snow on earth.

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