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When I announced that I was going skiing in Colorado, friends started to look at me with newfound awe.

They imagined I must be off hobnobbing with Heidi Klum and Claudia Schiffer in Aspen or Vail, two rather showbizzy resorts where your fur coat and your bling can prove as important as your skills on the slopes.

The truth is, though, that Colorado has a handful of other resorts that are far more accessible and affordable than the famous ones, but set in equally impressive chunks of the Rocky Mountains. Ideal for those of us who would rather spend a skiing holiday wearing ourselves out on the slopes and pottering around in a fleece and jeans in the evenings, than expend extra energy worrying about dancefloor divas and the price of a pina colada. In any case, why would you want to go people watching when the mountains themselves are just so stunning?

Plus, having tried French, Swiss and Italian resorts, I was a bit bored of the overcrowded Alps, where that last 100 metres of piste always seems to have become a murky pile of grey slush by 3pm and there’s a grumpy French family only too happy to ski over your feet as they push in to the lift queue. I longed for wide open slopes that only North America can provide.

And in Breckenridge and Winter Park, two resorts in easy reach of Denver airport, there they were. Just as when you first go to America and find that the roads are broader, the plates of food are twice as full and the people are twice as wide, so will you find that the ski slopes here are just, well, bigger. More spread out, with room to manoeuvre and nobody crashing into you. And then there are the friendly lift attendants and ski instructors and waitresses who really DO want you to have a nice day - in Colorado, even an altitude of 12,000 feet doesn’t seem to get in the way of American service culture.

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