Swinhope skiers are the best,
With parallels so classy,
In rain and mist and howling winds
On pistes that are so grassy.

Derrick Littlewood, 1995

It’s February 8, a week back yesterday. “The worst winter for thirty years,” says Steve Lumb over the phone and no matter that by the same token many might suppose it to have been the best.

Steve’s a Stanhope GP and chairman of Weardale Ski Club. To date there’ve been just two days on which it’s possible to have been downhill all the way.

The last of them, says the club website, was on January 14 when about 30 people turned up. Trained upon the rugged slopes of Swinhope Moor, Wednesday’s webcam suggests a green if rather desolate land.

The ski club’s answering machine hasn’t been updated for almost a month because that’s when there was last – delate as appropriate – a brighter or a bleaker outlook.

The forecast’s for snow by the weekend. “Well, that would be wonderful,” says Steve.

TWO days later we’re drinking coffee in his house overlooking Stanhope parish church, joined by fellow club official Steve Luard – a 65-yearold part-time lecturer at Durham University – and by Stuart Gallagher, from Esh Village, west of Durham.

Stuart’s 72, still charts the unexplored. There was a virgin peak in Kurdistan, he recalls, that they were allowed to call 150 Years of the Alpine Club.

Improbable? “There’s another called A Thousand Years of Christianity in Russia,” says Stuart. “The Russian government were very good about it.”

Stanhope’s around 600ft above the sea. A few miles to the west Swinhope rises to 2,150 and on average is four degrees colder. On one occasion the blizzard was so sudden and so severe that 100 people had to be rescued in a six-hour operation, on another a group in shorts and T-shirts became hypothermic – though that was in mid-summer.

Steve Luard recalls someone skiing on midsummer day. “He managed about six turns, ran out of grass and fell down in a heap.”

Steve Lumb’s pulling his boots on. “You can just about see the hills from here. It looks like there’s some snow,” he says.

The club was formed in 1963, partly by members of another club which skied Observatory Hill in Durham and who scoured the North Pennines for something more vertiginous, more north-facing and, probably, more white. Now it’s the longest lift-served slope in England with almost 700 members from across the country and even from Scotland, where skiing weather may be a little less capricious.

The club has survived, says the brochure, because of a combination of skills, experience, ingenuity and thrift.

Annual adult membership is £48, a day ticket £20 – much less for juniors. “Ski for a year for less than a Meribel half-day pass,” says the membership leaflet.

“When conditions are good, Weardale is dope,” said a Guardian website a few years back. The guys say they’ve no idea what it was talking about.

The 50th anniversary brochure, from which the poem at the top is taken, recalls – a bit like the story of the Children of Israel in the wilderness – that there have been good years and lean. The decade from 1998-2008 was terrifyingly temperate, the winters of 2009-10 and 2013-14 “phenomenal” for snowfall.

“In 2013-14 we had 45 skiing days, I was really fatigued and we struggled to get people to work the tows,” admits Steve Lumb. “I was almost praying for rain.”

Though the season may be short, volunteer maintenance continues through the year. The brochure records that, in 1975, ski lift pylons were helicoptered into place by the Army Air Corps from Topcliffe, near Thirsk, the accompanying photograph showing two gale-tossed members clutching a Sport for All banner in salute to the sponsors.

The appeal, says Steve Luard, is basically fresh air (which may be an understatement) and exercise – “the feeling of just gliding on snow, you can’t get that anywhere else” – though he wonders what any watching aliens might make of them all.

Doc Lumb, in turn, acknowledges the physical exercise. “There’s also always a challenge at Swinhope, always a risk element, to it.”

He’s 59, semi-retired, practises on Mondays and Wednesdays. So what if the weatherman’s right, and there could be decent skiing on Monday?

The GP says that he’s never pulled a sickie, never signed a note so that anyone else could go skiing. “Not knowingly, anyway,” adds his mate.

FOR Swinhope Moor, turn left at Daddry Shield and head for three precipitous miles up the narrow road which heads over the top to Newbiggin, in Teesdale.

The road’s frequently tricky, occasionally treacherous. The idea of a chair lift from Westgate long since abandoned – remember that bit about thrift? – the neighbouring farmers are said to be much more likely to offer a tow if the driver in the ditch doesn’t give the impression that they’ve nothing better to do.

John Wesley occasionally rode between the two dales, recording in his journal that the Weardale mountains were “horrid”. The horse may not have thought much of them, either.

The 50th anniversary brochure records that, not much later, Weardale’s first skier was spotted in 1790. “We googled it,” says Steve Luard.

There’s a half-inch covering, crisp but far from even, as we head for the impressively furnished club lodge (1905ft) on the back of something called a skidoo, a bit like the sort of thing on which Batgirl used to turn heads, only on runners. It’s minus two degrees, and bitter.

Among much more kit in the garage is something called a piste basher. They’re otherwise wary of the term “piste”, for what vaguely are supposed legal reasons.

Benefitted by both solar panels and a donated diesel generator, the lodge also has wi-fi (but not a kettle.) An earlier and much smaller clubhouse was an old hen hut which rested on redundant railway sleepers. They called it the chalet, regardless.

Even at 1,900 feet there’s not a lot of snow. Steve Luard can’t wait to give it a go, Steve Lumb’s not so sure. “Oh go on, then,” he says and, with little need for persuasion, heads back to his car for his gear.

MONDAY gone: It’s been a decent weekend, though an electrical malfunction affected one of the tows on Sunday. One couple travelled from Essex on Friday, stayed overnight in Wetherby, and rejoiced greatly up in Weardale’s wilds.

Perhaps because the midweek forecast’s warmer than Majorca, the club’s open today and plans also to ski on Tuesday. The webcam’s positively wassailing, nothing grassy about the pistes today.

Practising elsewhere, Steve Lumb’s delighted to have got a weekend’s skiing in – “and up here,” he says, “it can snow until the end of April.”

*Further details at www.skiweardale.com