Northern highlights

Scandinavian winter sports holidays offer much more than just slopes. Francine Stock tries out cross-country skiing, and dog-sledding, in Norway

I don't ski. I find that powering up the escalator at Tottenham Court Road station triggers all the adrenalin production I need, challenges my heart and lungs and is often less crowded. But I do enjoy landscapes, and walking, and I can tolerate other members of my family skiing - if they must. Snow, space and fresh air are all desirable, and the absence of après-ski is a positive benefit. Norway it is then.

I don't ski. I find that powering up the escalator at Tottenham Court Road station triggers all the adrenalin production I need, challenges my heart and lungs and is often less crowded. But I do enjoy landscapes, and walking, and I can tolerate other members of my family skiing - if they must. Snow, space and fresh air are all desirable, and the absence of après-ski is a positive benefit. Norway it is then.

The Peer Gynt highlands in eastern Norway are some three hours' train journey north of Oslo airport. The line climbs through long narrow valleys and past frozen lakes that are as deep as the ranges that surround them are high. We stopped north of Lillehammer at Vinstra, about 1,000m above sea level, where the station platform almost doubles as the pavement of the town's main street. We completed our journey to the Fefor Hotel via a cab that wound up through the snowy woods.

Some places are like time machines, and Fefor shuttles back through the 20th century. Captain Scott tested a prototype snowmobile here in March 1910. A series of photographs shows the broad caterpillar tracks of an ancestor of the Sno-Cat, built by Wolseley. It hauled 3,000 pounds of weight up a slope of one in four-and-a-half. Semi-circles of onlookers and experts grouped around Scott gaze out at the camera, their judgement on the Englishman's wisdom apparent from their frowns. Experienced Norwegian explorers advised the use of skis and dogs.

When I'd hauled myself from the Scott photographs to a chair in the original log-cabin wing of the building, the view extended beyond the woods and iced lake to the mountains. This old section of the Fefor is like a house made of chocolate fingers surrounded by sugar frosting, or the lodge in White Christmas - Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby might well be inside crooning in preposterous sweaters by the huge open fires. Fefor is one of the originals on which those Vermont ski lodges were modelled. More photos on the walls, this time of winter sports in the Fifties, could have been taken yesterday.

Next morning, dog-sledding dragged me right back into the moment - a series of gulping, whooping, exhilarating moments. Under the tutelage of Bergsvein (a Norwegian around eight feet tall with a beard at least a yard long) and his German partner Kim, I was given control of a team of four dogs and a sled laden with furs. For the best part of five hours we raced across the ice and through the countryside. The "driving" is largely a question of braking and modifying direction by shifting your weight on a pair of runners at the back of the sled. The dogs are highly trained and competitive. Forward presents no problem for them, and you can only keep them stationary with the help of two metal anchors kicked into the ground.

After the initial briefing I was apprehensive, an anxiety that tightened as I watched my action-hero husband flung from his sled into a snowdrift a few seconds after his team tore away from the start. Fortunately he sustained no injuries, except to his pride. But seconds later I realised I could finally enact a long-standing fantasy, and be the witch from Narnia. The woods swooped by, their silence broken only by the panting of the team. When I was too cautious with the brake, the lead dog glanced over his shoulder, reproach in his pale blue eyes. I was soon urging them on. The dogs were ecstatic in their work, their tails feathering, occasionally barking with impatience and excitement. Back at the kennels (each dog has its own house, staked out on the side of the mountain) those left behind flung their heads back and howled to their pack fellows across the frozen landscape, like the wolves they partly are.

Our handful of sleds with adults driving, children as passengers, swept on through the empty woods of fir and silver birch, with glimpses of bright lichens on the lake-side stones. We passed the occasional skier or a family drilling a fishing hole with an auger in the metre-deep ice. Our lunch was grilled over a bonfire in the snow - chicken wings, sausages and flat bread, while the dogs dozed and slurped slush, the steam rising off them. By the end of the day, I was ready to embrace each of my canine team. They responded cheerfully, breathing fishy fumes from their herring soup supper.

Fefor Lodge is slightly institutional, but you couldn't better the location or the resonance of early 20th-century endeavour, of women in long skirts striding out on skis and intrepid ski-jumpers hurtling into white oblivion. Twenty-first century comforts include a small ice-rink, squash court, indoor pool and sauna, and a relaxed attitude to children - of which there were many.

Our next stop was altogether more sophisticated, though not fussy. A better skier than I could have made the 15km journey to the Hogfjellshotell in Gala on the cross-country tracks. The region boasts 640 kilometres of trails, and with the right footwear these also make stunning walks, although you need to be alert. Wander a few steps from a firm path and you're stranded waist high in snow, muttering like some character from a Beckett play.

In Gala I was introduced to my cross-country skiing mentor, Svein Erik Molstad. Imagine Max von Sydow, but Norwegian, a handsome sage with untold patience and teaching experience that spans Olympic hopefuls, British commandos...and me. His challenge was to instill in me cross-country confidence. The Norwegians are mad for it in its various forms and I salute them. Cross-country does not mean flat. It is at least undulating and sometimes downright steep, leaving you inching up, skis akimbo, like a beetle. Down can be worse. Think speed, murmured Svein, not brake. It's hardly a choice: on a sharp downhill slope in icy prepared tracks, braking isn't an option.

With Svein's benign perseverance and warming faith in my potential, I did manage to cover 14km one day (reserving my right to get off and walk on two occasions). Urged to look at the landscape, not my feet, I gradually relaxed enough to enjoy the endless views of a country as big as Britain with four and a half million people and the odd cluster of cabins. The skies were deep blue, turning later to pastel orange, pink and green, and had an eerie Caspar David Friedrich glow. Taking time to breathe properly and let my brainwaves slow, as instructed by Svein, I listened to the crepitation of the snow on the branches.

The food at the Hogfjellhotell was excellent, which is no mean achievement given its remote location. Much, including fresh-baked bread, was organic, and the Fiskbord was a spectacular spread of freshwater crayfish, prawns, lobster, mussels, salmon and the trusty herring. One night, in the candle-lit dining room with a panorama so dramatic it looked as though it had been stuck on the glass, there was an extended formal dinner. An actress staying in the hotel, Norway's equivalent of Helen Mirren I think, sprang up between the many courses to recite traditional verse. Fellow guests offered us translations, which seemed to bear out Norway's early awareness of feminism. The hotel has 42 rooms, which were almost all occupied by Norwegians, many of whom return each year. I should also report that there is a heated outdoor pool, open in the afternoons for a dip amid the snow before rushing into the sauna.

There's little nonsense about this region of Norway - no picture-postcard village, no nightspots, no froth, no fuss - but the landscape, the facilities and the hospitality are exceptional. The right things are more than all right.

The writer travelled with Inntravel (01653 617922; www.inntravel.co.uk). A week's holiday split between the Fefor Lodge and Hogfjellshotell, including all accommodation, breakfast, lunches and dinners, scheduled flights with SAS, rail journeys from Oslo airport and transfers to the hotel starts at £636 per person.