Mountains are humbling. They are silently majestic in morning and evening light, terrifying when they roar into life in a landslide or avalanche, and they throw out a challenge to all who look at them: I am here: what will you do?

Well, conquer them for one, ask any mountaineer. Someone has always wanted to be first to climb this peak or that, and plant a symbolic flag on the summit.

Personally I am happy to leave all that adventurous stuff to people far more qualified (or mad) than I am. I do, however, feel drawn to mountains. Their ridges, inclines, chutes and peaks draw attention, command it. There is no looking away.

That said, riding on a cushioned chairlift up steep snow-covered slopes is my idea of mountaineering, and today I have conquered a number of mountains around the Sauze d'Oulx/Sestriere range, without oxygen equipment. In fact, at the highest point all I needed was a beer. Luckily the mountain had been conquered many years, and many times, before, and it was therefore available on-tap. If I'd had a flag I'd have planted it.

All this mountaineering business was, of course, inherent to daughter Catherine's and my ski holiday. 'Conquering' simply meant queuing up for a chairlift, to be whisked away and upwards, after gaining entry to the conveyance by means of an RFID imprinted on our ski lift passes. Mine is in a pocket on my left sleeve; all I have to do is approach the gates and they beep in robotic language like R2D2, presumably saying, 'Welcome Mr Bodnar. Your pass is valid, please go through the gate and prefer for take-off.'

The force was with me (and Catherine) and so we were able to fly to a summit in not so long a time and not so far, far away. 'I am your father,' I croaked to Catherine, as we rode the lift. Maybe I didn't.

It was during today's skiing that I contemplated the noise of mountains. They are, at their best, silent monarchs, overseeing the lesser landscapes around them. But when you're a skier, they are vocal. Take a chairlift for example (as we did, lots of times); the noise at the business end of the lift is, well, noisy. The large wheel, endlessly turning the cable that carries the chairs, is driven by a hefty electric motor, the whine of which is hard to dampen.

But once adrift of this beast, the world settles down, and you are rocked and swayed through the landscape, with a view as though from a drone, as you glide over the pistes and off-pistes. The only sound is the hum of the cable, an occasional rattling as it goes through the pylon wheels, and very occasionally - when it comes to a standstill mid-journey - complete silence.

The electric hum greets you again at the top of course, where another wheel turns the cable back on its return journey. But then, after gathering yourself, or in Catherine's case doing up your snowboard boot straps, you begin sliding back down the mountain. And the noises change.

You make your own of course - the swish, scratch and clump of skis and snowboards as you weave your way down - but if you stop (as I do often), and find yourself high on a hill without a lonely goatherd, there is the blissful silence of, well, nothing. It's the equivalent of being in a totally dark environment, say deep underground, with no lights. You see nothing, absolutely nothing - not even, literally, the hand in front of your face.

The silence of the mountains is the audio equivalent. Deafness is tangible. And then, eventually, a snowboarder or skier hurtles into view to break the spell, and... we're back.

Today's marathon skiing took us through an entire audio universe, from mechanical to environmental. In between were the multiple languages of the ski people: Italian (obviously), French, English, Scandiwegian, Dutch (how do they even ski? Holland is flat...), and a few others that could lend support to the theory that aliens walk among us.

And then, to cap it all off, the sound I was waiting for. As we trudged down the hill from the lower chairlift back to apartment, touts outside numerous bars were saying, 'Free glass of Prosecco? Free beer? Open till late, all welcome...'

Music to my ears.