Some human skills are best learned young. Languages, for example, and horse riding, plus of course, sarcasm. But the one that most Britons really lose out on is skiing. For example: instead of flying me regularly to St Moritz and Kitzbühel when I was a toddler, my own feckless parents insisted on piano lessons and Mablethorpe. But hold fast. Hope is at hand. Anyone can be a winter sports whizz, and in the Alps too.

I’ll be honest. I always thought sledging was something done on an old fertiliser bag on a sloping field of slush. I had never even heard of sledging at the swanky winter resorts of Europe. But now I am on a Bavarian ski lift with Maddy, my 13-year-old daughter, rising up above the fir trees and the snow- white slopes, watching those skiers carve lazy curves below. Only hours earlier we were arriving at Munich airport; now we have stout wooden sledges in our hands, rented for €6 a day from the Oberstaufen cable car station. It was as easy as that. We have joined the winter elite.

Except, of course, it is not quite so simple. We are looking down as the steepness of the slope increases. I notice that one tree has a scarlet padded bumper on its trunk.

“Is it going to be dangerous?” asks Maddy.

“No,” I reassure her. “Not unless you crash.”

“Which looks highly unlikely.”

What did I say about sarcasm?

At the cable car station on top we have further cause for concern. The start is a belvedere of snow and ice perched in a scintillating panorama of sharp peaks. I am not impressed, however, with the safety precautions. Shockingly, the supposedly super-efficient Germans have left a dangerous gaping hole in the orange netting around the rim of this high-altitude shelf.

“Dad,” says Maddy. “That hole is where we are supposed go.”

I peep over. “But it’s almost vertical.”

Maddy gets on her sledge and disappears over the edge. I ask the cable car operator for advice. “Use your feet to slow down,” he says with a grin. “But don’t break your ankle.”

I launch myself after Maddy.

It is a truth grudgingly acknowledged that some skills are best learned young. After 100 metres of screaming descent we come to a sharp right hand bend which Maddy, with the nonchalant ease of youth, tackles with style. I crash into a wall of ice.

I get back on and pursue. There is a long magical swoop into the trees, all of which I avoid – except one. God bless red bumpers. I climb back aboard. I’m almost getting the hang of this. One of the strange effects of sledging at breakneck speed for extended distances, I discover, is that you laugh uncontrollably, especially when someone crashes. Predictably, Maddy overreaches herself and does a spectacular leap into a net, somehow managing to get her foot stuck through it, so she is lying on the ground, writhing like an angry orange bear caught in a snare. I find the parental urge to rush to her assistance is not as powerful as the desire to throw snowballs. She breaks free. I escape on my sledge. She pursues. And so on.

There are several sledging slopes along Germany’s border with Austria (see Germany’s sledge areas, below). There are hotels in the ski resorts of course, but my choice was to hire a car and use a farmstay away from the ski crowd in the village of Böbing. Self-catering is cheap in Germany, supermarket prices are lower than in the UK, and the farm, with apartments, was friendly, warm, sold a few essentials, and was almost exclusively used by German families.

From the farm, we could access several slopes with a 90-minute drive each morning (public transport in the area is also good). Snow here is not entirely dependable – our farm’s ski run had been good in October, but was bare in March – so it’s worth checking with the tourist office of each resort before setting off. (Wind can also close essential cable cars, as happened for us at Wallberg.)

One morning we pitched up at Pfronten, only to find the run closed for lack of snow. We hurried over to nearby Bad Hindelang and had the best day of the trip: a fabulous steady 3km descent through forests with time to go back down several times. The longer runs – Oberstaufen, for example, is 6km – are great, but you need to arrive early to do it more than once. Watch out, too, for long walks back to the cable car after you descend – some children might not like that. After two days we were experts and decided to tackle the sledgers’ ultimate challenge: the Zugspitze.

Germany’s highest mountain stands over the chic resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and was clearly popular, with big queues for the cable car and funicular railway. Behind the spectacular Zugspitze peak is a vast glacial bowl streaked by ski lifts and a central station where you can hire sledges (€6 a day; basic ski kit is €27).

The sledges were not the traditional wooden items of other resorts, but plastic saddles something like a child’s car booster seat. They looked fast. “They are fast,” grinned the man renting them. “Try the family slope first. That is not hard. The Tal Weißes next to it – now that is fast.”

The family slope was closed for no apparent reason – there’s always snow up here. We sat at the top of the Tal Weißes and gazed in awe at the descent: a long, lung-busting roller coaster of white-lipped insanity.

“Dad?” asked Maddy, “Where do you keep your will?”

“Will to live?” I replied – and went for it.

OK, so youth has certain advantages. Bones heal quicker. But age won that day on Zugspitze. Maybe it was the secret tot of schnapps in the coffee, but I made every corner and screamed down the unbelievably steep main drag to finish, breathless, disbelieving, and utterly addicted to the finest winter sport ever invented. Sledging.
• The trip was provided by Visit Bavaria (bavaria.by). Bussjaegerhof Farm (bussjaegerhof.de) in Böbing has family apartments from €74 a night. Airport accommodation was provided by Holiday Extras (holidayextras.co.uk)

German Alps sledge areas

• Zugspitze
Family day ticket for cable car, funicular and ski area: adult €39, 6-18s €21, under-6s free; sledge rental €6 a day.

• Bad Hindelang
A three-hour ski lift pass: adult €26.50, child €13.50.A Bad Hindelang Plus card is also available from some accommodation; it gives reductions on transport. Sledges are rentable at the lower lift station from €6.

• Oberstaufen/Hochgratbahn
Best value is to get an Oberstaufen Plus free lift pass with your accommodation and then rent a sledge for €5.

• Wallberg
One of the longest runs at 6.5km, but not suitable for small children. Sledges €5, three-trip cable car pass €27.

• Pfronten
Three available runs, including the 6.5km giant from the Ostlerhütte.