It wasn't his idea, but Sir Harold Evans's family insisted they go skiing. After all, wasn't he the expert? So onward and downward they went…

We had no clue where we were on the mountain. It was night. We were thousands of feet up, climbing somewhere in a dense forest in Utah, deep in snow. It was well below freezing. My family—my wife, Tina; son, George, 19; and daughter, Isabel, 15—were barely visible through fur and scarves; George sported sinister Red Army arctic headgear. We could see intermittently as clouds scudded across a full moon. Instinctively, we were ready for the howl of a wolf, but there was nothing save the swish of wind in the ponderosa pines and the crunch of snowshoes. And then the trees caught fire.

Or so it seemed, as the light in the trees was so sudden and intense, the glow magnified in the whiteness of the snowdrifts. But the illumination was welcoming. It was the warm light of oil lamps hung outside a curious tentlike circular structure hugged by forest. We caught the scent of wood smoke drifting from a hole in its domed roof. A woman emerged with another lamp. We had arrived at the Viking Yurt, Yurt being the name of the curious hideaway and Viking being its builder, Norwegian-born Geir Vik—Geir meaning "head of a spear." We were soon inside with him before a roaring log fire, enveloped in warmth and guzzling hot spiced glogg from pewter mugs. If you fret about how cold it was coming up, he is apt to say, "There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing." With only a ski jacket and not a whisper of fur, he made me feel as if I had ascended the mountain naked and deserved to have my extremities severely frostbitten.

Geir is a genial fellow, actually, just wary of mountain weather. He is an athlete who came to study at the University of Utah and married a young woman who could keep up with him on the downhill, Joy Merritt Vik, the daughter of a mountain ski doctor. Joy has run the nighttime expeditions to the Viking Yurt for nine years from the ski resort of The Canyons, only half an hour from Salt Lake City International Airport. There is no electricity or running water in their yurt, but even in a blizzard it is snug inside. The Viks have gone one better than the nomadic tribes who carried their felt-lined yurts around the cold barren steppes of Central Asia. Geir used bubble-wrap insulation developed by NASA and welded the seams electronically.

There were 32 of us who had trekked up into the night for the promise of a five-course meal "fit for royals," the kind of food the Viks served the crown prince and princess of Norway during the 2002 Olympics somewhere down that mountain in Park City, Utah. Most people make it to the yurt wrapped in blankets on a convivial 30-minute sleigh ride from The Canyons (base 6,190 feet), and while the sleigh is drawn not by six white horses but a Sno-Cat, it is nonetheless romantic to see the lights of civilization fade to pinpoint as you head out of the valley into the unknown. You can stay in the sleigh all the way to the yurt, at 8,000 feet, an ascent of almost 2,000 feet. It is the adventurous who drop off some way up the mountain to don snowshoes and cross-country skis for the last 20-minute climb in the forest.