Patrick Thorne fell in love with snow at a very early age, growing up in a rather flat and not very snowy part of the English East Midlands. He played with snow whenever he could as a child and loved sledging.
At age 15 his life changed when he first clipped on ski boots and skis and made his first turns on a 60m long artificial surface ‘dry’ ski slope in Nottinghamshire and then went on a school ski trip to the little resort of Prato Nevoso in Italy.
After early success writing about his teenage life and finding a publisher in The Sunday Times, Patrick was asked to write his first book on skiing, ‘Lowdown On The Slopes, The Essential Ski Holiday Guide’ at age 19, by Harper Collins publishers.
This book deal gave him the resources to keep skiing and extend his knowledge whilst studying for a writing degree at college. The book also led to his first ski magazine work at The Skier, during a ‘year out’ from his college studies, which was then based in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.
After return to complete his first degree and having spent a summer on the remote Shetland Island of Foula, Patrick and his future-wife Sally decided to try living in the Scottish Highlands in 1988 and have remained there ever since.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s Patrick freelanced for newspapers and magazines and took on a number of new book contracts, most notably for Swiss travel publishers Berlitz.
About this time, Patrick realised that most media coverage of ski resorts in newspapers and magazines focussed on a few dozen leading resorts and rarely mentioned all the rest. With personal computing now possible although the internet and world wide web were not yet widely available, he began a three year quest to find every ski area on earth, collecting printed brochures for national and regional tourist offices and ski associations as well as ski guide books from around the world. At this point he became known as “The Snow Hunter”, eventually finding more than 6,000 ski areas in 80 countries – the largest research project carried out previously had found 2,500.
The database was initially used in guidebooks, cartographic projects and CD ROMs that bridged the gap between print and the advent of the World Wide Web.
As the web started to develop in the late 1990s The Snow Hunter database was well placed to instantly supply content to the first online ski websites with most of them licensing content from the database.
Patrick was also employed to write news stories for the websites, initially supplying the websites 1Ski, Virgin Media and The Ski Club of Great Britain. This quickly led to Patrick produced a weekly, year-round, news-feed of at least 10 stories. That continued for nearly 25 years, eventually delivering more than 10,000 items of ski news content. The service eventually ended in 2022 when the impact of social media and the growth of ski sites operating a clickbait model left real news stories sidelined.
In the period from around 2005 – 2015 as internet publishing businesses consolidated their output and sought fresh income streams, Patrick’s main work, alongside extensive freelancing work, was for the Norway-based pan-European snow reporting website Skiinfo, supplying their news content; British sites J2Ski.com and Snow-forecast.com.
In 2007 he became editor of the newly launched InTheSnow magazine, supplying much of its oprint and online content.
The early 2010s saw an unexpected but welcome return to book authorship, 15 years after his last book, when he was asked to write Powder, a guide to the world’s 50 greatest ski runs. This beautiful coffee table book (thanks to efforts of designers UrbanAnt and mother nature supplying the material), was published in 2014 and has topped Amazon’s best -selling ski guide list ever since. It was translated into French, German Spanish and Swedish editions and new edition was published in winter 2025-26.
The past decade has seen Patrick work on several new books including a title with his son Robert on snow on other moons and planets, 2023’s Around The World in 50 Slopes which tells the amazing stories behind 50 ski slopes around the world, and the 2026 title The Skiing Bucket List.
Social media has also risen to become the main source of information for many people and Patrick publishes posts on these daily for a number of publishers collectively reaching up to 200,000 people.
He has continued to edit InTheSnow online and in print and work for other publishers, including supplying a weekly snow report for The Telegraph newspaper.
Patrick and Sally live on an 8-acre croft complete with a low hill that they use for skiing whenever there’s snow in the wintertime. They have three sons, and now grandchildren too, and have all skied together on hundreds of trips whenever possible.
Patrick Thorne The Snow Hunter 