We do it every winter before the snow melts, leaving behind the bothersome lowlands that absorb us for most of the year.

Everyone knows the metaphors – the purity of snow, the endlessness of the view, the clarity of the air. Renewal. All that. And all of it is true.

At least for a little while, you become different up high. There are times when you can find your own shadow cast as that of a giant upon the top of a cloud below you.

Everything is sharper – the crack of overnight freeze beneath your skis, the swiftness of motion consuming the vanishing point.

You must focus on nothing more than a rhythmic alteration of balance, or end up arse over head.

I discovered this truth when I first clicked on a pair of skis in my mid-20s.

It was an unpromising beginning – a fiasco involving falling from a T-bar and floundering helplessly while the young woman I was with carved perfectly sinuous tracks across the slopes, launched into the air from the lip of a cornice, and slid to a racing stop, propelling a geyser of snow that drowned whatever semblance of pride may have been left to me.

There is something to be said, though, for the forced abandonment of conceit before there can be hope of learning.

With perseverance and a deal of pain, winter weekends in the high country became a joy that remains these years later.

Up there, the most anguished spirit can free itself.

There was a time, indeed, when the federal parliamentary Liberal Party devoted a long weekend each year to renewing itself in the mountains.

Adrift in the agony of opposition in the 1980s, the leadership veering between Andrew Peacock and John Howard and back again, the party sought inspiration in the alpine village of Thredbo.

These expeditions became known as "love fests" among the mocking, for there was a shortage of affection among participants.

There were, however, moments that could not be imagined from lesser elevations.

One night in a lodge, John and Janette Howard joined a scoop of journalists over drinks.

Mrs Howard eventually sent her husband off to bed, and with the night advancing into a mountain morning, she constructed for the journalists a quite mesmerising case about why her John would prevail against the dreadful forces of Peacock and why he would eventually become prime minister. Scepticism was put aside, and songs floated in the thin air.

The next day Mr and Mrs Howard could be seen, in matching ski suits, meandering across Thredbo's snowy slopes, seeing, perhaps, sunlit uplands awaiting. Which, of course, they were, though more than a decade distant. In the ether, doubts evaporate.

In April 2010, with darkness beginning to descend upon the time of Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott came to the mountains, too.

Naturally, he chose the path of greatest exertion, grinding aboard his bicycle 70km up the western slopes from Khancoban to Thredbo, the most arduous bike-ride in the nation, made particularly tortuous by a frozen gale, sleet and snow.

He was on his annual poli-pedal, but seeking also to vault himself from Opposition Leader to a more exalted position. A fellow journalist and I rode up – on motorcycles – to meet him at the top of the mountains, and accompanied him down to the high plains where he and his large band of fellow cyclists camped for the night at the village of Berridale.

There was a group dinner, and there emerged an Abbott you mightn't imagine. Comfortable and relaxed with around 50 friends, some of them from school days, he presided over a jolly evening of song and stories – as he did every night on that long, long ride – and uncorked a bottle of schnapps to share with the two guest journalists.

Casual, in a roll-necked sweater against the highland chill, there was an easy optimism about him, doubt and caution absent. In the dawn, he was on his way again, streaming across the high plateau past farm gates decorated with jaunty signage ("Well done, Tony") and stopping here and there to shake hands and to find himself clapped upon the back by high country well-wishers. Beneath the big sky, anything seemed possible, and so it eventually came to prove.

Still, the mountains do not always deliver.

Labor Party luminaries have also sought the bracing air above the clouds from time to time. Frontbenchers Tony Burke and Stephen Conroy found the air too rich when they were required to admit a couple of years ago that they'd accepted the hospitality of corrupt NSW ALP broker Eddie Obeid in his family's ski lodge at Perisher. A case of forced abandonment of conceit turning awkward.

These years later, however, it is Tony Abbott and those around him who seem stuck in the lowest of lowlands, renewal and inspiration required.

Time, perhaps, to seek the high road. It's up there, where, if you're fortunate, you might find your shadow cast upon the top of a cloud.

But better hurry. The snow will be melting very soon.