Meet the snow men you don’t want to sit next to on the chair lift.

One of the fascinating things about leisure activities is the scope they offer for the emergence of our less savoury personality traits. Think of the mild-mannered dad screaming abuse amid the anonymity of a football crowd, or the unabashed carnage unleashed at the annual office paintball outing.

Freed from everyday routine, we seem to untether parts of our psyche that, under normal circumstances, remain on a very tight leash. That is a huge part of the appeal of the annual ski trip. Few environments offer the same scope for temporary self-reinvention. Out here, in this bright, white environment, we can become whoever we want to be. We don a new uniform, experiment with expensive new equipment, and indulge our most adolescent fantasies, whether it’s swooping down slopes like a Primark James Bond, or striding into an apres-ski bar like an imperial-phase Mr Richard Burton.

Little wonder, then, that the ski resort is a veritable petri dish of human psychology, both good and very bad. Here, we offer you our guide to who to avoid on the ski slope.

It began with Snowbombing, the original Glastonbury-on-ice extravaganza started by an entrepreneurial crew of Mancunian ravers in 2000. But the formula – import big-name DJs and bands to a ski resort – proved so successful that the modern snow festival scene was born and, along with it, the tribe who follow it, the Snow Musos. Their spiritual home is the deep-house foam party at the Folie Douce, that notorious hive of extreme alpine bellendery, while their favoured look is animal-themed onesie paired with severe goggle marks. Happily for them, and less so for the rest of us, the pickings have never been richer. There is Snowboxx, Altitude, Rise or Snowbombing itself, and lots more planned. You can spot these dancing douches a mile off. They have the pallor of a week-old glowstick, which is useful because you can make sure you give them an extra-wide birth.

Where to find them: Avoriaz, France

These heroes are identifiable by their uniform of outsized helmet-and-goggles combo and a “tall” jacket that reaches down to their knees. Their habitat is the fun park, a snowy assemblage of cheese wedges designed to propel them to death-defying heights so they can hone their stock in trade: mind-bending freestyle tricks that challenge the laws of physics. As there’s a high likelihood that you won’t set foot in the fun park, you’ll be able to spot them from the safety of the chair lift. Like indie bands playing the toilet circuit, their lifelong ambition is that mythical sponsorship deal that will enable them to embark upon an endless winter chasing the snow and rub shoulders with their heroes, Messrs Travis Rice and Danny Davis. To achieve this, they seek to perfect the quad cork, a freestyle trick that involves four off-axis rotations, which has been successfully landed only four times and will pretty much guarantee a medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics. The reality? Once they hit their twenties, a future of arthritic knees and a job on the shop floor of their local snowboarding emporium awaits.

Where to find them: Laax, Switzerland

They say the biggest ass brays the loudest, which makes it easy to identify the Big Spenders among the rest of their fellow skiers. Like Ms Imelda Marcos, these bankers, hedgies and entrepreneurs inhabit a different financial and moral universe from the rest of us, and are blessed with the type of unshakeable confidence that only the extremely wealthy possess. If you’ve ever wondered who actually goes heliskiing or books out Sir Richard Branson’s own personal Airbnb in Verbier each winter, wonder no more. That’s why you need to be earning a minimum of seven figures to be in their gang. How else to keep up with their breakneck schedule? With a minimum of four ski weekends and a couple of longer trips each winter on the agenda, they’re considering going by private jet to cut down on travel costs for the season, and to fulfil their lifelong goal of arriving in the Three Valleys via Courchevel Altiport, favoured by oligarchs and minor dictators. Even more annoyingly, they can ski, too, and are as at home on the steeps of Revelstoke and the chutes of La Grave as they are paying €200 for a bottle of Eristoff vodka in Dick’s Tea Bar.

Where to find them: Verbier, Switzerland

Over the past few years, splitboarding – an activity where snowboarders split their boards, use them as skis to walk uphill, then put them back together to snowboard down again – has become one of the sport’s biggest trends, for some reason. And, perhaps inevitably, it has also provided a certain super-fit, farmer-tanned and nauseatingly wholesome type of snowboarder with the opportunity to do some serious showing off. After all, who really needs a ski lift? For these guys, the journey is the destination, and a run doesn’t count unless you got there under your own steam by walking uphill, and it is documented relentlessly on Instagram. Think of them as the #fitspo of the winter sports world. Their accounts have a humblebrag-heavy tone thick with platitudes and a multitude of empty feel-good slogans. And far too many hashtags. They live to #getoutside, have been using the #winteriscoming hashtag since the end of May and would really, really like it if you #followedtheirjourney. Please. Don’t encourage them.

Where to find them: Chamonix, France

In the age of Facebook and Instagram, life itself is just one long carefully curated digital post-holiday slideshow, an endless stream of images and edits that document every last detail of everybody’s life – forever. It is this pernicious atmosphere that has spawned the GoPro Ski Bore. Once a tidy skier or snowboarder himself (and it is always a man), the GoPro Ski Bore is today determined to vicariously live out his own skiing and snowboarding fantasies through the exploits of his very own fledgling (and slightly bewildered) Mr Shaun White. To that end, he leaves no stone unturned. Aged two, the kid owned his own Burton Riglet snowboard. Aged three, he was being dragged around the nursery slopes on reins. Aged four, he was hiking for his first powder turns. Since then, his overly keen dad has spent every waking moment on their twice-yearly ski trips following his pint-sized terror down every black run and off every jump. He films absolutely everything as he goes and, once the clan is back home for another 50 weeks, spams every social media stream in sight with endless tedious edits. For his hapless and mentally scarred offspring, a future in accounting surely awaits. Alas for him, those videos will live on in cyberspace. Forever.

Where to find them: Méribel, France

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