Situated in the North of Germany is a mountainous range called Herz and it's easily accesible by train or car, but I recommend a 4x4. We travelled there in a 4x4 and found the roads to be extremely steep at points and covered in ice on the mountain roads. The nearest airports are Paderborn and Hannover that I know of. But by car it's the number 7 autobahn (motorway) that we used and then travelled through Herzberg to get to a medium sized town called Braunlage, which is well equiped for all your needs.
We had decided the previous morning to travel there but I wished that we had booked somewhere in advance to stay in because as it was peak season nearly everything was booked but we managed to find a quant little hotel called Landhaus Zum Schultheiss to stay in. It was a B&B but at 31€uro's each per night to stay in a two bedroom appartment with our friends, which had a large bathroom, lounge/diner and a small kitchen was very reasonable.
The next morning we all ventured out to find the ski lifts and were shocked, we litterally turned out of the hotel's road and travelled 5 minutes up the road to find ourselves at the base of the ski lift and mountain. It looked spectacular and as a novice snowboarder also very scary to me!
As you stood in the car park and looked towards the ski lift on the left hand side of these buildings is a hire shop where I managed to hire snowboarding boots for 10€uros for the day, (it would only have cost me 20€uros for the board aswell) and it was about the same for the hire of ski's and ski boots I think. You could get a better rate for hiring for two days, but the downside of hiring is you have to leave an ID card in the hire hut and your shoes aswell, so take a spare pair if you are looking to hire items for more than a day.
Then we joined the queue to get our ski lift passes and it seemed to take forever to get to the kiosks but it was actually about 20 minutes. It costs 25€uros for your pass and that's for the whole day. They open at this particular ski lift from 9am till 4.10pm every night (well that's the last lift up) so you can always play at the top a while and then board or ski down to the bottom but the hire shop shuts at 5pm.
As you get into the lift you have to place your snowboard's and ski's in a carry hole on the outside, which is worrying but they don't budge at all really once you are on your way. You begin your assent up the mountain and pass through the middle station (which has a little snack stall at it) then pass on up to the top station. I recommend keeping your lift pass in your top left pocket because then you can just hold up your pocket to the turntable machiene instead of having to get it out everytime you need it.
At the top station there is another small snack bar, which sells hot and cold drinks and also hot and cold snacks. But if you walk round to the right of the top station up a slope there is a resturant which is very reasonably priced.
There are about six or seven slopes for all types of skiers and snowboarders and a few have T-bar lifts which bring you back to the top of the slope. From what I could see they have a very good first aid team all around the slopes and they use snowmobiles to get to injured people quickly.
We had a brilliant day there, only slight injuries to my husband and myself but that was our own fault! I would recommend this to any level of skiier or snowboarder. Unfortunatly we couldn't see any of the view from the top of the mountain and it was snowing like mad..