How to be a gaper.
February 27th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
File this under the category of “we all to this once-in-awhile”. Evan, who’s skied since he could walk, been an instructor, a racer, blah, blah, blah….and his friend, who’s equally experienced and currently a ski patroller, still managed to give the lifties something to talk about.
Here’s his account from his Oronaut blog of how to fail chairlift riding 101 at Mount Hood Meadows.
At 4 most of the lifts closed, but a few are open with the lights on until 9 or so, and since our ticket was for the “11 to 7″ shift we figured it would be fun to hang out a ski a few more runs as the sun went down, and do a little night skiing! (a rare thing in Montana). Our plans fell apart quickly, though. First we realized we had to ski down to our car and drive it up to main lot, since the night skiing didn’t extend down to our lot. We had to ride up a slow, old double chair to get back to the lot we were parked in. The top of the lift is kind of strange… it dips you down to unload and the the chairs go back up to a bull-wheel that’s at the full 20ft tower height! We… got confused. It looked from our angle like it might be a mid-station. Rather than try to determine if it really was or not, I started reminiscing about Grand Targhee’s old mid-station, and how long it’s been since I saw one. And we didn’t get off.
Turns out I still haven’t seen a mid-station in a while. Why didn’t we get off?? I’m still not exactly sure. We hit the stop-gate before the bull-wheel, and hung there for five minutes hotly debating the deeper implications of our apparent (and severe) retardation while the liftie tried to figure out what had happened and reset the stop gate. Then, because the lift is so high there, we couldn’t even unload at the top! We had to ride all the way back down, as some sort of cruel public humiliation. And then ride back up again! *sigh* (We did much better the second time around, btw).
Read the full post from Oronaut here.
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