Aspen – The parking lot is full. Rowdy young action sports fans cram the makeshift midway to collect cowbells, stickers and foam hats shaped like tacos. Music blares, videos blink, the base of Buttermilk Mountain nearly bursts. I climb into an egg-shaped bubble and attempt to disappear.
Fifteen minutes later, the air is cold and the crowds have cleared. Snow is falling hard on top of Ajax Mountain. Other than a hardy, few, like-minded, storm-loving skiers and snowboarders who have opted out of the Winter X Games, we are alone at 11,212 feet, 3,267 vertical feet removed from the madness. God bless the gondola.
Not everyone agrees with my attitude toward chairlifts, but I confess that I’m a fan. I can appreciate the Zen of fixed-grip double as much as the practicality of a high-speed quad. I’m down with the comfort and community of a gondola car as readily as a rickety rope-tow. I’m just glad they’re there.
Sure, I hate lift lines as much as the guy standing next to me. Probably more. That’s because I’m spoiled. Living in the White River National Forest for 15 years, I’ve come to think of it as just a little more mine than the rest of the nation’s. But I’ve also come to know how to use the lifts to my advantage. Combined with a pair of climbing skins, the lifts can become your best friend.
The first known chairlift was built for Sun Valley way back in 1936 by a guy named James Curran, adapting technology used for loading bananas on fruit boats. Curran replaced the banana hooks with chairs, thus creating a machine with greater capacity than existing cable cars and far greater comfort than the J-bar rope tow, the two most common ways of moving skiers up mountains in his day, short of actually climbing them. The basic design is still used today, ironically including transport of the occasional fruit and nut.
Three years after Sun Valley, the Gunnison Ski Club installed Colorado’s first ski lift made from old mining tram parts at the now defunct Pioneer Ski Area. And the rest, as they say, is history.
As the largest single ski area in the nation, Vail – my home hill – dominates the lift tally as well, with 34. As a result, it’s not unusual for the area to dominate the human tally, either. But let’s face it, when Vail was created that 5,289-acre plot of property was set aside as a recreational sacrifice to the masses. With a little lift savvy, and a pair of skins for your skis, it’s not hard to pull off tours of more than 25 miles that keep you far from the kooks.
These days it’s not the ski areas, but the roadside backcountry access areas that scare me the most. Last full moon, the Colorado State Patrol found more than 300 skiers and snowboarders clogging the highway over Loveland Pass as a full-blown powder party spontaneously combusted. Up on Wyoming’s Teton Pass, trucks are being ticketed and towed every weekend because the number of backcountry skiers has grown so much they’ve run out of parking at the region’s most popular winter trailhead.
Beyond the obvious impacts of more cars on the highway (keep winter cool, remember?), consider the notion of uneducated or less-than-ethical powder poachers dropping in above you in avalanche country. Sure, there’s something to be said for safety in numbers, but I prefer the number three or four to 303 or 304. If I want crowds, I’ll stay in-bounds.
But the reality is I don’t want crowds anymore than any other skier I know, at Vail, Aspen or anywhere else. So I use the chairlift, just as I use the bus. It’s a people-mover that’s capable of moving me away from people and putting me in, or at least near, a place a lot of others aren’t willing to go. If I need to go farther, I can walk.
Sometimes I do just that, walking out my door and up the nearby slopes of my favored national forest when life’s pace allows for an all-day escape. So far, I haven’t made it up those 3,267 vertical feet in under 15 minutes though. Until I do, I’ll take my chances in the fruit basket.
Staff writer Scott Willoughbycan be reached at 303-820-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
