Quintessential Telluride ski bum T.M. Faversham spent more than half his adult life dividing his time between schussing the slopes and working construction jobs to pay for his season ski pass.
A few years ago, Faversham was riding Telluride’s celebrated Lift 9 — a notoriously slow triple chairlift with a payoff of what The New York Times called “a series of vertiginous and relentless pitches” — when it occurred to him that it would be fun to make a movie about the experience. There’s no shortage of downhill skiing footage, but going up? That was a different story.
“I thought it’d be funny,” he said, and he was right.
He took a digital camcorder up Lift 9, panning the scene on the hill below, the shaky cable overhead, the tips of his cherished skis, and the flushed, amiable faces of fellow skiers.
It takes 17 minutes or so to ride up Lift 9 — plenty of time for a mind to wander over topics from the weather to the native habitat of fellow skiers, musing over career plans or dinner possibilities. Then he added a voice-over monologue and eclipsed the Lift 9 ride into a video less than 5 minutes long.
“Initially, I wanted to make it like something Stephen Wright would do, more deadpan,” he said.
“But that felt too slow. So then I just put the first word of the next sentence over the last word of the first sentence, so the dialogue was more like the way you think. And it worked. Worked really well.”
It worked so well that “Solilochairliftquist,” a vowel-crammed title combining “soliloquist” and “chairlift,” became a minor hit at outdoor film festivals. Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, Banff Mountain Film Festival, Taos Mountain Film Festival, Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, Kendall Mountain Film Festival and others have put “Solilochairliftquist” on their programs. It’s also popular on YouTube.
“Solilochairliftquist” made Faversham a local celebrity in Telluride’s old-school extreme-skiing community.
“People are always referencing it,” he said.
“People in Telluride assume ‘Solilochairliftquist’ is all about Chair 9. But outside Telluride, it doesn’t really matter that it’s Chair 9. In a world of high-speed quads, a chairlift really lets your mind expand.”
Excerpt from the film:
It’s probably about 2 hours on the chairlift today. Wow, that’s a lot of time. What else would I be doing right now? spending time with my girlfriend? Possibly drinking? Nah, I don’t really like drinking during the day. Unless there’s a good game on.
Maybe I should start working harder toward my future.
Yeah right, what future?
“Nice air!
“So, if I spent 2 hours a day on the chairlift, and I ski 100 days a year, that’s about 200 hours a season sitting on the chairlift. That’s actually a lot of time. That’s something like 8 days straight, 24 horus a day. That’s more hours than I’ve worked all winter.
“Maybe I should become a liftie. They look like they’re having fun.
“Think I might’ve tweaked my knee on that last run.
“I’ve heard this particular lift is the most dangerous in the state. I believe it…”
Excerpt from T.M. Faversham’s 2005 short film,
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