Snow Sunday: Bullwheel Cowboys and Other Chairlift Fails

30 Jan Snow Sunday: Bullwheel Cowboys and Other Chairlift Fails

Twenty years ago, when I moved to Telluride, my first job on the ski area was as a lift operator, bumping chairs. I did it because the job came with a ski pass. I didn’t realize the real fringe benefit: Watching people get on and off the chairlift every day is pure slapstick comedy. But it’s also sort of like someone farting in church. You’re not allowed to laugh.

There are three basic types of chairlift fails. There’s the Crash Landing, the most ubiquitous of all fails. This typically happens to new skiers and boarders who have been lulled into a false sense of security during the calm of the ride aloft. Suddenly they need to shift their weight to standing, and balance on a waxed board or skis—on snow. It’s not easy at first, and there’s nothing to hold onto except the other people on the chairlift, so usually it’s not just one person who skids into ignominy, but a full-on pigpile of splayed legs and gear that often takes out the people unloading the chair behind them. There are whole bloopers videos devoted to the Crash Landing, and lift ops get pretty adept at picking sheepish people up off the ground.

The second is a little more rare: It’s the Bullwheel Cowboy. For some reason—maybe it has something to do with prior experience with the Crash Landing—there are some people who just don’t get off the chairlift. They ride it around the bullwheel at the top and then realize that they’ve missed the safe 3-second window in which they were supposed to unload. Often they decide to deplane mid-air, dangling from the chair and then dropping. This is more dangerous than the Crash Landing, but also infinitely more entertaining to watch.

The third is the Failure to Launch. And beware, because this also happens to veteran skiers who are not paying attention. Maybe you are the fourth person in your group to shimmy up to the loading line when you suddenly realize this is a triple chair. Or you were fiddling with your glove or your pole or talking to a friend behind you, and find yourself in the path of a heavy metal chair traveling at high speed. It’s a good thing so many people wear helmets on the mountain these days, because never mind the trees or the out-of-control people on the slopes, if you get hit by the chair, you are going to lose brain cells faster than the taste-tester in a pot brownie factory.

The POMA Drag

Telluride has its own special chairlift hazards. Back when I was bumping chairs, we only had one high-speed quad and all of the other lifts actually required “bumping,” holding the seat steady for a second so that the rider can sit without the chair smacking the back of their legs. Some of the lifts are still this classic type, but most have been replaced by the high-speed quads. I worked on Lift 7 (Coonskin), which had the distinction of being the oldest operating lift in Colorado. There are a lot of superlatives you’d rather use to describe equipment—fastest, longest, even highest—but the oldest? And twenty years later, it’s still chugging along, with an uphill ramp that looks like a jump for water skiers. I’ve never been on any other chairlift that needed an uphill ramp, and the amount of carnage I witnessed on it tells me that it probably became an obsolete feature for safety reasons. Oh, and then there’s the Poma lift. Poma lifts (the ones you tuck between your legs and ride up with your skis or board on the ground) are not that easy to load and unload your first time—and when you’re loading a light person or a small child, and they take a while to get the Poma tucked in, the line gathers a lot of tension. It’s almost like a slingshot, only instead of a rock you have a person on skis. And if there’s a Bullwheel Cowboy equivalent on the Poma, it’s the rider who just can’t let go, no matter how long or how brutally they’ve been dragged.

But whatever you do, don’t laugh. Don’t make fun of people for being “gapers,” or start swaggering around with your new mustache and your mountain-town bravado. Because just when you start feeling superior about your ski-town skills, it’s going to be off-season, and you’ll be the one burying the nose of your surfboard or skidding out of control on the slickrock on your mountain bike. Every sport has its learning curve, so be gracious and keep your karma spotless. After all, the person you help up from the heap at the top of the chairlift this year could be Quentin Tarantino or Channing Tatum.