Snowboard Kitsch in Alaska

It's fairly common to see old pairs of skis in hotels and restaurants near or at ski areas,* and of course you may see them in lodges on the hill. But how often do you get to see old snowboards?

The blog Alyeska Lift Crews has a photo of not just one, but six old Burton snowboards, plus one Snurfer. They're mounted on the wall in the Sitzmark, an establishment of some sort (lodge? restaurant?) at or near the Alyeska Resort. You can see the photo and click through to a full-screen shot here.

* I'm a snowboarder who periodically dons skis, but "ski and snowboard area" is a mouthful.

The Kiddie Waiting Room

My contribution to ski kitsch--some 1950s wooden skis--are standing up in a room in the basement, awaiting a suitable way to attach them to the wall.

But some people put their kitsch out for the world to see. In this case, I suspect that it is/was useful for the children, too.



This gondola, which from the looks of it was purchased from Loon Mountain, lies at the end of a long driveway. I suspect that children would find it a useful place to seek shelter from winter winds during their wait for the school bus.

An Indiana Sense of Humor

It's no secret that Indiana doesn't have the greatest terrain for snowboarding, though it does have Paoli Peaks and Perfect North. I imagine that neither has a vertical drop of over 300 feet, but then again, you make do with what you have.

Speaking of making do, how about the town of Terre Haute? Its name literally means "high ground." My best friend in college had looked into attending an engineering college there known as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Sometime in the 1970s and 80s they developed a recruiting poster that played off the image of Indiana as a sea of cornfield as well as the irony that Terre Haute really isn't that that high (about 500 feet above sea level) and is in fact flat.

Come to our school, the poster said, and you can Ski Terre Haute!



If the poster was created today, would they use a jibber on a snowboard?

By the way, you can now order one of those posters for your kid's dorm room.

Take up a seat on an old chair lift

I'm a sucker for alpine kitsch. Not that I have any at home--save my father-in-law's 50-year old skis--but I think ski and snowboard areas ought to play up some of their obvious qualities.

One thing they can do is recycle their equipment. Sports stadiums do something like this when they replace all the seats and sell the old ones to fans. A couple years ago I played the last round of golf anyone played on one particular course slated for a housing development--but only after the management had auctioned off the yardage markers and other objects on the course.

What do ski areas have? Chairs, for one thing. What other outdoors activity involves being suspended in air while being transported from point A to point B? The only thing I can think of is skydiving. Like snowboarding or skiing, the point isn't so much the trip up (though that can have its own pleasures, such as looking at the scenery or engaging in conversation) as it is the trip down.

In the Midwest, the typical snow slider will spend much more time on lift chairs than actually snowboarding or skiing. So what better way to welcome customers to a snow hill than to put a few chairs near the chalet?

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Erica leaves the following note. The comment function is broken and I can't figure out how to fix it. Until that point, I'll paste in comments as they arrive.

Erica: I've seen old chairlifts at random places around some resorts... I agree though, there has got to be more use for the old stuff, recycle the materials at least - think Green! At Mammoth they just replaced an entire lift with a huge 6-person express, but I have no idea what they did with the old ones.

Me: There's got to be a customer somewhere who would love to buy something like that. More likely, they sold it to another ski area.