Surface Lifts for Boarders?

Snowboarding is challenging enough, without having to deal with surface lifts.

I learned how to ski by using a rope tow. That was hard enough, but at least I had only one axis on which to balance: front and back. It was relatively easy to put equal weight on both feet, since each had their own ski. I simply had to make sure that I wasn’t leaning too much towards either the tips or tails of my skis.

But riding a tow on a board–which is what I had to do for my first lesson–is another matter entirely. It’s completely different, and ski schools that use ropes for teaching riders ought to be sued for educational malpractice. (Note to lawyers: that’s a joke.)

Here was my progression on a rope tow: ten feet up. Splat. Ten feet up. Splat. Ten feet up. Splat. Repeat a dozen times until “it takes,” at which point my attitude changes to “Am I actually going to be able to hang on the entire time? This is hard work!”

Riding a board on a tow requires not only having a proper weight distribution between tip and tail, but from heelside to toeside as well. So riding up on a board is at least twice as difficult as riding on skis.

T-BARS and POMAS
All this brings me to t-bars and pomas, which can still be found in older ski areas. Actually, they can still be found in large destination resorts. (Snowmass uses a t-bar near one of its summits.)

How do you ride those things on a board? I faced that question at a new (to me) resort. Thinking back to my early days on a board, I decided that I just didn’t want to face either the “splat learning curve” (worst case) or the “this is going to be a lot of work” situation (best case).

My wife was with me, and she was on skis. She had spent a lot of time during her childhood skiing days using surface lifts. In other words, she could have handled the surface lifts just fine. But even she had no taste for anything that required that kind of work. So we avoided the parts of the terrain that were not easily accessible by a chair.

The surface lifts do have one value: they open up some terrain for use. Just not by me.