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?

———————
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.