Lassen Ski Lift

The Forest Service had signed a permit to allow a ski lift to be built in the Lassen National Park.

Visions of wealth and employment excited the few people who actually lived in the nearby mountains scratching out a living as highway maintenance people, gas station operator, school teacher, or cafe waitress, bar owner, motel person, trucker or, like me, firewood scavenger.

I drove the eight or so miles by the little back road from Mill Creek to the town of Mineral and found the boss of the ski lift project.

I knew zero about ski lifts or skiing, but I was in pretty good shape physically from loading firewood so the big boss hired me on the spot as a by-the-hour day laborer and on the appointed morning I joined the dozen or so other workers at the Lassen Chalet parking lot and we hiked down into the meadow below and started digging big holes.  (Lassen Chalet was a park restaurant and gift shop operated by the Forest Service.)

What I soon found out about ski lifts is that they are just a row of big steel-pipe towers which go up a mountainside in a straight line at higher and higher elevations. Each tower is bolted to a huge block of concrete foundation and has a cross-bar at the top on which are mounted rows of grooved wheels which carry a moving steel cable.

A big Diesel-powered horizontal moving wheel at the bottom called a bull wheel and another big horizontal  wheel at the top tower are linked by a big loop of steel cable. Clamped to the cable every few yards  are hanging chairs which swing high in the air over the snow to carry skiers up the mountain—since ours was to be a chair ski lift.

 I later learned there are also gondola things for carrying a lot of people at a time up a mountain and also simple “rope tows” with a moving rope strung between motor-driven wheels which skiers simply grab and hang on to as the rope pulls them up the hill––then they let go at the top and slide back down.

In fact, the whole big idea of downhill skiing, as I discovered, is to ride some kind of towing device to the upper part of a snow covered hill or mountain and then slide back down on skis and then ride up again and slide down again all day long.

No kidding. That’s what it’s all about and people spend thousands of dollars to do it wearing the latest style of skiing clothes and faddish skis! They also need expensive four-wheel drive vehicles to get them to the ski slopes and pricy hotel rooms and restaurants and bars and so forth nearby to cater to their whims. This expensive sport absolutely limits the participants to the idle rich and their servants.

Well, what the heck! That’s pretty much life, isn’t it?

But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself because the Lassen ski lift hadn’t even been built yet!

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