Little-known fact about me: Since the age of three, I’ve been a real winter sports enthusiast. Long before Jalopnik, way back in high school, I was even a snowboard instructor up in Vermont. Every weekend of every winter was spent up at the mountain, sleeping in a grungy basement apartment on the hill and snowboarding to and from work each day. Real “living in a Front Bottoms song” energy.
I, luckily, never fell victim to the fate that befell one poor Lake Tahoe snowboarder last week, when she was trapped in a gondola overnight as temperatures dropped. That’s likely because of folks like JohnnyWasASchoolBoy, who explained the procedure for ensuring no one dies of hypothermia overnight at your ski hill:
If you’re a skiier or snowboarder, you’re used to chairlifts stopping while you’re on your way up. Every few minutes, someone screws up their dismount, and you’ve got to pause while they collect their detached skis and get off the ramp — normal stuff. But every time that lift came to a half while I was on it, I’d always look around for the softest nearby snowbank.
My theory was that, if it came to it, I could just jump off the lift and survive. In some spots, I’d try to figure out where I could land and just keep boarding — use the chairlift as a sort of terrain park drop-in, and find a steep enough slope that my vertical momentum could translate right into snowboard speed. Maybe I’d even beat my 60-mph land speed record in the process.
Congrats on your COTD win, JohnnyWasASchoolboy, and thank you for reminding me to get back out on the slopes. It’s been too long, too far from snow and hills, and my board is probably dying for a wax and an edge sharpen.
