Mill Creek Memories page nine

I Learn to Ski

Every few years Lassen gets a LOT of snow.

The year the new Lassen Ski Lift opened was one of those years.

By the time the lift opened there was snow piled six to eight feet deep and by the middle of the season there was some forty feet of snow on the ground.

The highway coming into the park as far as the Lassen Chalet and the parking lot were plowed with tremendous perfectly vertical walls of snow towering up from the edge of the tarmac.

I absolutely loved being the first human way up high on the mountain every day in the silence of the dawn.

And I soon grew to know and enjoy the customers that used the lift.

Lassen had just the one lift and two or three groomed trails but the closest mountain competing for the skiers of the northern Sacramento valley was way over at Lake Tahoe—so I thought we did pretty well.

As I said, I had zero experience of skiing or the scene so I was content.

I had no experience with the huge mobs of skiers or the costumes, the racers, bars, hotels, the pros or any of the merchandising hype that is, of course, the only real reason for skiing to exist.

I wore some snowmobile boots down to the lift before the morning opening and would carry a set of bongo drums with me to the top where I would play rhythms—trying to “rhythm entrain” myself musically with the mechanical pulse of the huge loop of moving cable which had been laid out on an exact East/West line (I had checked through the surveyor’s theodolite when they were aligning the towers at the beginning of the project.)

As a matter of fact the message I was sending out into the cosmos through the entire vibrating cable was “Send Help”, not just for me but for all of us since even back then the “handwriting was on the wall” for the ecological destruction of this planet by humans.

And, of course I was very alert to anything that would require me to push the "stop" button!

One of the best privileges of working at the lift was the opportunity of skiing free when not working and on our days off––and we could also borrow boots and skis from the rental shop for free.

The management had set up a “Bunny Slope” rope tow near the Chalet and one of the little girls from the town of Mineral was one of their most enthusiastic customers. She would grab the moving rope and get as ride to the top and slide down and do it again all day.

The first chance I had I asked her to teach me to ski––which she was delighted to do.

She showed me how to hold the poles and how to slow and stop by forming a “piece of pie” with the ski tips.

So I rode the Bunny Tow with all the little kids for a couple of hours.

Then I asked her if she thought I was ready to try the chair lift.

She gave me this profound Little Kid Wisdom: “If YOU think you’re ready, you’re ready!”

So I slid down the hill to the big new chair lift, slid into position to be scooped off my feet by the moving chair and before I knew it–– was riding high over the snow with skis on my feet.

Sliding off the chair at the top turned out to be a piece of cake too and so, like everyone else, I did it again and again!

It was fun!