Mill Creek Memories page three

Years later--Tanya on Mount Lassen.

Building the Lassen Ski Lift

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

I knew absolutely nothing about ski lifts or skiing, but I was in pretty good shape from tossing firewood so the big boss hired me as a laborer on the spot.

In the morning I joined the dozen or so other new hires up at the Lassen Chalet parking lot and we hiked down into the meadow and started digging.

What I soon found out about ski lifts is that they are just a row of towers which go up a mountainside at higher and higher elevations. There is a big drive wheel at the bottom called a bull wheel and another at the top tower and a traveling cable links them. Clamped to the cable every few feet are chairs which swing high in the air over the snow—since this was to be a chair ski lift.

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

In fact, the whole idea of downhill skiing, as I discovered, is to ride some kind of towing device to the upper part of a hill or mountain and then slide back down on your 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 the latest style of skis! They also need expensive four-wheel drive vehicles to get them to the ski slopes and they need fine hotel rooms and restaurants and bars and so forth nearby. (Indeed, what fools we mortals be!) 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!

What I had been hired to do was to help dig big holes to fill with concrete for bolt-setting foundations for the towers that carried the rows of wheels (shiv trains) that in turn carried the moving cable—one huge loop of steel cable––up the mountain!

We had shovels to dig with of course, and the ground in the valley was soft but as we went up the mountainside for the higher towers the digging got harder until we were finally digging through solid rock. For this job we switched to “rock bars”— six foot steel bars with a chisel point. You use this tool to bash at the rock and every few blows you get some chips to fly off.

We did this eight hours a day and when I got back to my camper the first night after using the rock bar, I went to eat a sandwich and found I couldn’t open or close my hand! My fingers were stuck in the rock bar grip position! Lucky I could still move my hand close to the bread until I slid a slice between my fingers and managed to eat that yummy poor man’s delight, peanut butter and jelly on white bread!

But there were some rocks we couldn’t dent and for these they had hired a dynamite expert—a kind of hippy looking guy. His tools were a heavy duty pneumatic rock drill—like the things they break concrete with on road work––and dynamite. He would drill a hole with this rock drill––a heavy steel pointed thing and the odd thing about his work was that he wore flip-flop rubber sandals while this dangerous drill was pounding away boring a hole in the solid rock right between his feet!

I asked him why he did it that way and he told me that by going almost barefoot he was twice as cautious with the drill. Maybe so.

I wore steel capped safety boots myself.

When he had his hole drilled, this technician warned us civilians away, stuffed dynamite into the hole he’d dug, shouted “Fire in the hole” and there was a bang and a lot of gravel sized bits of stone rained down on us for a few seconds. That broke the rock enough so we could go attack it again with our rock bars.

Once he shouted “Fire in the hole!” and there was no bang.

He came over where we were cowering behind some rocks and said “I hate it when this happens.” Then he had to go fish the dud dynamite charge out of the drilled hole and start all over again.

Well, he was getting paid more than the rest of us.

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