Telluride 2012 - The People You Meet

You might think skiing is a solitary sport, just an elemental challenge of Man vs. Mountain, but in fact it is really quite sociable.  True, there is an anonymity in the descent, especially on a cold day when you are all bundled up in helmet/goggles/gaiter and no one can actually see any distinguishing features.  George Clooney could ski by, and I wouldn’t know.  But if you want to go down, you have to go up first, and you can meet all kinds of interesting people on a ski lift.   Sometimes these encounters set the tone for the entire trip.  Who among us (well, OK, who among me, Bill, and Andy Reinhardt) can forget Michelle and 495 from years gone by?  Or the fellow who said to Bill (far more recently), “Dude, you have GOT to get some new skis.”  This year’s trip to Telluride was no different.  So here are some people that we met:

Not technically a lift buddy, but Our Friend From Tennessee was our first prolonged acquaintance.  We met him while getting the United Airlines treatment, which consists of getting bumped from confirmed flights and then getting big fat checks from United, so it is not all bad.  Bill and OFFT learned quite a bit about each other while standing in line with the eleven other people United had to deal with.  We never did learn his name, but OFFT was heading to Telluride for a long weekend of skiing with his brother from upstate New York.  Our luggage and his all arrived in Montrose far earlier than we did, so we reconnected in Montrose, and then we saw him again at lunch the next day.  Funny how that works, you see the same people on the plane in, then everywhere around, then the plane out.

There was a garrulous high-level lift maintenance fellow, who told us more than we really needed to know about the modifications that had to be made to Lift 9 when they put the safety bars and footrests on the chairs.  It was extremely complicated, and we really couldn’t make sense of much of it, but he also gave us the crowd counts for each day of the holiday weekend (Saturday in the 4000s, Sunday expected to be over 6000, Monday back around 5000), information which is strangely fascinating and makes you sound like you are really in the know when you tell someone else later.  The upshot of all those numbers was that we had to wait at Lift 4 for all of five minutes once in a while.  Damn crowds.

Miss Denver was a gorgeous tall woman with fast equipment who was accompanying a decidedly less gorgeous man on Lift 14.  She was excessively friendly, even for the west.  He didn’t have much to say.  Good thing it was a short ride, or that friendliness would have gotten kind of creepy.

Best of all was The Most Happy Fella, a local who had to be the most cheerful guy on the mountain on our first, sunny, hard-charging day.  High on life, or something else, who knows, but he was just delighted to be out there.  Mid-sentence, about the fifth time that he was commenting on what an awesome day it was, he leaned over and shouted to a good skier below “YEEOW, RIP IT DUDE!”  This has become a rallying cry in the Laskin household.  I may shout it at Peter during the 5^th Grade Ballroom Dancing Showcase next week.

We actually met fewer folks on this trip since we had the great pleasure of getting together with Bill’s college chum Louisa, with whom we spent several highly enjoyable mornings skiing and riding the lifts.  There was one day when I tried to explain character points to her, and the fourth guy in our chair got completely confused and said “you mean you can buy them with a credit card?”  No, no, no.  It is much more complicated than that. 

I’m sure that our nephew Jake is happy that we did NOT spy him from a chairlift, since that spared him the mortification of me shouting hello from above.  Of course, I’d have yelled YEEEOW, RIP IT DUDE but that would probably have been worse.

At a big resort like Telluride, gondola rides also offer a source of contact, contained as you are in that little pod for 12 minutes.  And if one or more members of your party happen to be wearing Green Bay Packers garb such as Peter’s 2010 team sideline hat and Isabel’s blaze orange won’t-mistake-her-for-a-deer hat, you can pretty much be assured of a conversation about Wisconsin.  One day we rode up with a family from Texas, but the dad was originally from Milwaukee and had resisted the siren lure of the Cowboys to remain a Packers fan.  Good on ya, man, too bad we saw you and your wife following your son down the mountain on a sled the next day. 

One of our most eclectic gondola cabins included our Bill from Milwaukee, a World Traveler who was now crossing the USA but was originally from Racine, and a Nationally-Ranked Snowboarder (slopestyle and big air) whose family was from Green Bay, and his girlfriend.  Big Air was the most unlikely-looking elite athlete ever, being a scrawny kid with long hair, a huge scar on his jaw, and one of those silly looking hats with the flat bill, worn sideways.  In my worldview, alpine athletes have broad shoulders, accentuated by Nordic sweaters, and goggle tans, but I suppose I am dating myself now.  Nonetheless Big Air fascinated all of us with three unrelated pieces of information.  First, his mom had dated Bobke, the balding gap-toothed fellow who commentates on the Tour de France (how did we learn this, you might ask?  Discussing various countries and their national behavior with the World Traveler, who commented that the French weren’t particularly pleasant, that’s just how it goes on a gondola ride).  Second, he told us about camping in some massive (dozens of miles deep) cave in New Mexico for several days, including passages of more than a mile that you had to crawl through on your hands and knees (I really don’t remember how we got to that one).  Finally, and of most interest to Peter and Isabel, the scar on his jaw was the result of a training run during which he over-rotated a trick and caught his face with the side of his board, lacerating his cheek so badly that he could stick his tongue through the three holes.  The kids really liked that detail.  Required 50 stitches. 

The gondola also produced a young couple who quizzed us on distances from the Cape to everywhere else, since they were relocating to Woods Hole from California (he in the Coast Guard, she a third grade teacher), as well as various grandparently types who smiled indulgently when Isabel fell asleep. 

I should say that the Packers hats worked on the Galloping Goose shuttle around town, too, where I had a long chat with an Asian lady who grew up in Germany, now lives in Rhode Island, but is married to a man from Milwaukee, whose parents live about two blocks from my in-laws.  See?  Small world!  If you want to break the ice anywhere, just wear some Packers gear, you meet the nicest people.

YEEOW, RIP IT DUDE!