Important Life Acheivements

I was always an imaginative child with a abiding penchant for action movies, so it was natural that as soon as I rode a chairlift I began to daydream about climbing around on one. Specifically, three questions came to mind:

1. What is in the enclosure above the bottom station of a chairlift? Obviously, it's the machine that powers the chairlift, but more specifically, what does it look like? How big is it? Why is it in an enclosure that looks like it comes from a sci-fi movie?
2. What is it like to climb a lift tower? They have ladders on them, but you're never allowed to climb one. Anything that's banned is likely to be fun, so what's going on up there?
3. If the chairlift stopped in some kind of action-movie based emergency, would it be possible to climb up from the chair onto the cable, traverse along the cable and then get down via a lift tower?

Well, yesterday was staff day at the ski hill, and after the lifts had stopped running and everyone was slowly drinking themselves into a stupor in the bar, I answered all three of those questions and acheived a number of life ambitions that I had always assumed I would never do. And the answer to all three questions is:

AWESOME.

Of course, that doesn't make a lot of sense as the answer to question three, so for that question we should add the words "and totally possible".

Now that I look at it, it doesn't really answer question one either. The answer to that question is that the mechanism that powers the chairlift is pretty small. In fact, it's not much bigger than a truck engine. Given that those enclosures are pretty big and pretty sci-fi-ish, there's actually a lot of empty space up there. So that was suprising and slightly unnerving. But also awesome.

Question two is totally about awesome. It's fantastic on the top of a lift tower. You're up high, on a lift tower, there are enough safety railings that it's not scary, there's the thrill of the forbidden. It's great - I recommend it to you all.

As for question three - I should admit that I didn't actually climb onto a lift tower. A bunch of us climbed into a chair near the bottom station that was at a conveniently reachable height, and I just climbed onto the cable from there and traversed down it to the base station. But it was still most excellent. And everyone said the cable would cut up my hands, but it was remarkably smooth and un-burred. I guess it spends its days running over pulleys which must smooth it down. Anyway, it's totally climbable, so if there are explosions going off and you're riding the chair next to Steven Seagal and he tells you to get off the chair so he can kung fu some bad guys, just do it.

Just so everyone's clear on this: the chairlift was not running at the time. Doing life goals one and two with a moving chair would be fine, but number three would be worthy of an action movie - if you stuffed up the timing your hands would go through the pulleys, and I suspect they would pretty neatly cut all kinds of important hand parts off.

I hope this post inspires all of you to live your dreams. I'm available to act as a motivational speaker at high schools right away, and my fees are very reasonable.