Day 227: My life as a liftie

Hey everyone!  Sorry it has been so long since my last update.  I've been working at Mt. Hutt Ski Field for about a month now, in the lifts department.  So I thought I'd tell you a bit about what a day in the life of a liftie looks like.


Most days, I get up at 6:30 to get to the town office of the ski company by 7:20.  (If I'm on early I have to be there anywhere between 5:15 and 5:45, depending on what's happening on the mountain that day - it could be a race start or deicing of the lifts.)  Then I jump in a staff bus and get a ride up the hill.  The ride takes about 45 minutes or so, and we wind our way up a steep, curvy unsealed road with quite severe drops on the sides in places and minimal guardrails.  Sometimes we have to stop the bus and put chains on, depending on the state of the road and what the weather is doing at the time.  The mountain is very barren (no trees) so the wind can get quite strong in exposed places and this means at times the road is closed to traffic going up and sometimes, coming down, as we found out during my second week when all the staff and 1,000 guests got trapped up the mountain overnight by excessive winds (I slept on the floor in the retail store next to the ski socks!).

 Once I get to work, at about 8, I have a look at the roster to see where I am working.  The lift department covers all lift operations, as well as the carpark and road patrol (helping people who get stuck on the road) and chains.  Depending on road conditions chains may be required to travel the road, and the mountain hires them out and fits them to cars for a fee.  As a chainy your job is to crawl around under cars fitting chains.  Fun stuff. 

By 8:15 I am at my morning station, with a radio and a drill with an enormous bit for drilling holes in the icy snow. We set up the gates and the queue lines and get the top operator up to the top and do stop checks on the lift (checking that all the controls are working properly.) Once the stop checks are finished and we have maintenance clearance (and okay from ski patrol if there has been new snow) a radio call goes in to Admin saying the lift is ready to load at 9am. When 9'o'clock comes along we unsuspend the gates and start to load people. If I'm working a base station we usually do half hour rotations in three different positions: controls (stopping/slowing the lift), tickets (checking that people aren't cheating on their tickets or helping them out if the gates won't let them through) and ramp maintenance (shoveling and raking the ramp to keep it smooth and safe so people's skis don't get caught in the snow and the don't get pulled off the chair – I've seen it happen more than once!) At about 10:30 or so there is usually someone around to give us each a 10 minute break and then at 11:30 people start showing up to break us out for lunch. We get an hour for lunch which is nice if you want to go riding or skiing on your break. After lunch you are generally rostered onto a different position, so I will head out to wherever my afternoon station is to give them a lunch break. Then we get another 10 minute break at some point during the afternoon and next it's time to pack up at 4pm when the lifts close. We put everything away and help each other out on the stations that take more time. Then all the liftys gather in the staff room for a quick meeting and then it's out the door and down the mountain. We are the last people to leave the hill every day, and sometimes we have to wait to make sure any leftover guests get down safely. And then we do it all over again the next day!