Skiing Notes from Ira Riklis

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Vail Mountain officially opens for skiers at 8:30 am. The lift lines will open at 8:00 am and the first skiers will be allowed onto the lifts at 8:15 am. This is generally referred to as “first chair”.

Officially, all the chairs are first chairs until the first person to get on the lift at 8:15 am reaches the top of the lift and would have the time to ski back down to the “feeder” lift. So all the chairs from 8:15 am to about 8:45 am are considered “first chair”.

As for me, I consider being on the lift, skis on feet and tushy on the frozen cushion of the chair, at 8:15 am to be the only true first chair. My friends and family consider me to be a little crazy this way, but it works really well.

[In addition to his skiing interest, read about Ira Riklis' Charities.]

Continued stories of Vail and the skiing business:

Most people, when they go skiing, naturally feel that they are on vacation, which they are, and then they do what they would normally do on vacation.

This includes sleeping late.

The vacationer tends to sleep in, get a lazy start, have a nice breakfast, and then get themselves ready to go out onto the slopes around 9:30 to 10:00 am. This causes the lift lines to become heavily overcrowded, especially on those few “feeder” lifts at the bottom of the mountain that all skiers have to take in order to gain access to the rest of the mountain.

While there are a total of 32 ski lifts to access the 193 trails over 5,289 acres, there are only five “feeder” lifts, and one of those is dedicated to the Cascade Village enclave and therefore has limited use. So with only four main lifts to move people up the mountain to start their journey to other lifts and runs, when the day skiers and the resort skiers converge at the same time, even with the rather remarkable speed of these “feeder” lifts, there are going to be long lines and long waits. Also, once you get off the “feeder” lifts, there are only a limited number of choices for where to go next, and those quickly fill up causing even more waiting.

It seemed immediately clear to Mike and me that the answer was to get on the mountain before the rush of skiers caused long lines and long waits.

More to come …

(Much more about the interviewee on the Ira Riklis LinkedIn page.)

Still more from Ira (Ira Riklis is on LinkedIn):

So, when Mike was still a ski instructor, and was being paid to ski with me, he wore, as did all members of the Vail Ski School, a medium blue uniform of ski pants and a tufted ski parka which had across the front a black and white stripe starting at the left shoulder and dropping diagonally to the lower right corner of the front of the parka.

Thusly identified as a Vail Ski School instructor, we were allowed to use the special line at all ski lifts designated for the use of the Ski School. That meant that we almost never waited more than a few minutes in a lift line, even during peak ski days or peak ski hours.

Today, this is much less of a problem than it was thirty years ago. With the massive amounts of skiable terrain and the four person, high speed lifts, large numbers of skiers can be moved up and around the mountain very quickly. Although, at peak times and at particularly popular ski runs, it is still a frequent possibility to spend a good 30 to 45 minutes waiting, in ski equipment, to get onto the ski lift. But 30 years ago, an hour in a lift line was not at all an uncommon experience.

Of course, once Mike was no longer with the Vail Ski School, and we were skiing together just because we enjoyed each other’s company, we were no longer allowed to cut the ski lift lines. So, unless we wanted to spend a great deal of time on lift lines, we had to work out another method.

More from Ira (check out the Ira Riklis LinkedIn page here)

As I wrote earlier, Mike and I met because he was assigned to me for a private lesson when Mike was an instructor with the Vail Ski School. This turned out to be a marvelous stroke of good luck as it gave me a lifelong friend, business partner, and a skiing companion.

Even though I am an expert skier, I can’t ski with Mike in a manner that would challenge either his athleticism or his skiing abilities. Mike is a consummate athlete who fills every available hour with some sort of athletic endeavor, whether it be skiing, hiking, kayaking, hang gliding, and the list goes on and on. Mike can ski any terrain at any speed; I cannot. Mike has to throttle back his skiing ability in order to ski with me. I flatter myself by hoping that what is lacking for Mike, when he skis with me, in boisterous effort is compensated for by our conversation, bonhomie, and a strong affection for each other. I hope that Mike has as good a time skiing with me as I have skiing with him. We certainly have been doing it for a great many years. It must be almost 30 years that we have skied together.

Ira Riklis continues about Vail:

So we did return that winter to Vail and have returned every winter since. I have skied exclusively in Vail for over 30 years now. The town is charming. The slopes are maintained superbly. The restaurants are wonderful and varied. The ski school, especially for children, is reputedly the finest in the world.

The whole vibe is less about “being there and seeing and being seen” than it is a family friendly environment that not only provides top notch skiing, but brings the whole family closer together. From time to time, Diana would agitate to relocate to Deer Valley in Utah where the ski concierge would put on and take off your ski boots; but I have never felt the need to ski anywhere else.

I expect that the rest of my skiing days will be spent in Vail.

Perhaps one more then innovative product is worth mentioning. I had a pair of Burt Bindings on my skis. These were thick plates with retractable metal cables that attached to anchors on the skis.

The theory was that, if properly adjusted for tension, the ski and boot would retain contact and angle during skiing. However, when tension pulled the skis and boots apart at greater tension levels, the cables would extend and then automatically retract. I was not yet an expert skier and so this rather obviously flawed system was not apparent.

I do remember one particularly bad fall in which skis did separate and then retract from my boots. My ankles were fine, so I guess it could be said that the system worked well. However, the angle that the skis caused my fall to take slammed my face and chest into the hard packed snow so badly that I ached for days.

How Ira Riklis got back into skiing:

The sons of Alden Hanson, the Dow Chemical scientist that invented the fan powered snow making machine and the “flow” material that would make ski boots SO much more comfortable, Chris and Denny Hanson, invented the rear entry boot.

This boot was much higher than ski boots had been until then. As I had written previously, ski equipment, boots included, had adapted from hiking and show shoeing equipment. Therefore, early ski boots were low, near the ankle, much like hiking boots. It has since been determined that bringing the boot higher up the calf creates a stronger connection between knee movement and ski movement. That meant that the break area was going to be completely surrounded and held tightly together.

But the rear entry element is what really did the trick. In a front entry boot, the sides are squeezed together and that put great pressure on my break area. In the rear entry boot, my break area rested uniformly against a thick “tongue” and distributed the stress throughout my leg. The material of the liner was very sticky and in order to get your foot into the boot you needed to spray on silicone.

But with my new bright red pair of Hanson Riva recreational rear entry ski boots, I was ready to take on skiing once again.

Now deciding to go skiing in the winter of 1975-1976 was no small deal.

In 1970 I had suffered a severe leg break of both the Tibia and Fibula, directly at the top of the ski boot. The leg did heal but to this day my right leg has a slight bend at the point of the break and a “collar” grew connecting the two broken bones. The day that the “collar” separated between the two bones was exceedingly painful, but that’s another story.

I tried to take skiing up again after the break. However, the pain of the break zone at the top of the ski boots was unbearable. Essentially I had not skied since 1970. Diana encouraged me to take it back up again as a very loving gesture.

Diana, while an excellent skier herself, does not actually like to ski much and really dislikes the cold environment. She was really trying, against her own best interests, to help me get back something that I truly love and enjoy. But there was hope.

Ira Riklis on his first trip to Vail:

We were on our way back to Philadelphia having traveled south along the California coast, then east to Las Vegas, and northeast to Aspen. We spent a few days in Aspen enjoying the pristine beauty. Aspen was intended to be our stop in the Rockies. However, the United States had a new president, Gerald R. Ford, and he was staying in his vacation condo in the then rather new village of Vail, Colorado.

Vail was only nine years old at that point and Ford had been a charter purchaser of a condo in the then new (and only) condo hotel in Vail, The Lodge at Vail, long before he ascended to the Presidency. We had never seen the president and thought that it might be fun to stop off on our way to Denver in Vail; after all, Vail was directly on the route from Aspen to Denver in 1975. It turned out that the president wasn’t in town when we got there.

This was the time of the great oil shortages and Ford was off inspecting a shale oil demonstration project; he left in the morning and returned in the evening. We were in Vail for lunch. We never got to see the president up close. We did, however, have a charming lunch on the outside terrace of Pepi’s Gasthof Gramshammer which is located right across the street from The Lodge at Vail and at the very center of the small town. We were enchanted, ensorcelled, and smitten.

We just fell in love with Vail and decided to return the following winter to ski.

In the Summer of 1975, Diana and I decided to do a road trip around the United States. While Diana had traveled extensively in Europe with her parents, she had never seen much of the majesty or vastness of the United States. We packed up our brand new American Motors Pacer (in Burgundy Red with the Navajo Red & White interior) and set out West on a northerly route out from our home in Philadelphia.

The Pacer has pretty much been lost to time and history, and I doubt that there are many people today who were alive then that would remember the Pacer. It was produced from 1975 to 1980 and only a little over 350,000 were ever made in all configurations. It was a most unusual car with a unique jelly bean shape, but two characteristics made it a particularly bad choice for a round trip cross country jaunt of 8,000 miles in seven weeks. First, it was underpowered. The Pacer was originally intended to be powered by a short but powerful Wankel engine. When the promise of the Wankel was abandoned, AMC went with an inline 6 that was insufficient for the bulk of the Pacer.

We were moving on the highway through the Rockies east of Denver at 5 MPH with the gas pedal floored. I felt certain that we wouldn’t make it to the top of the last hill, but we did and the car was able to drive (coast?) at normal speeds on the way down the Rockies. Second, the car had massive side, rear and front windshield glass areas. This made the car a huge solar oven on wheels. Traveling in summer through the badlands, deserts, etc. that are out west was quite an experience in such a car, a little like taking a sauna while in transit. But how does this all relate to skiing?