Skiing Notes from Ira Riklis

This is the Courcheval Summit at 2,700 meters

A spot that, as Ira found out, if you have to break your leg, is a beautiful place to do it.

Ira Riklis‘ skiing accident story continues:

Going to the hospital in Megeve was quite an experience for a young American that didn’t speak much French.

While I waited in the hospital hallway, on a gurney, to be taken to surgery, my sister had to hold my toe so that my foot would not flop to the left or right thereby causing me excruciating pain.

I don’t know if this was a church run hospital or not, but I wouldn’t exactly call the nurses there sisters of mercy. In fact, they displayed the usual unpleasant Gallic temperament and disdain for Americans. This made for some very interesting and unpleasant occurrences. The most interesting was when the nurse gave me a strange looking, rather waxy, bullet shaped “pill”. My sister and I had no idea what this was for or how it was to be administered. Remember, we were only fifteen and nineteen years old and hadn’t spent much time in American hospitals, much less European hospitals.

We asked the nurse what this was for and how I was supposed to take it. She yelled at us in French, we don’t know what, and stormed out. After consulting, we decided that, unpleasant as it obviously would be, I should attempt to swallow this “pill”. As it was in my hand and my sister handed me a glass of water, the nurse reentered the room, surmised what I was about to do, screamed something unintelligible at us in French, grabbed the “pill” from me, pushed me on my side, and proceeded to push the “pill” none to gently up that portion of your body where the sun don’t shine.

This was my introduction to suppositories. I had never seen a suppository before, but I will never forget that one.

The saga continues …

When I broke my leg, I was skiing for the first time, and the last time, in Europe.

Courcheval was, and I presume still is, a marvelously beautiful setting with a charming town and a magnificent glacier based ski resort. It was particularly thrilling to me to be skiing in the home stomping grounds of my skiing hero, Jean Claude Killy.

In addition to lovely, small hotels, the food was of the finest French caliber of cooking. It had been a simply wonderful trip and I was taking, yes, you guessed it, the last run of the last day before we were to pack to leave. I was just enjoying the ride down, letting my skis remain in an extended unweighted (evenly balanced without any edging) position to skid along the slope. While in this unweighted position, I hit a patch of powder which grabbed my edges and sent me flying forward.

It was immediately clear that I had suffered a serious break, not the least of which reasons being that my skis and legs were arranged in a manner that is not possible if all your bones are still attached. The right ski was still attached to my leg, just my leg wasn’t exactly still attached to me.

We have been, over the last year, interviewing Ira Riklis on his love of skiing, his involvement with Vail, Colorado, and other matters. This is the latest installment:

It should come as no surprise to anyone that skiing is an intrinsically dangerous sport. I myself have suffered numerous injuries, the most serious of which was, as mentioned above, that I broke both my tibia and fibula on my right leg just above the ski boot.

To be truthful, most of the responsibility for the broken leg belongs with me.

I had just bought a new pair of skis and bindings. I didn’t like the safety strap that came with the new bindings, they were just too much work to put on and you usually had to remove your gloves to do so, and I used the safety straps from the old binding.

This was not a very good idea.

The old binding had a much lower profile than the new binding and didn’t need as long a stretch of strap between the binding and where it attached on the boot than did the new binding. Using a strap that was too short for the binding meant that if I fell directly forward over my skis, there would not be enough “play” in the strap to allow the boot to pull forward and snap directly upward out of the binding. However, being fifteen years old, indestructible, and not knowing any better, I opted for what seemed a clever exchange of safety straps.

Care to guess at how I fell when I broke my leg? Of course I fell directly forward over my skis and the binding was unable to release. I broke both bones and only the skin, muscles and sinew were left to hold my foot to my leg.

Continuing with Ira Riklis‘ interview on Vail and the skiing scene:

There is one last trick to this method, where you do your skiing.

The method we use is to take the VistaBahn out of Vail Village to the Mid-Vail area. We yo-yo the runs around Chairs 2, 3 and 4 back to Mid-Vail while they are pristine and empty. As other skiers begin to work their way up the mountain, we will start moving on back into the bowls. If my legs are up to it, we will work our way out to Blue Sky Basin for some of the most exciting skiing on the mountain.

But Blue Sky Basin is really rather far out there. It takes a great deal of skiing to get there and a great deal of skiing to get back from there; so don’t start out for Blue Sky Basin unless you feel you have the energy for it.

I would also recommend against it if the weather is particularly cold or miserable as you could find yourself effectively stuck out in the cold working your way back to civilization, a toasty fire and a warm cup of hot chocolate.

Again, once our idyll is disturbed by other skiers who are working their way to the back bowls, we start moving in the opposite direction of traffic. We now work our way back to the front of the mountain and back to Vail Village. We take advantage opportunistically of the runs we find still in good condition and with relatively few skiers. In fact, around 11:00 am, you can ski the front face of the mountain, terminating at Vail Village and still find that the conditions are relatively unspoiled. That’s because most people ski quickly past these areas in the rush to catch up with Mike and myself and get into the back bowls.

Now anyone reading this blog knows mine and Mike’s secret for getting the most out of every ski day. More to come …

Continuing:

We start our day at 8:00 am putting on our equipment at the lifts. We are on the first chairs at 8:15 am, sometimes the actual first chair of skiers for the day (but we are never very far behind those first people). Depending on the level of my physical conditioning (remember, I’m a fat, sedentary, city dweller), we can get in 15 to 20 runs by Noon.

We stop at Noon, have a lovely and unhurried lunch at a one of the wonderful restaurants in Vail Village, and then spend the afternoon in some other activity. Mike usually goes after lunch to check on business at the stores and I usually spend the afternoon with my wife, getting a massage, going shopping, etc.

I consider this a much better use of my day. I effectively get a full ski day as measured by the number of runs and then have the afternoon to spend in another way.

Skiing aficionado Ira Riklis (LinkedIn page, Charities site) continues about Vail:

Another benefit of being on the first chair is the efficient use of time. A skier that waits to start until 9:30 – 10:00 am, stops and battles the crowds at lunch time for a lousy hamburger and a seat to eat that lousy hamburger at the Mid-Vail Cook Shack, and comes down with the crowds (a really scary experience and rightly so because many injuries occur at this time, often caused by an out of control skier hitting into you) at 3:00 – 4:00 pm, after waiting in long lift lines, will probably get around 12 to 20 runs in the day.

I should digress at this moment to explain how Mike and I measure the number of runs. We’ve been at this a long time and have seen a great many changes in the type of ski lifts. It used to be that the maximum length of a lift was about 1,000 vertical feet (only took two skiers at a time and moved at an almost glacial pace).

Today the lifts can carry three or four skiers at a time, move swiftly, and can cover, where called for, long stretches of vertical drop. Therefore, in order to have a uniform method to determine the number of runs in a day, we break up the runs into units of approximately 1,000 vertical feet, regardless of the number of lifts actually involved.

Ira Riklis continues:

You see, it’s not just about the lift lines. There are other reasons to be on that first chair.

For one thing, if you are a mountain cruiser as I am, it means that I get first crack at all the fresh snow and freshly groomed slopes. I can’t tell you how many times Mike and I have made the very first tracks on a slope in the morning.

In fact, we have yo-yoed runs, being the only tracks on the slopes two, sometimes three times before some other skier has the temerity to put their ski grooves on our slope. Because the slopes are freshly groomed, especially combined with the limited number of skiers out on the mountain at the same time and the diversity of directions that those few intrepid skiers can go off into, we can cruise at high speed on nicely “corduroyed” snow.

Vail does a remarkable job overnight of repairing, freshening, and smoothing the slopes. During the evening and night hours, if you look up at the mountain, you will see the lights of the Sno-Cats working to prepare the slopes for the next day’s skiing. The Cats are out all night long preparing large swaths of runs for cruising the next day.

However, as the number of skiers swell, each skier carving grooves into the snow, the snow gets chopped up, deep fissures begin to develop, and eventually moguls will form. While there are many that love that type of skiing, such conditions are the antithesis of my mountain cruising. I also have to slow down, both because of the snow conditions as well as to avoid the swelling number of skiers, of varying skill level, that I now have to share the slopes with.

More from Ira Riklis:

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.)