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.
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.
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