1960s and 70s

In the early days of skiing riding the chair lifts took up a large portion of your day. Back then only two people, and sometimes only one, rode in each chair. The chairs were also spread a good distance apart from one-another as were the towers that held the cable and chairs above the ground. The speed of the chair lifts was a constant “slow” and that gave many of the kids way too much time to sit around and be up to “no good” while waiting for their arrival to the top.

One of the more strictly enforced rules when riding a chair was that the riders were forbidden to bounce the chairs, but we did it anyhow. The fun of it was to get the chairs ahead of you to bounce as much as possible and then watch the mayhem ensue as they approached the next tower. The closer they got to the tower the faster and more violently they would bounce up to the point the chair reached the first guide wheel and then it would abruptly stop bouncing. As a passenger in the bouncing chairs it was your job to hold on for dear life or risk being thrown out of the chair and plummeting to the ground below.

In the mid-1960s with the “hippy” era in full swing Aspen had its fair share of the “peace loving, pot smoking” individuals, many of which were hard-working adults most of the time but loved to get high smoking pot on their off hours. These same individuals were avid skiers and chose to smoke their wackie-tobackie while enjoying the great outdoors. They were an easy target…

Back to chair bouncing. It was no fun anymore to try to bounce your friends in the chairs ahead of you as they were expecting it and always got even on the next trip up the mountain. But we had new victims in the form of our local and visiting Potheads and they made it fun. We would intentionally spread out in the lift lines in order to put some potheads in the chairs ahead of us. The bouncing worked best in the gaps between towers that were the biggest and those were usually somewhere in the middle of the ride up. Unprepared for what was about to strike they continued their smoking ways while riding to the top. Just as soon as our chair cleared the tower we would start the process to get the chairs bouncing, first they would ride up and down in big, smooth arcs and our task was to make the arcs as big as possible. Once accomplished we would sit back and watch as the chair ahead of us approached the tower and began to bounce violently, the occupants just now realizing that they needed to hold on tight, not an easy task for someone high as a kite. The closer it got to the tower the more we laughed at the sheer terror of the potheads ahead of us as they experienced Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

The beauty of being high on pot is that you also tend to be very forgetful which gave us ample time to set them up for the next tower and another wild ride. On some occasions they would wait for us at the top and let us know how they really felt but often enough they did not realize it was us causing the problem in the first place.

We never did cause any of them to fall out of the chair but many came close and even more avoided riding that particular chair lift the rest of the day, blaming their predicament on the lift itself.

On one occasion we did actually meet with more success than we ever intended. On that particular ride the chair ahead of us was empty and we quickly learned that the seat, which folds up at night to keep it from icing up or collecting snow would bounce up and down along with the chair and even fold up if done just right. We had a new game when there were no human victims ahead of us. On that day, much to our surprise the seat not only folded up but actually fell off the chair frame and plummeted to earth. These seats were covered in nylon and this one landed nylon side down and immediately began sliding down hill. Much to our surprise the seat picked up speed and eventually took out a skier, a pothead none-the-less… Game over!