Time wasted on lifts while skiing…

If you ski a lot, are at least an advanced skier, you soon realize that there’s often more time spent riding lift than actually skiing. 

Based on my own observations, the time I spend on lifts is between two-third to three-quarter of my total time spent on the mountain, depending on the speed of the lift, without accounting for any lift stoppage, waiting in line, food or bathroom stops. 

At the end of the outing, all this “dead-time” can literally play havoc on one’s actual skiing time. So when skiers spends five hours on the mountain, this might leave them with only one to two hours of actual gliding down the slopes. 

With so much time left sitting on a chairlift, what can we do is try to fill up that dead-time, fumble with our smartphone, make sure we get a decent signal, watch for the top station coming on too fast, drop a glove or a pole in the process, and get even more aggravated…

Short of hiring a helicopter service at the risk of blowing up one’s carbon footprint, skiing remains a pretty inefficient way to recreate, at least for someone like me who values time so much!