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Summit Up 1-31-11

Summit Up

Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that’s fondly replaying a conversation heard last season between father and son at Monarch Mountain, concerning the “gaper filter.”

While hiking up to Mirkwood Bowl, the youngster asked why there couldn’t be a lift to cover the several hundred feet of vertical.

Daddy responded to his dear son that the short hike was quite fundamentally and basically a “gaper filter” for the mountain – keeping fresh turns on steep terrain for those with the eagerness and stamina to repeatedly make the hike.



We smile quietly inside at the concept of such filters – generally present in some way at every mountain.

In a sadistic way, we enjoy watching skiers and riders crash and burn on Copper’s Storm King lift, and hearing the subsequent taunting that happens.



Really, any T-bar can operate similarly – as can extreme terrain gates, “no jumping”, “danger: cliff” and “ski area boundary” signs – pulling folks away from steep and deep glory terrain. We’d like to add that folks who give parking a shot despite “parking lot full” signs deserve kudos because, inevitably, they’ve timed their arrival for, say, noon, when surely at least one car has left the parking lot.

Now, the SDN does want to make the disclaimer that everyone shows their silly-skier or rider tendencies at some point.

There’s the time when we foolishly arrived at A-Basin in a two-wheel drive sedan and, yes, had to be towed out of the lot.

There’s the other time when our chains broke at Mary Jane, on the uphill drive, and, yup, we had to back all the way to the bottom to get a running start. We bought better tires after that one.

Maybe we forgot our jacket and had to pull one from the lost-and-found… yeah, it was 1980s awesome neon.

Just the other day, one well-skied staffer arrived at Copper Mountain only to find she’d forgotten her poles… and she was already donning toothpick skis from the late 1990s, having set her twin-tips aside for much-needed, heavy-duty tuning.

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And that leads us in no way to a Scum Alert!! Scum Alert!! submitted by Frisco’s Leah Baxter, who writes about a cool-sounding – which is why it was probably stolen – jacket. She writes thusly,

“I was at the Silverthorne rec center last Monday (January 24) and I put my nice lavender Spyder jacket in a locker (it was 0 degrees out). After I finished my workout and went to get my jacket, it was nowhere in sight. Not only did someone steal my coat as I looked through every single locker in the women’s locker room, but my car keys were in it as well – the kind of car keys that are electronic and cost $300 to replace.

“Fortunately, my husband came with an extra set and his ski jacket to give to me to wear home.”

Ms. Baxter is looking for information on the incident and describes the jacket as lavender with a black stripe on the sleeves. Call her at (970) 389-6367.

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May we make one small suggestion to our millions of Summit Up readers? Don’t take important or expensive clothing with you to the gym, unless you plan to lock it up. We’ve lost many a “thing” trusting our fellow residents, and sorry, many but not all are exactly trustworthy.

Gotta run. Happy Monday!


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