More about skiing

At around 4:00 on Saturday I had enough skiing for the day and we found ourselves about halfway down the mountain. Five of us started the day together because we wanted to keep it relatively easy. It was a great idea to have at least one buddy because there were so few people there that if you had a problem, nobody would ever find you and also, I didn’t see many ski patrol people. Since we had to buy insurance, I suspect these ski patrollers don’t go out looking for work. (I didn’t have my cell phone with me either – not that I would have known what number to call and what to say!)

Just before lunch, we lost one of the people in our group after he fell a few times and we didn’t know it. (we found him later) So when Paul and I decided to split from the other two and take a lift down to the bottom, Catherine was already feeling guilty about leaving Brian behind. So she said to us.... ”We will watch you go down on the lift before we ski down.” I thought it was strange... we had been getting in gondola lifts (cabines) all day long. It was about 4:15 at this point and the lifts were supposed to close at 4:30 so we were good to go. We entered the deserted lift area, climbed in, and waved to them as we passed by and then they skied down.

We were enjoying the view until at about 100 yards out, the lift stopped. Just stopped. And we just dangled above the snow. I asked Paul the time.. 4:24 ....French time.

French time is a mystery to me. I think a given time is just a ‘suggestion’. So you can imagine my thoughts... Did they decide to stop the lifts 6 minutes early and go home? There weren’t many people skiing anyway. That's probably it!

OK... so here we are... we are going to spend the night here. We may freeze to death. We have no cell phone. I have some walnuts in my pocket so we won’t starve. Maybe tomorrow, if we are still alive, someone will find us.

Paul (former Safety Director at a plant) said... surely they have some shutdown procedure. They must have a safety plan. They have to do a final check each day, don’t they?

My answer... We are in France! No OSHA here.

I don’t know how long we were there, maybe 10 minutes. It seemed like an eternity. Finally, it started to move, but only a few more yards. It stopped again... then moved slowly forward... at some point we saw someone in a cabine on the other side, going up so we figured that we would not be the only ones to freeze to death. It picked up speed... and finally reached the bottom and I was never so happy to be back on the ground!