After skiing down yet another perfectly groomed piste, you skid to the bottom of the slope and breeze onto the chairlift with hardly any queue. In a jiffy you're headed up the mountain again, the sun shining and fresh powder below... time for a selfie! You rummage around in your pocket and extract your mobile phone but your fingers are a little cold and your grip slips... down goes your phone into the snow! How on earth are you going to get that back (and in what condition)? We've all been there, and it's not fun. Here are 8 things we've dropped from the lift at some point or another. How many can you tick off?
It's a brilliant bluebird day and the mountain peaks are glistening in the distance. How can you resist taking a photo? And while you're at it, why not snap a selfie, and maybe even a group shot? But this is where you've crossed the line. At the very moment you're stretching out your arm to capture a group shot with everybody in it, your phone slips through your fingers and sails down into the white powder snow. Hope you remembered to get travel insurance!
The slopes are perfect today and there's no sense wasting precious skiing time on a meal, so you've packed yourself some cereal bars and a plastic-wrapped sandwich and you'll eat on the lift. Well lads, this strategy works on the gondola but not so much on a chairlift...
The sun is shining full-blast today and you've been good and remembered to keep reapplying sunscreen to avoid the dreaded goggle tan. You've successfully managed to apply sunscreen to your face and you're just popping the lid back on the tube... but your fingers are slimy and oops, there goes the sunscreen bottle.
Ski poles are a common sight in under chairlifts, having been dropped time and again by unlucky skiers. If you think about it, it's actually amazing more people don't drop their ski poles when riding the lift. Whether you're trying to take a selfie, apply sunscreen, grab a bite to eat or even just sit semi-comfortably without having to clutch your poles tightly in front of you, ski poles are just downright inconvenient things to carry all the way up the mountain in a full chair. Don't try to tell us you've never dropped a pole before.
Today's goggles usually clip to the back of your helmet, but it wasn't so long ago that they just had to sit over top your beanie. In those days, it sufficed to adjust your beanie or take off your goggles for just a moment to apply your sunscreen and bam, your goggles were looking up at you from the snowbank below. Ski fast and you might get to them before somebody else does!
You may sneer at those people who secure their mittens or gloves to their hands with an elastic band, but they've probably learned from harsh experience that it's the only way. Mittens are one of the most common things to drop from the lift, because you have to take them off to do virtually anything. What a dumb invention.
Lip balm is perhaps one of the few things that you could manage with your mittens still on. It doesn't take that much dexterity to apply lip balm to chapped lips, right? Wrong. As you're fumbling around, the tiny little tube is already plummeting down into the snow below. And that's one thing that you'll definitely never be able to find.
Hopefully you've never actually fallen off a lift when it's already on the way up the mountain - if you have and you're still reading this, massive respect to you. But who among us hasn't stumbled when trying to board or disembark from a lift? If this happens to you this winter, take heart in knowing that even the best skiers and snowboarders have had to endure the embarrassment of having everybody watch as you faceplant in front of the lift attendant.
Born and raised in the ski paradise of Vancouver, Canada, I learned to ski before I can remember, balancing precariously on my parents’ skis as they sailed down the hill. I started snowboarding in my teens and am now delighted to be exploring everything Europe’s ski scene has to offer!
