Stephen Koch

Axl night skiing at Snow King Mountain.

This past weekend my son, Axl, and I skied on Saturday evening at the King (Snow King Mountain). It was our first night runs together, at least of the skiing kind. We alternated skiing with swinging on the swing set at the base. I narrowly missed stepping in a dog dukie left by a woman and her golden retriever about 5 p.m.

Axl and I started the evening with a run on the Cougar chair, where Blaize Oswald, 7 years old, fell from about 40′ up on December 30, 2009. The following information about the incident is from the Jackson Hole Ski Club’s website:

“Today (Dec. 30, 2009) at the Holiday Camp Blaize Oswald, age seven, fell from the Cougar Chairlift at the Snow King Resort between Towers One and Two. Ski Patrol responded quickly and sent Blaize to St. John’s Medical Center where he received a full CT scan. The test showed minor bleeding on his brain and a partially ruptured lung.”

Axl swinging at Snow King.

Blaize is currently doing well and according to his mother, Leya Ozwald, “very excited” to get on his skis again soon. There are no protection bars on the Cougar chair, which, as a father of a young child who enjoys  taking skiing on the mountain, sucks. The bar is not a guarantee that shit won’t go bad. From my personal experience, when a safety bar is 1) Low, like on the Casper Chair at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, or 2) have the arms that come down from the bar which touch the chair as on the Teewinot lift at Jackson Hole, which you can situate in between the small child’s legs (or adult legs if not 3 or less are on the quad chair) that offers greater security (for child and for parent!).

The lift to the summit of Snow King, Exhibition, has a safety bar, I believe, every fourth chair. It is surprising that the folks at Snow King don’t put in safety bars on all the chairs on Exhibition, at least during the Hill Climb. During the Hill Climb, and throughout the year, Non-skiers/boarders are required to use only the chairs with safety bars. During the annual Hill Climb, this causes a huge backup of people wanting to ride the lift. If there were bars on all the chairs the wait time would be much less, and safety arguably increased. In addition, I would think this action would increase revenue for the mountain. I don’t know how much a safety bar costs, but it is a fairly simple device with minimal hardware required to install, taking only a few minutes for each chair. Snow King can hire Lawrence Bennett, artist and metal worker with a shop at the base of the mountain, to make custom ones for them, if they don’t have a line on some. I bet there are used ones that can be bought from a ski area that doesn’t use them because they went out of business or upgraded their double chair to a triple or quad. Hopefully monetary gain would follow doing the right thing, which in my opinion is to keep the kids and adults using the lifts at Snow King, our beloved town hill, safer. OK…what the hell is safer? Well we can debate that, but to me it is having bars on the Cougar lift so that I don’t have to hold my son or clip him in to the lift with a cord to prevent him pitching off and getting hurt or killed while out trying to have a good time.

On Sunday Axl and I were at Jackson Hole for the day where we ripped the animal trails off of Teewinot Lift and then ventured up to Casper and over to Thunder. I am learning the easiest ways down from all the lifts as I go out with Axl these early days of his skiing. Giradelli larger milk chocolate chips and GU Chomps got us through the day. I heard about using a ski pole to help slow Axl down but have not yet tried it. I have been skiing without poles and grabbing him and carrying him like a football over the steep sections, which unfortunately interrupt many of the cat tracks, at least for enough time to not have it be a smooth, super easy ride down from the Thunder, the Gondola (getting onto Amphitheater for a brief moment until one can cut east to Nez Perce is steep and challenging) and even Casper (below the restaurant to the cat track). This being said, there may be some easier ways which I haven’t learned yet and hopefully won’t have to as Axl is getting stronger and ripping more every time out!

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Enjoy!