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gear of the week

Gear of the Week | T-bar lift

A tribute to an endangered species

by Tobias Kurzeder 01/17/2015
They are available as platter lifts, finger-eating rope tows (New Zealand specialty, see below) or as a pretty perfect T-bar or anchor lift. I've actually always liked drag lifts. Unfortunately, they are becoming increasingly rare, at least in the Alps. Reason enough, therefore, to award this hardly improvable ascent aid (which is probably the very reason why they are being replaced) with the Gear of the Week category.

For me, drag lifts are still almost unrivaled today. What could be nicer than being almost alone on a long lift in the powder during a snowstorm, with visibility only 10 bars away? For me, it's much more meditative than yoga. And because T-bar lifts can be operated in any weather, they are my favorite lifts - unless there is no snow...

The almost infallible Wikipedia encyclopedia dates the first T-bar lift to 1907; the date is probably correct, even if that is actually beside the point. And of course, the first T-bar lift was built in, we all know it already: - Austria, in beautiful Vorarlberg. However, the first "modern" T-bar lifts with self-retracting stirrups were put into operation in Switzerland from around the mid-1930s. Especially in the period after the Second World War, hundreds, if not thousands of T-bar lifts were built in the Alps, most of them with T-shaped anchors. And some of them are still running today, some of them still with stinky diesel engines. An aberration that I still find incomprehensible, and one that is particularly widespread in France (where some things are known to be seen differently, but that's another story), are the (pole) platform lifts. Especially as an early snowboarder, I learned to fear them: thanks to their massive suspension, the mounting poles swing back and forth when you get on - hardly controllable for sideways riders: more than once they banged against my skull. Of course, you still rode without a helmet back then ...

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But much worse, and therefore almost good again, are the Nutcracker or Nutcracker lifts, which are mainly found in the private club ski areas of New Zealand. No, you're probably thinking of the wrong thing. They are so called because you are pulled up the mountain on a kind of wide leather belt (experts use a climbing harness, which is much more comfortable). The rope runs - at an impressive Doppelmayer speed - at about hip height. As this rope also runs over pulleys, you clamp yourself to the rope with a nutcracker-like clamping device on your harness and can be pulled up the mountain at breakneck speed. Low-tech, but it works. In addition to the serious risk of fingers being severed and the first glove disintegrating after just three or four descents, this construction, if you have it on your back as a snowboarder, is a challenge that demands everything from your riding technique. Well, if you're good at it, you can ride switch. But what am I going on about: there are hardly any snowboarders left anyway, and even I have been skiing again for a long time.

Some of my favorite drag lifts are in the Black Forest at home. Until a few years ago, there was an impressively steep one there. Naturally on a north-facing slope that was icy for 90 percent of the winter, through a steep forest aisle. Inexperienced skiers would repeatedly hurtle down the several hundred meters in altitude to the lift cabin. In order to avoid a wild scramble with the uphill skiers, the lifties usually spent hours digging a nice sideways slope into the track by hand. Although this reduced the number of cones enormously, hundreds of snowboarders, who were still common back then, failed. Of course, today there is an ultra-modern chairlift in the same place ...

And while I'm on the subject of progress bashing, one of my favorite topics: the West is going down with ass heating in chairlifts, and with Pegida. But that's a whole other story ...

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