Where to Ski And Snowboard -

Fill those chairs

12th August 2009, by Chris Gill

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North America 1 - Europe 0

Four, four, five, two, four, three, five, three, four, six - wow! No, it’s not a winning lottery number, or the code that will get you into my Swiss bank deposit box. I’m standing in the queue for a six-seat chair-lift in the French Alps. I’ve been here five minutes - not a long time as lift queues go, especially for those of us intimately familiar with some of the all-time greats of Alpine lift queues (Kitzbuhel, Davos, St Anton, Meribel-Mottaret, Verbier), but long enough for the first signs of frustration to develop. I’m gritting my teeth, and counting.
I’m counting the number of people on each chair as it swings away from the queue. Roughly speaking, as you’ll have worked out by now, the six-seat sofas are carrying an average of four people each. Were they carrying an average of six, I reflect, they could shift the existing queue much more quickly. What’s more, in the last hour the lift could have moved an additional 1,000 people - so the queue (of about 200, I reckon) would not have formed in the first place. I’d have swooped down to the lift station and straight on to a chair.

Chair etiquette

Filling chairs isn’t rocket science. Why don’t lift companies make it happen? Why will lift companies throughout the Alps calmly install new, more powerful lifts year after year, instead of taking the simple step of making 100% use of their existing ones? Maybe it’s because Messrs Pomagalski, Leitner and von Roll give away free upgrades, but I doubt it. Serious money is spent on these installations every year, and a serious proportion of it is money down the drain.
Whether you share my frustration probably depends mainly on whether you have spent any time in North American resorts. If you have, you’ll be aware that North Americans fill their chairs (and their gondolas, though they don’t have many of those to fill) with religious zeal.
They start with certain advantages, of course. Continental Europeans deal with queues by denial that they exist -if it’s physically possible, they walk to the front of them. Our colonial cousins, though, share the British understanding of queues and the need to keep them short. They have the maturity to resist the temptation to let the chair ahead go up half-empty. (This is compounded by the fact that - meurde, alors! - they actually like talking to strangers on chair-lifts, so sharing a chair isn’t so much a matter of sacrificing privacy as creating a welcome chance of an insider tip or a hot date.)
But it isn’t simply down to attitude - it’s also down to organisation. First, there are the physical queuing arrangements. You don’t get the simple rope funnel that usually suffices in the Alps: if there is any prospect of a queue forming, you get highly organised systems of rope channels designed to get you shuffling forward in suitably sized groups.
Next, there is the lift-line-marshal, whose job is to make sure the group shuffling forward to take the next chair are (a) entitled to shuffle, and not just muscling their way forward, and (b) composed of the right number of people. If the group is down on numbers, the marshal turns to the final component in the system - the singles line. There may be lifts in North America without one, but the singles line is pretty much standard issue: a one-person-at-a-time queue, in parallel with the main queue, so that groups that don’t quite fill a chair have a ready supply of bodies to make up the numbers. It’s an essential part of the chair-filling process.

Going solo?

Singles lines started to appear in the Alps several years ago, particularly in resorts that like to think they can compete globally (ie attract American cash). They should be universal, obviously. But bunging in singles lines isn’t enough - you also have to make them work. The problem is, only North Americans and Brits (well, Brits who have been to North America) have any idea how to use them.
The problem is not a shortage of people to populate the singles line - after all, there are plenty of widely travelled Brits ready to ditch their partners to get back up the hill without delay. The problem is the guys in the main queue. To them, the singles line is a foreign concept in more ways than one.
Picture the scene: Hercules Bourgeois plus wife Madeleine and daughter Nicole are just sliding forward into position, ready to sprawl across all four spaces on the quad chair when, to their genuine astonishment, our man Henry slips in from left field to join them. At best, Henry can expect Gallic froideur; often, intimidating Gallic abuse; at worst, physical repulsion from the chair.
So far, I haven’t seen a singles line attached to an Alpine gondola, but once you get within wriggling distance of the front of the queue, you can always save a minute or two by wandering along the departure platform until you find a cabin that’s about to shoot out of the station with theoretical space to spare. Chuck your skis in the rack and launch yourself past the closing door, et voila! - you and the famille Bourgeois are united again.
The real challenge is to see if an extravagantly good-humoured charm offensive in schoolboy French can have them all smiling before you get to the top. If in the course of this diatribe you can get across the concept of a singles line, you’ll have done your bit for the campaign.

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