T bars

Love them or loath them?  I am not sure myself that they are really a Marmite moment at all; they are neither good nor bad, they just exist.

They are outdated of course and around here there are only a couple left.  To have any at all is close to miraculous.   In the upmarket resorts, the T bar (or its single seater equivalent, the Poma) is long gone more or less completely.  In Courchevel, the main lifts are six or eight seaters, with footrests, head restraints and cocktail cabinets.  Okay, I made part of that up, there are not any head restraints.

So the humble T bar, where you have your feet on the ground and on which you might be struggling for a bit of space with your over-sized fellow passenger, belongs most definitely to a simpler past.

We always say T bars serve a purpose still.  Namely, when the wind blows, they stay open.  However, when the foehn blew last week, the Tschuggen T bar closed for a while. I don’t think it was a strategic decision. The top of the T bar is quite exposed and it was simply too windy. So maybe soon we will say goodbye to the last of the surface lifts.  If that happens, I hope we have new lifts instead.  The last thing we need is a few gaps in the infrastructure.

Today ran contrary to the norm, in that it started grey and became sunny.  The cable car this morning was full, but as the day improved, the mountain became quieter.  Hard to argue with really.

A mainly sunny, quiet day brought 10,751 vertical metres in 23 lift rides.