Angel Fire Resort/Snow shovel Race
Posted by Pete | Posted in News | Posted on 28-01-2010
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Hurry…Hurry…Hurry….Come one, come all..Bring your snow shovel and 35 bucks for the time of your life…or maybe in my case, for you life…Can you believe these people ride down the slopes of Angel Fire sitting on a snow shovel. They say you can reach speeds of 70 miles per hour or so…They say, “most” of the time people tumble harmlessly before they ever reach the bottom, but I wonder what happens the other times not included in the aforementioned, “most”. How in the world can anyone on a shovel with a handle sticking up between his or her legs, control a 70 mph shovel. They say you don’t steer with the handle, you steer with you hands out to your side. Now lets see if we can visualize this: An old man, say me, sitting on a shovel, saying goodbye to friends and family up on the top of a 12,000 foot mountain, telling them that he will “see them at the bottom”, (yeah, right) and pushes off, shovel handle between his legs, holding his feet off the snow, guiding himself down this mountain, that by the way does have trees on the side of it, and going up to 70 miles per hour. Yeah, sure, ain’t no way folks, just ain’t no way. But remember this is up near Eagle’s Nest where they take their vehicles out on the ice, with holes drilled 10 yards apart, to do their fishing. Riding snow shovels is tame stuff for some folks……You Angel Fire/Eagle Nest folks are tough….I ain’t saying about smart just yet…
Feb 5 – 6, 2010 visit www.angelfireresort.com for additional information and try clicking on to to their live web cam.
If you tried the snow shovel slide at Angel Fire, then you must know how Sonny Bono felt the day he hit the tree. Now, write a book about it, and you will be rich. Take my advice, though, and just write the book. don’t try it. You might end up like Sonny Bono.
Angel Fire, though, is a great place. I have many fond memories of the Angel Fire Ski Range in the late Sixties when the ski range was pristine with few condos and mostly trailers. My fondest memories are set in the summer when the wild antelope roamed, and there was no snow. I was never much of a skier, much less a snow shovel rider. My fondest memories concerned helping my friends bury a water line to their trailer in almost solid rock. After working all day with picks and shovels to get a ditch bearly 10 inches deep, my friend saw a backhoe across the hollow. After a 15-minute trip down to hire this guy, it was a relief to see a six-foot ditch completed in just about 30 minutes. Isn’t modern technology wonderful, and this was 1966?
Digging a ditch in Angel Fire would scare me. A friend had a cabin up there. Deer were everywhere…And a few bear…Nice place though..
Gee whiz! I never saw any bear. I did see a lot of deer though. When I wrote “where the antelope roam”, I was referring to the deer. I was assuming that they are the same, but I am not really sure.
The burial of that water line was a tough assignment for a lady (a civilian) with whom I worked at the Goat Farm on KAFB and a chemist. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I didn’t know that water lines in that particular area in the mountains had to be buried at least six feet to keep them from freezing. Dad only buried his bearly six inches. I certainly didn’t realize that the mountain was made essentially of solid rock. Boy! How stupid one can be in one’s youth. I had just graduated from helping Woodrow cut and hawl cordwood for paper and various other jobs around his sawmill. I figured that it couldn’t be any worse than that. But it was. The weather was rather warm too, but not sticky warm like Alabama. It was a relief, though, when Bill (Lemmon) drove up with the guy with the backhoe that afternoon. I immediately wondered if this gizmo could really dig a ditch through this rock. I didn’t have to wonder for long because, in 30 minutes, there was a nice six-foot ditch where our 10-inch one had been. It turned into a nice free weekend vacation for a GI after all because, when we got up the next morning (Sunday) we saw the hollow down below practically covered with deer of all ages and sizes, at least 10 or 12. I don’t remember the exact number now, but it was the most deer that I had ever seen at the same time.
Bill and Gerry Lemmon later built a condo on that property which they sold just last year because they were getting too old to use it and to negotiate the stairs. They wrote that it sold so fast that they were barely able to get all their things out of it before the new owners acquired ownership.
As you can see, I have some fond, non-skiing, memories of Angel Fire.
Deer, elk and bear all call that area home. We had some meeting up there and our entertainment some nights were going out to the trash cans, sitting in our cars and watching Momma Bear and baby bears climbing on and in the dumsters searching for food. Yes, its nice country up that way, colder than crap, but nice….