Day Fifty-Six: Snow Tubing

Snow tubing has always been one of those activities that looked like a pretty good time to me. What's not to like? You go down a giant, snow-covered hill in a canvas-covered tube, and you don't even have to drag your vessel (or your person) up the hill to do it again. You get hitched to a wire that drags you and your tube up the hill to the top. But unfortunately, like most things, tubing is much more fun and exciting in theory than in actuality. I learned this last night.

Upon arrival, we stuck those annoying lift tags onto our zippers, and trudged to the back end of the resort to the tubing lift. The air was clean, crisp, and beautiful, and the lights sparkled off the snow and ice in the dark evening. The hill looked steep and exciting, and the mountain was sparsely littered with skiiers and snowboarders.

And then we saw the line for tubing.

A line snaked around the back of the hill, about fifty feet back. It didn't look that bad, but it moved incredibly slowly. It is absolutely not a good activity to engage in by yourself -- bring a friend to talk to for the half hour of time you're in line waiting to be hitched to your inner tube. As we chatted and finally reached out destination, a long-haired, efficient man in a snow hat lifted a tube from a self-made chute that led down from the bottom of the track above us, hurled it in front of me, and waited for me to sit. Then he waited for a hook to whirl by on the line and hitched my tow line to it, and I whizzed steadily up the hill backwards. The noise from below faded away, and all I heard was the sound of tubes whizzing down the track, and the canvas under my butt scraping against the ice and making my bottom end really, really cold.

After about a one-minute ride, the tube plopped and whirled into a landing, where I got up and schlepped it a couple of feet to the top of the track. It looked a lot steeper up high than it did from below. As we waited, a friendly man in a ridiculous snow hat asked, "has everyone here gone down already?". "No!!," we yelled, anxious for a little instruction. He promptly instructed us to lay with our face first , so our least-repairable body part would of course be the first to sustain any damage in case of an impact, and explained that in order to slow ourselves down, to dig our toes into the icy snow the entire way, so we would stop before hitting the inflatable barrier at the end. This would be our only defense against hurling off the edge of the raised track, off a twenty-foot high cliff onto the snow below.

Simple, right?

Actually, it wasn't that bad. It was, in fact, really effing fun. After the initial fear subsided quickly and I actually realized I COULD slow myself down a considerable amount, it was easy. Except, of course, when I hit one or many of the numerous bumps and potholes that had appeared on the track. Fortunately, though, I sustained no injuries. One of my tube-mates fell off her tube, but I'm really honestly not sure at all how she managed it. In one swift minute, I was at the bottom of the hill, walked down some steps, and got back in line. And I started the whole process again, which had taken about forty-five minutes.

My toes were freezing.

My verdict on the activity is that you have to be pretty unbothered by being cold to stay long enough to get in enough trips down the hill to make the money worth it. Save yourself the money, buy a snow tube, find a big hill, and go down that way. It's a lot easier.