With These Tips Beginner Skiers Can Have a Lot of Fun

Here are a few simple tips for beginner snow skiers. Use the sharp side edges of the skis to guide you. Position your skis like a snowplow: the tips should be close together and the heels far apart. As you go down the hill lean to the outside of the intended turn. Again, use your edges. To continue in a straight line, while in the snowplow position, just equalize your weight between the skis. To stop, simply spread your heels further apart.

Once you learn to ride the lifts, the rest is easy

Right away, I became fearful of the T-Bar. Why do the novice slopes seem to have lifts that require expert skill? The T-Bar is an arrangement that pulls the skier along a path by a bar. The middle of the bar has a stem extending from it to form a T. The self-retracting reels are spaced along the cable so that the unoccupied bars hang along a rotating bicycle chain between the pulleys at the top and the bottom of the slope.

How to handle the ride up the hill.

It seems easy enough. Two people ski over to where the attendant is. They line up, so they are pointing towards the uphill path, and wait for the attendant to grab the overhead T-Bar. He will hand it to one of you while the cable is reeling out of the spool overhead. There are about 5 seconds to place the bar just across your lower butts, with the rod that forms the stem of the T placed between the two of you. That is when both of you blast off at the seemingly Ludicrous speed of a slow bicycle along a path that seemed to be narrower than some snowboards.

Common errors 

The biggest mistake here is that some people think that they can sit on the T-Bar. This is the reason why most of the calamities are at the starting point. This usually leads to the bar rotating in an ark towards the ground where the skier lands but the T-bar does not stop. It follows along the back of the skier's legs, hooks the skis like a meat cleaver and drags the hapless skier along the path. Bound by some code, the attendants must stop the lift. Otherwise, the skier's body will smudge the nifty ruts that guide the skis up the hill.

Skiing is easy; the lifts are hard. Seriously, the attendants have seen it all. Just tell them that you are new to this, and they will explain everything much better than I did.