Lonely liftie: Six miles from civilization

VAIL – Tim Bruner works at Vail ski resort’s most remote post, and he wouldn’t want it any other way.He’s a lift operator for Vail Mountain, but he actually works on Battle Mountain. His office is at 11,570 feet above sea level high – the highest point in the ski area – at the top of Pete’s Express Lift, Chair 39, in Blue Sky Basin.Bruner is really closer to the tiny village of Red Cliff than he is to Vail Village. Even his closest co-worker is usually more than a mile away.He has wide windows that look out to China Bowl. Ermine scurry around in the snow around him.”It’s the greatest place on Earth,” he said. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

It takes him an hour and a half to make the six-mile commute from Vail Village to his lifthouse. A powder day can add some time to his trip – but he does have first tracks in China Bowl.”First tracks all the way back here,” he said. “Every day it snows.”He and about 20 other lift operators, mechanics and dining workers ski in a group to work, starting at a little after 7 a.m. each morning. It takes Bruner five lifts – the Vista Bahn, the Mountaintop Express, the Sourdough Lift, Skyline Express and Pete’s Express – to get to work.He works for 10 hours, and usually heads back to the village shortly before 4 p.m. He brings lunch, which he cooks in a microwave in the lifthouse, and there’s an outhouse nearby in case he needs it.Each morning, he goes through a checklist to make sure the lift is running correctly. Once skiers arrive, he watches them to ensure they get off the lift safely, and keeps an eye on computer screens that monitor how the lift is running. In front of him in the lifthouse is a control panel with different-colored buttons that allow him to stop or slow the lift. Phones keep him in communications with the lower lifthouse.This is Bruner’s fourth season working for Vail, all on Pete’s lift.

“It was kind of a luck-of-the-draw kind of thing,” he said.His friends from the East Coast are envious, he said.”Every single one of my friends said, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing that. I wish I didn’t have to sit in traffic for three hours,'” he said. “I think my friends are a little jealous of what I do.”It’s great to work at the top of Pete’s lift, but often mundane, Bruner said. He gets a steady flow of powder-seekers when there’s new snow. Tourists come to ride the groomers when there isn’t new snow, he said. He sees some ermine and ravens, he said, but nothing exciting like elk, and certainly not lynx.”Nothing really exciting happens out here,” he said.There’s a bit of sorrow, too, at the lifthouse at the top of Chair 39 this year. Shirley Bower, a Vail lift operator for three decades who had worked at Pete’s lift since Blue Sky Basin opened, died unexpectedly shortly after last season ended.

He and fellow lift operators made a commemorative trail sign to hang in the lifthouse. It reads “Shirley’s Chute,” an unofficial trail near the Skree Field trail that Bower named before Blue Sky even opened.”Shirley was a big part of this lift,” Bruner said.Bruner will try to carry on Bower’s legacy. For now, he wouldn’t leave his mountaintop office for a more conventional desk job, he said.”I’ve never had a better job in my life,” he said.Staff Writer Edward Stoner can be reached at 748-2929 or estoner@vaildaily.com.