Backsliding on the Slopes

In the days when most Americans thought a lift was a ride and schuss meant "Be quiet," the country's few ski slopes were as warm and friendly as the air was cold and forbidding.

Skiers considered themselves blood brothers, shared racing wax and car racks, casually draped parkas over pine boughs by the trail, and stacked their skis in the nearest snowdrift. Today, all that has changed. With 4,000,000 enthusiasts crowding into 1,200 ski areas, the sport's open-hearth atmosphere has taken on a decided chill.

Losing Their Heads. Many of the sport's new "diesel set" (those who ar rive by bus) are untutored novices whom experienced skiers drive for hours to avoid. The newcomers elbow their way into lift lines, ignore ski-patrol warnings,, snowplow into middle-aged ladies. If their etiquette is lamentable on the slopes, their ethics at the bottom are worse. "Anything gets stolen around here that's not tied down," says Alex Gushing, developer of Squaw Valley.

"Bear and beaver skins on the lodge's walls have been stolen several times.

They just rip them off, even if they are nailed down."

On a recent afternoon at Killington, Vt., 16 pairs of skis disappeared within two hours. At a resort in the Adirondacks, so many people complained about lost skis that two New York-bound buses were stopped and searched; ten pairs of stolen skis were recovered.

Head Skis, which circulates a list of the "hot" serial numbers to all its dealers, claims that in the past three years 10,000 people have lost their Heads.

Gloves vanish off radiators, goggles disappear from snack-bar counters, boots are bootlegged before they have dried out, lift passes are torn right off par kas. Poles are stolen so often that skiers drag them to restaurants and rest rooms, hide them under the bed at night.

To combat the new low mountain morality, ski areas are fighting back. Bogus Basin, Idaho, now hires off-duty deputy sheriffs to patrol the piste in "plain clothes," passes out notices to advertise the fact. Squaw Valley has put up posters offering $100 reward to those who can catch a thief. And resorts as chic and cher as Vail, Colo., have been forced to install racks that lock skis in place for 250.

To make lift passes harder to pull off, resorts are stapling them four or five times onto a parka's zipper loop; by the time a light-fingered felon gets one off, all he has left is confetti.

Caught at the Pass. Innocent skiers have also developed some defensive ploys. On the lodge walls at Stowe, Vt., they crayon huge messages saying "New Yorkers, go home." Even more direct --and effective--is the practice of splitting up pairs of skis, placing them hundreds of feet apart. Sometimes husbands and wives will leave a his-her pair on one side of the lodge, their mates mated off on the other, and stomp off to have a carefree lunch. But even that is not infallible. Recently a racer at Squaw Valley stashed his Head Competitor skis in widely separated locations, only to find when he returned that they had been replaced with a matching pair of gouged wooden ones.

If all else fails, the irate skier has no choice but to play "Head them off at the pass." When a vacationer at Treasure Mountain Resort, Utah, discovered that his skis had been swiped while he was buying a Chap Stick, he hopped into his car, took a short cut to the spot where the ski road meets the highway. As each car stopped for the traffic, he counted the number of skis on top, paired them off with the passengers until he found a car with one too many pair of skis. He was back on the slopes for a final run before his teen-age robbers had warmed up in the cooler.

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