Word: patroled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...night the four of us dined together in Jim's cabin, drank wine, ate peanuts and watched the pine and spruce wood fire while we ran our bare feet through the deep shag rug. Jim and Mary Lyn did most of the talking. They talked mainly about the Junior Patrol, to which they had both belonged, and about some of the people on it: Peter Fader, who saved a man's life once, Joe Ward, the hottest skier at Winter Park, and Bob Patterson, the patrol leader before Jim, Jim's best friend on the patrol, and Mary...
Some of them were on the junior ski patrol at Winter Park, and when Jim heard about patrolling and its responsibilities--watching for fallen skiers, providing first aid, packing the snow on unskied runs so they could be opened, and performing a painstaking "sweep" at day's end to make sure no one was hurt or lost on the mountain--he knew he wanted to join, too. He was 13 at the time; the minimum age for junior patrolmen...
...years later, a sophomore in high school, Jim had enough confidence in his skiing to attempt to join the patrol. "I wanted it so bad I could taste it," he said, "and I knew they would only take 15 people." After passing an endurance test, he took a written exam on first aid and ski patrol regulations, and passed with the second highest score. This qualified him for the skiing test: Jim had to demonstrate every technique of skiing, from stem christie to parallel to snowplow on a very steep slope, and ski every kind of snow--packed, powder...
...first, the patrol appealed to Jim because of its image. "I liked being the guy on the hill who knew what he was doing. I liked giving people first aid. But I was always going in for dramatic things, and that was dramatic work," he says. So was the Alpine Rescue Team, a rock-climber rescue group Jim joined in the spring of his sophomore year. "It was really neat stuff. Neat equipment to work with, and it's really slick to pull someone off the rock. It's a gas to be hanging out there, with your ass over...
Weekends were great. Saturday morning Jim and some of the other patrollers would drive up to Winter Park in Jim's jeep. There was real incentive not to be late; the last two arrivals had to sweep and mop the patrol room floor. They spent the day skiing with friends, free. "We had to wait in lift lines unless we skied with a senior patrolman, then we could cut the lift lines. The way to do that was to start skiing with a real foxy looking female junior. Then you'd get one of the 50-year-old seniors whose...