A classic gets a second life.
That slow sway, rocked like a baby in a cradle. Sloshing from side to side in the wind, you’d bump shoulders with a stranger, a friend, or the one you hoped to sway into the night with. You’d huddle for warmth; you’d share a nip, a drag, a puff and a plan. You’d lean on that bar till it left a crease in your sleeves. You were at one with that lean–a Bukowski barfly in your private locale, searching for wisdom with every kickity-klack of cable on wheel.
The romance of the chairlift is gone. Conveyor-belt-fed eight-packs shoot you into the breach like a commodified product ready to be boxed up and shipped. They have all the soul of an Amazon sorting facility. Whisked skyward, gliding over the snow and the crowds, they brim with efficacy.
Most of my life, I’ve had bruises behind my knees, a dash of colour nesting in the sly gap above the top of my calves. They would form in late autumn and stretch into spring. These fists of midnight purple were not the product of accident or injury, but the result of hundreds of chairlift rides. The chair would round the bull-wheel and, despite the courteous bump from the lifty, slam into the back of my legs, inevitably, time after time, run after run, day after day.
These creaky fixed-grip chairs inched up icy slopes from Wānaka to Whistler and everywhere in between. They were cold, they stopped too much, broke down too often and the comfort they provided was down to your clothing choices and how many pies you had at lunch. They were awful. They were wonderful.
Towering above Tāhuna Queenstown, The Remarkables opened for business in 1985. For generations, adventurers had ventured from the lake to the summit to ski and to climb, but with the ski field came chairlifts that stitched up the terrain. One of the first was the Shadow Basin lift. Snaking towards the horizon on the flank of Double Cone, it delivered skiers and, eventually, snowboarders high into the alpine. For thirty-three years, it ran. Thousands of days, hundreds of thousands of laps.
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It was old, and it was slow. Eventually, progress caught up. The desire to deliver a quality customer experience trumped history, and a multimillion-dollar replacement was commissioned—a six-seater monstrosity of cut glass, architectural steel and precision engineering. Over the months of summer 2023-2024, the old Shadow Basin chair was ripped from the ground and replaced. The ride time was halved from eight minutes to four.
As soon as the new lift was announced, I had a hunch. I knew the original Shadow Basin lift was destined for the scrap yard, and the old chairs would need a new home. I called, cap in hand and asked what the plan was for the retired chairs. It turned out that for the price of a few lift tickets, one of them could be mine.
I hit ‘Buy Now’, and before I could figure out what to do with a ski lift chair, how to get it home, or where to even put it, I was told to come and get it. We loaded it into a mate’s ute and trundled across Queenstown to home. We dumped it in the gravel beside my garage, and I started to hatch a plan.
It was always going to live in the garden, but in what form? My first thought was to build a giant frame for it and create a swinging seat. That idea got lost in logistical headaches when I started doing the back-of-the-envelope math of how much steel it would take, how deep the hole for the concrete would be, and the scale of the infrastructure to hold a swing that weighs more than 100 kilograms without anyone on it.
In the end, it was the simplest idea that won. A stationary garden bench, utilising the safety bar to form the frame it sits on. It wasn’t totally my idea; the folks up at Remarks had done the same with theirs in the on-hill Ice Bar. I called up a welder mate and, for a box of barley, it was transformed.
I wasn’t done though. The chair was clad in plastic slats that may have been great at withstanding decades of sun, wind and snow, but did nothing for comfort or aesthetics. Replacing them all with hardwood was a meditative process. Much like riding the old chair, it took time to get to the destination.
Settled on our Shadow Basin chair, sipping my morning coffee, I think back to its life. How many people have sat here? Who braced themselves against the wind, who turned their faces to the spring sunshine, who caught snow flurries on their tongues so they melted into a blizzard of ahh’s? What emotions did they carry? The excitement for powder, the trepidation of trying a new sport, a rush of love as the person beside them smiled back—friendship, romance, whanau, solitude, comradeship, achievement and so much more.
I’m just the custodian of this piece of history, one made of steel, wood and memory. The chair has started a new chapter, and those of us who sit here will do as we always have, gaze to the mountains filled with dreams.
Words & photos: Scott Kennedy
