rozboonIn backwards little New Zealand a few of the smaller hills have the rather more ridiculous evil bastard version of a rope tow. These things go up some gnarly terrain, and the ropes go really fast. Not a hope in hell of hanging on with your hands... instead you put on something that's a hybrid of a climbing harness and a bit of bondage gear and it has this industrial strength "nut-cracker" metal contraption attached to the front. You ski up to the rope at pace (so your arms don't come off when the tension comes on), half grab it with one hand then whip the nutcracker over (or under if you're a bit better at this game) the rope, then hang on for dear life.
Each "tower" has a large pulley on it that doubles as a ham-slicer at the local butchers during the off-season. If your hand goes through one with the rope... you just pray your fingers don't come off.
Sometimes just to fuck with you the rope will go slightly downhill for a bit, then vigorously uphill - but because 50% of people riding this vicious contraption knock the rope off the pulleys when their fingers get minced, sometimes the pulley holding the rope down in the valley isn't doing anything, so the rope is like 15ft up in the air and the only solution is to get 3-4 skiers literally overlapping their skis riding up so you have enough weight to get the rope back on the pulley rather than everyone just getting launched.
Or the opposite, if the rope comes off the pulley at the top of a rise and nobody puts it on for a while it saws a foot-deep slot into the snow and when you arrive at it you promptly get pulled dick-first into the slot as well, unless you break the Olympic record for weightlifting and manage to keep the rope up.
Sparknotes: New Zealand rope tows will fucking maim you
I came here to post about these
I mean, Mount Olympus is one of my favourite mountains when you combine terrain, snow and lack of other people but holy fuck there's only 3 lifts and they're all tows that want to murder you.
