Depends on the lift, but yeah extra weight on the bullwheel causes excess wear and with the older ones it can really fling you off to the side during that turn. Saw a guy try to ride the bullwheel on a dinosaur of a fixie and it chucked him out of the chair before I could get it stopped.
For the chairs that’s more of a summer thing, as the ramp isn’t something you should be walking on and it’s not great for the lift to have weight on the chair while it’s going around the wheel up top. The gondola style lifts (enclosed cabin) you can absolutely do that just to hit the bar at the top or whatever, hell, most resorts will give you a cheaper ticket price if that’s all you plan on doing.
Depends on the lift and downloading a guest on most chairs is real annoying for everybody involved, including the people waiting in line at the bottom. On a gondola it’s of course trivial. If you do manage to get yourself stuck somewhere you can’t download from that’s more of a patrol problem than anything ops can help you with.
Is it a thing at ski places to just ride the ski lifts up and down? I have no desire to ski ever, but I’ve always wanted to try one of those things.
You’re not really supposed to ride them around the wheel at the end
Depends on the lift, but yeah extra weight on the bullwheel causes excess wear and with the older ones it can really fling you off to the side during that turn. Saw a guy try to ride the bullwheel on a dinosaur of a fixie and it chucked him out of the chair before I could get it stopped.
For the chairs that’s more of a summer thing, as the ramp isn’t something you should be walking on and it’s not great for the lift to have weight on the chair while it’s going around the wheel up top. The gondola style lifts (enclosed cabin) you can absolutely do that just to hit the bar at the top or whatever, hell, most resorts will give you a cheaper ticket price if that’s all you plan on doing.
Many of them do this during the off-season to make some extra money.
Otherwise they do allow people to go back down every place that I’ve been for various reasons like sudden panic/fear or broken equipment
Depends on the lift and downloading a guest on most chairs is real annoying for everybody involved, including the people waiting in line at the bottom. On a gondola it’s of course trivial. If you do manage to get yourself stuck somewhere you can’t download from that’s more of a patrol problem than anything ops can help you with.
Oh and a bunch of resorts use a gondola to access parking lots or other areas of the base if you wanted a completely free option.
Gondola yes