STUPID SKI TOURS: The Chicken

The Chicken crashing the Vallée Blanche party in 2013.

The Chicken showed up again on another recent ski trip, so I thought I'd post an explanation:

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, Jeff and I entrained Mike, Kim and Sue in the mountain bike equivalent of a Stupid Ski Tour. The goal was to ride all the way around Donner Lake, staying as high as we could. Well...we did set a shuttle so we could get BBQ at Smoky's at the end of the ride instead of pedaling all the way back up to the top of Tahoe-Donner where we started: meatheads we may be, but we don't miss a lot of meals.

From the Glacier Way trailhead in Tahoe-Donner, we pedaled out the Rim Trail and down to the Castle Peak trailhead which was fun, as always. Then we crossed under the Interstate and things got hard.

The Donner train tunnels

Evidently forgetting how to actually read a topographic map, we eventually figured out by trial and error that the best way to ride over to Donner Pass from Donner Summit is to jump on the Hole-In-The-Ground route and contour around below Boreal, past the Sierra Snow Lab and up the paved road past Norden to the top before shifting to the abandoned train tunnels. On this day, however, we didn't know that yet and ended up gasping and shoving our bikes up the Boreal fall line to where we could traverse over to Donner Ski Ranch then drop down to the pass on snow cat roads at mach-schnell.

Given that our route was often too steep to ride, we had a lot of time to look around while we wore ourselves out breathing hard. It's always interesting to see just how much crap accumulates under a ski lift: I remember there was a lot of pot paraphernalia that day. And someone had dropped a small rubber chicken that they had inexplicably been carrying to go skiing. Or, maybe they threw it out? The whole rubber chicken phenomenon is really weird and rather disgusting when you think about it. Maybe they suddenly realized that they just didn't want the awful thing in their pocket anymore...

At any rate, The Chicken was kind of nasty-looking, even after a water-bottle wash. Turns out that this skanky look was actually a painted-on feature. Someone tossed the ugly little thing in their pack, probably intending to remand it to the trash when they got home. But The Chicken had other ideas, and it somehow began showing up in all of our gear whenever we'd travel. If it showed up in your emergency repair kit in the middle of some long skin track, of course it made sense to get rid of the horrid thing as quickly as you could bury it in someone else's luggage (or recruit someone else to do it for you).

The Chicken would vanish for years at a time, then suddenly appear when you pulled out your warm gloves or first-aid kit in the US, Europe, Canada or Mexico. Having no doubt originated in China, that vile chicken is now very well-traveled, indeed.

At least we figured out a way to keep a chunk of plastic out of the landfill, I suppose, but it's not a very practical idea to scale up.