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We’ve all been there: You’re sitting on the lift, musing over which run you’ll take next, when all of a sudden you reach into your pocket and you forget to hold onto your pole, or mittens—or worse, your phone or car keys accidentally slide out.
If you were able to recover your item pretty quickly, consider yourself lucky. For the rest of the stuff, it’s often collected once the snow melts, as resorts do big hillside cleanups ahead of reopening for summer.
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As ski season ultimately comes to a close in the Northern Hemisphere, resorts are setting out on their annual pilgrimage to clean up all the fallen gear below the lifts. There’s plenty of the things you’d expect: AirPods, phones, skis, and mittens. But every year provides us with new entertaining items. Volunteers at Breckenridge, for example, recently found a restaurant-grade burger flipper, and last year they discovered a pineapple. Over at Vail, it seems as though someone lost their “emergency chicken” noise maker.
More important than finding wacky items is seeing that everything dropped is recycled as best as possible. This year, Vail Mountain collected 400 pounds of trash, and nearby at Breckenridge, around 780 pounds of trash were removed from the hill. Vail sends all the recovered skis to a local company that repurposes the sticks into furniture. Everything else is taken to a trash sorting facility for proper disposal.
Over in Breck, the mountain clean-up has been part of a summer refresh for over a decade. The team donates outdated or broken gear to be upcycled through programs like Colorado Ski Chair, Jones Boards, and ReCircled.
Watch: These Random Items Were Found During Breck’s Cleanup
“We actually had someone DM us on Instagram asking for help finding his ski,” a Vail representative said. “Next thing I knew, he was thanking us for helping him recover it. I had no idea that was something we did.” Moral of the story? If you’re prone to dropping things, quit fumbling on the lift and wait until you’re back on solid ground.
