stevenje
Senior Member
- Location
- Yachats Oregon
The good old Snake River Saloon. Boy do I have some stories about that place!
In my apprenticeship I worked at a couple of different ski resorts. One of them was A-Basin which back then was privately owned. We wired new ski lifts along with remodeling various buildings over the course of a couple years. The lot of the employees at A-Basin did most of their "socializing" at The Snake Creek Saloon. So needless to say, so did we. I remember two people in perticular. Rick was one of the maintenance guys for A-Basin. One of his jobs was to keep up the maintenance on all the lifts. This would sometimes require him to climb the towers. Here's the catch. He had an artifical leg. I didn't know about it until he pulled a prank on some poor unsuspecting Snake Creek Saloon bar patron by sticking a knife in his leg.
The other character was the nighttime snow cat slope groomer who we called "Dudley Rimshot." I never knew his real name. Dudley was a heavy drinker to say the least. Dudley would close down the Snake Creek Saloon and leave the bar with a pony keg of beer and a tap. He would then go to work grooming the slopes for the next day. Of course he kept that keg in the snow cat with him just in case dehydration over took him while he worked through the early morning hours grooming all the slopes. Here is the other catch. He only had one eye! If I'm Lie'n, I'm Die'n! You just can't make this stuff up. What a thought. A one eyed, slightly inebriated snow cat driver running up and down the ski slopes at night with a beer in his hand. Boy those days are over! If we were working on an upper lift station that day he would swing by in the morning after his grooming duties and we would load up the tools and material in the snow cat. Up the slope we would go with the three of us and a half empty pony keg rolling around in the cab. The story was is that Dudley use to be some sort of a race car driver in his earlier days. He lived above the maintenance building. I remember seeing a steering wheel off of some race car tacked up on the wall in his apartment. Many years later when the movie Caddyshack came out, there was a scene in Bill Murry's "apartment". I said to my self, hey I've seen that place! It was Dudley's. I could go on and on, but I don't what to be banned from this forum. Thanks for listening.
