I just hung up the phone after an hour of talking with Ward Baker, who is the only person I know who is as dumb as I am. We slept in the parking lots of almost every ski resort in the West that had a chairlift, in a small trailer with no heat. Most of our two winters together were spent in the Sun Valley parking lot. Today Ward lives in Maui and spends his life raising exotic fruit trees and diving for his dinners.
In 1947, Sun Valley was operating three chairlifts on Baldy, one on Dollar and one on Rudd Mount. There were only two chairlifts in Colorado, located at Aspen. California had one on Mount Waterman and one at the Sugar Bowl. Utah had three: one at Snow Basin and two at Alta. When we returned from our two winters of living in a parking lot, Ward did not ski again for another 27 years. Then when he went out again, for one weekend, and it had become so crowded he never went again. Both of us are asked questions about those parking lot days, but the most important question asked is why we did it.
We had grown up surfing in Southern California when a crowded day was a second car with a surfboard on the roof showing up at the beach. We knew how important freedom was and in spite of 100-pound, eleven-foot-long surfboards, we enjoyed every wave we ever rode.
Ward reminded me that he brought along on our expedition a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. One day he made two quarts of ice cream at a ski jumping tournament. It was 10 below zero when he got out of the warm car with the machine, poured in the ingredients and, standing out in the cold, turned the crank. Later we drove down to Ketchum and traded those two quarts of vanilla ice cream for four hamburgers with fries for our dates and ourselves.
On the phone, we both agreed that the rotary snowplow was both the best thing and the worst thing that happened to us when we were camping in the parking lot. One day we had to move our trailer so they could plow out the parking lot. We had originally only planned on staying a week, so we had been burying our garbage in the snow bank behind the trailer. When the rotary snowplow hit that pile of buried garbage it sprayed the nearby trees with milk cartons, paper napkins and a lot of rabbit skins.
A question Ward is asked all of the time is, “What did you eat?” “Rabbits” is the answer. “How did you get them?” “We shot them.” “How?” “With an over and under .410 shotgun and .22 caliber rifle with a bent barrel.”
At 87 years old Ward Baker is still healthy and physically fit. He blames his good health on never smoking a cigarette or even having a beer. That has really worked for him and the same abstinence has worked for my health all my life. I won’t go spear fishing with him, but I sure like it when he cooks the fish that he catches.
Ward remembered that when we left Alta, driving down the canyon road, the trip started off with a near total disaster when the left wheel just fell off of the trailer. I was driving down the canyon in the dark when I felt a lurch and watched a tire pass me and roll up over the snow bank and disappear into the darkness of the creek in the canyon below. Since I was driving it was my fault and I had to wade down into deep powder to get the tire back.
When we got the tire back onto the trailer. I was so frozen that Ward had to drive the Buick convertible down to Salt Lake City where we found a deserted street in a new subdivision and parked under a streetlight to cook dinner.
We had already eaten all of the goat meat chops that Ward had brought along for the trip. He had shot the goats from the deck of his fishing boat. Instead, it was sauerkraut and wieners under a streetlight. The smell of the boiling sauerkraut on our Coleman stove attracted the attention of the people who lived in a nearby house. They, of course, called the police, but there is no ordinance in the Salt Lake City law books about cooking dinner on a public street. At least there was no law against it then. I do know that as a result of my travels with Ward Baker a lot of laws about things that were legal then got changed because of the stuff we did.