Riding the Mountain Road yo-yo

By the time the 101 bus starts ascending Harlow Hill for the last stretch of Mountain Road before Mount Mansfield, English has become a secondary language.

The 7:05 a.m. up-bound run is the busiest bus of the morning, but it fills up gradually, mostly with workers on their ways to punch in for the day at Stowe Mountain Resort. On the bus last week, about half of them were speaking Spanish.

It’s standing room only, 60-plus riders, as the bus reaches the end of the line, the apogee of its second up-and-down cycle of the day.

“We learn to speak a little, un poquito, amount of Spanish,” said Charlie Taylor, a laid-back former ski patrol member who’s been driving the bus up and down the mountain for two years — he calls it the “Mountain Yo-Yo” — becoming acutely aware of how landmarks look with and without snow, observational of the varying stages of melt on the Winter Carnival ice sculptures dotting the town.

The yo-yo run, the seasonal Mountain Road Shuttle, is the busiest route in the Green Mountain Transit Authority, with a record 63,000 riders catching a lift last winter, and with signs that this year will see a lot more riders on almost 3,500 round-trips between Commodores Inn and the ski resort.

A shadow has been cast over the future of the Mountain Road Shuttle, which costs $310,000 a year. The town government now pays $31,700, Stowe Mountain Resort pays $50,000, the Stowe Area Association pays $16,000, and the remaining two-thirds of the cost comes from the state and federal governments.

The Stowe Area Association has indicated it will phase out its share in the next two years, and the other partners have shown no indication that they’ll pick up the cost.

Tricky steering

Last week, Taylor had plenty of time to chat during a slow midday run, where one lap of the route took about 50 minutes and had just six riders.

Taylor moved to Stowe in 1969 and worked on the ski patrol and the rescue squad, as well as in the lab at Copley Hospital. He started driving buses with GMTA a few years ago, at first in Barre.

“That was too much city for me,” he said.

Mountain Road shuttle drivers have to drive two types of bus — the short Cutaways that can seat about 15 riders and the long, low-floored Gilligs packing in at least 60 people, both sitting and standing.

Both vehicles have automatic transmissions, but the Gillig takes a little getting used to, with the driver sitting right over the road, using the 22-inch steering wheel to swing into the other lane to make sure the bus doesn’t go up and over the sidewalk.

Last week, Taylor was training George Riley, for whom bus driving’s the latest part-time work since he was laid off by IBM in 2008.

“The Cutaway drives like a pickup truck,” Riley said. “The Gillig’s like driving your car, if you’re doing it from the hood of your car.”

Endless winter

Public parking has been eliminated on the Spruce Peak side of Stowe Mountain Resort, which has caused a periodic parking crunch on the Mount Mansfield side. As a result, more employees and — the resort hopes — more guests leave their cars behind and catch a lift on the free bus.

But for a lot of the riders, parking isn’t an issue. Their cars are back in Guatemala, Peru, Jamaica.

“Actually, I’d love to have my car here,” said Jordan Aguillar, a Peruvian resort employee who rides his snowboard far more often these days than he drives his car back home. He’s been doing the wintertime ski resort gig for a long time, sort of an endless winter. He gets back to Lima at the end of the ski season, just in time for the snow to start in the Southern Hemisphere.

“I haven’t seen summer in four years,” he said.

Aguillar doesn’t particularly want to be carless; it’s not a matter of him trying to shrink his carbon footprint. The bus takes him and his friends between the dormitory they stay in behind the Matterhorn bar and the mountain where they work.

On a slow midday run last week, Aguillar and his friend Roxana Damian — they’re both from Lima, Peru, but had never met until they started working in Stowe — said they use the GMTA’s Route 100 commuter buses outside of Stowe in either direction, usually either to go shopping in Morrisville or to catch a bus from Waterbury to Burlington.

“It’s the only time we get to enjoy a city,” Damian said. The South American workers enjoy heading into Morrisville for a different kind of ethnic food, from the Green Dragon Chinese restaurant. Usually they come back into town laden with shopping bags.

Squeezed in

Last Thursday morning, Michael Lawlor and Sebastian Groskin, a couple of Stoweites — Groskin’s a Stowe native and Lawlor came here via western Massachusetts — are among the first riders on the 7:05 commute.

Some Latin Americans and Jamaicans get on at the Commodores Inn. As the bus makes its way up Mountain Road, more and more people file on, and then squeeze in.

As busy as the morning route is, it’s nothing compared to the post-4 p.m. routes back down Mountain Road.

“The mountain shuts down at 4, so you get hundreds of people coming down, workers plus guests,” Groskin said.

Part of the bus’s draw is it doesn’t cost a thing, and the drivers stop for anyone who even looks like they could use a lift and anywhere a passenger wants to get off.

Would Groskin stop riding if the bus charged a fare? Heck, yeah, he says. But then again, not really, he said a second later, chuckling as he realized he was relaxed, warm, sitting along the back bench of the 40-foot Gillig Low Floor, with outside temperatures that lately had been stuck in single digits.

Lawlor fist-bumps a Latin American co-worker sporting a New York Yankees winter hat. He’s seen the Yankee fan around the mountain, but doesn’t know his name. The two exchange few words, but at least there’s a bit of communication between the Americans and the international workers.

More often, there are pockets of conversation, the Spanish-speaking folks talking in Spanish and the Americans sitting and listening to something through their headphones.

Resort employee Martina Rovere from El Salvador echoes Aguillar in her yearning for her own car back home. Jamaican resort worker Annette Morris misses everything and everyone about her home.

“Every time it gets cold, I just think about the sun and the beaches,” Morris said, and then laughed. “And my daughter. OK, my daughter and then the sun and the beaches. But I talk to her every day.”

Who rides?

A 20-something American with sunglasses, a hoodie and some blond peach fuzz wonders if the guy talking to the riders and taking notes writes for Seven Days. Oh, the Stowe Reporter? He read one of the recent news stories about the shuttle, and deemed it a not very Vermont-y kind of story; it talks way too much about money.

He leaves his copy of Seven Days on the seat he’d been occupying.

He probably has a point, although perhaps he wouldn’t admit it. Stories about who pays for the Mountain Road Shuttle are interesting to the people who have to pay for it. Everyone else just rides it.

And those riders aren’t just international workers who don’t pay property taxes. They are Stowe natives who rent and don’t pay property taxes, at least not directly. They are tourists who don’t pay property taxes. They are people who live in the West Branch Apartments who don’t want to walk to the Black Cap cafe, and resort guests who want to have some après-ski drinks at the Matterhorn but don’t want to endanger themselves and others by driving drunk.

These are a just a handful of people on just a few spins up and down Mountain Road. Dollar figures are important numbers, but so is a figure like 63,000 riders in 100 days. And all those thousands of people in those seats riding the Mountain Yo-Yo have stories to tell.