The view into Grand Teton National Park from the top of Jackson Hole’s new Teton lift.
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is celebrating its 50th anniversary in December which will coincide with the opening of new terrain and a shiny high speed quad called Teton. JHMR’s first Doppelmayr detachable will serve three new runs in the area formerly known as the Crags. This project is part of a major lift upgrade that included the new Casper detachable quad and will also include a second gondola.
Ready for a Uni-G terminal next to the Lower Werner run.
The new lift will serve approximately 1,800 vertical feet of terrain between the Casper and Apres Vous lifts. With a steep profile, Teton’s ride time will be under six minutes. Having four detachable quads on the north side of the mountain will hopefully take some pressure off the aerial tram.
Funny to see Doppelmayr staging next to a new Leitner-Poma terminal.
Doppelmayr USA has redesigned all of their controls for 2015.
Apparently Doppelmayr has redesigned their controls for 2015. A new pedestal pictured above looks like an improvement, especially the speed selector replacing slow/medium/fast buttons.
Willard Mountain, NY files for bankruptcy, proving once again it is best to control all of the land your ski resort sits on. The area has a Borvig and Partek doubles.
Saddleback Maine has put the drive terminal for its main lift up for sale on Resort Boneyard for $200k. Hopefully a new lift is on the way.
Whistler-Blackcomb to test snowmaking as a means to preserve summer skiing on Horstman Glacier, home to the only glacier-anchored lifts in North America.
Park City and Jackson Hole just started building new lifts but trail map illustrator James Niehues is already finishing illustrations for their 2015-16 trail maps. Niehues planned to retire last year but apparently some projects are too good to pass up. There is no question Mr. Niehues is the best in the business and I hope he keeps painting as long as possible.
Jackson Hole’s new Teton lift will open up a handful of new trails in between the Apres Vous and Casper areas this coming winter. Mr. Niehues is repainting the portion of the map that was previously known as The Crags while the rest will remain true to his original 1991 painting.
Jackson Hole’s new map showing the Teton lift pod. Photo Credit: James Niehues
Vail Resorts contracted James to paint an all-new, unified map of Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort which will operate as one from 2015-16. I was surprised and pleased to hear they were going with a painting instead of the awful computer-generated maps that Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Northstar have gone to. Niehues admits he had to get creative with portions of the map to show 37 lifts and 7,300 acres of terrain acres in one view. The final result below is impressive and shows why paintings make more compelling trail maps than satellite photos.
Illustration for the new Park City Mountain Resort. Photo Credit: James Niehues
British Columbia’s Minister of Environment has finally killed the Jumbo Glacier Resort, proposed to rival Whistler in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia. Jumbo Glacier is a spectacularly-remote place up a dirt logging road from Panorama Mountain Village and Invermere. It’s more than 200 miles from Calgary, the nearest major city and airport. The plan was to build 20+ lifts on 3,000 hectares of public land above 5,000 feet. You can read the full master plan here.
Leitner-Poma poured some footings last fall in a last-ditch effort.
The project was first submitted to the BC government in 1991 and received environmental approval in 2004. The resort claimed they would get 2,700 skiers per day. This was always a red flag to me as 2,700 skiers is not a big number for a destination ski resort. Take for example a mid-sized area like Mt. Sunapee in New Hampshire. It has six lifts and a comfortable carrying capacity of 5,220 skiers per day. 2,700 could justify perhaps three or four lifts at Jumbo, not 23.
BC has no shortage of large ski areas struggling due to remoteness. Kicking Horse and Revelstoke are perhaps most similar to the Jumbo proposal. Revelstoke was supposed to have 21 lifts; they built three before running out of money in 2008. Lucky for them, the 27th richest person in Canada bought in and paid off over $100 million in debt. Kicking Horse was in similar trouble when it was rescued by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies in 2011. Both of these resorts are on the Trans-Canada Highway, not 50 miles from a town.
These days building a detachable lift means a capital investment of at least $3 million plus around $100,000 in annual maintenance. A so-called ‘pulse’ lift offers the speed of a detachable system with similar infrastructure to a traditional fixed-grip lift. Chairs or cabins are grouped together into ‘pulses’ and the entire lift slows down for loading and unloading. When comparing types of aerial lifts there are always trade-offs; here they include low capacity and long headways. Most pulse lifts can only move 300-600 passengers per hour and headway – the time a passenger has to wait for a carrier to show up – can be minutes instead of as low as six seconds. Perfect for certain applications but unsuitable in most.
Pine Ridge lift at the Yellowstone Club, Montana.
There are currently 17 pulse lifts operating in the US, Canada and Mexico; all but three are gondolas. Nearly all were built in the last 15 years. Panorama Mountain Village, Northstar California, Steamboat, Snowmass, Canyons Resort, and Le Massif all use pulse gondolas to connect village areas. These lifts are usually less than 3,000 feet long and convenient for skiers and non-skiers alike. Other pulse gondolas are attractions in their own right such the Iron Mountain Tramway at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, SkyTrail at Trees of Mystery, the Gondola at Royal Gorge Bridge Bridge & Park and the Riverfront Park SkyRide in Spokane. There is also a new Leitner-Poma pulse gondola in Orizaba, Mexico with tripod towers that are hundreds of feet tall.
Riverfront Park SkyRide, built by Doppelmayr.
Snow Valley in Edmonton, Alberta has a very unique pulse chairlift built by Doppelmayr in 2008. Instead of having groups of 3-5 chairs, it has just two groups of 20 closely-spaced quad chairs. Because it is only 850 feet long, the lift can move 1,378 skiers per hour at up to 5 m/s, the same speed as most detachable lifts. In fact the ride is only about a minute. The lift slows to a beginner-friendly 0.8 m/s for loading and unloading. Because of the low speed, skiers ride around the bullwheel at the top and unload facing down the hill. It’s the only lift I know of with 180-degree unloading.
A bit further south, Waterville Valley started cutting trees for its Green Peak Expansion. Unfortunately they don’t have funding for a new lift or even a used one.
Also in New Hampshire, Tenney Mountain plans to reopen next season after being closed since 2010. The mountain has a 1964 Stadeli double and 1987 Borvig triple
You can own one of Oregon’s ski areas for only $1.25 million. Includes lifts with charming names like “Happy” and “Echo.”
The Harbour Skylink would be a four-stage gondola in one of the world’s great capitals.
Poma is currently building five gondolas in Latin America, two for the Metrocable system in Medellin, Colombia and one each in Bolivia, Chile and Mexico. They recently received €1.3 million from the French government to lead a consortium promoting ropeway transportation in cities.
The world’s tallest observation tower is coming to Brighton, England, courtesy of Poma, who also brought us the London Eye and the High Roller in Las Vegas.
Sigma takes on CWA with 3S gondola cabins developed by Italian car designer Pininfarina, set to debut in 2018 on the world’s highest 3S in Zermatt.
Sunshine Village is one of two ski resorts in North America with access provided by gondola rather than road, the other being Silver Mountain in Idaho. Visitors park at the end of Sunshine Road and transfer to a Poma gondola for a 17 minute ride to Sunshine Village. Along the way there are two angle stations, one where doors stay closed and the other with loading/unloading at Goat’s Eye Mountain. All three sections share one haul rope driven by a 2,000 HP electric motor underneath the top terminal. The Goat’s Eye angle station has indoor cabin storage and there are additional maintenance rails at each end.
When opened on November 22, 2001, Poma claimed the Sunshine Village Gondola was the world’s fastest 8-passenger gondola with a max speed of 1,200 feet per minute. I don’t believe this was ever true as Whiteface’s Cloudsplitter Gondola opened two years earlier and can run 1,212 fpm. There are now at least 15 gondolas in North America that can do 1,200 feet a minute or faster. Regardless, Sunshine’s gondola is an impressive machine that moves 2,800 people per hour in each direction 15+ hours per day. It cost $16 million to build.
Little Snow King Mountain in downtown Jackson, Wyoming is in the midst of an $8 million transformation. They are simultaneously building a new Doppelmayr quad, Wiegand alpine coaster, zip-line adventure course and brand new base lodge. The lift is nearly complete and expected to open shortly along with Snow King’s famous alpine slide. The goal was June 15th but I think it will probably be a week or so later. The alpine coaster is well on its way and planned to open in August. With a $4 million base-to-summit TechnoAlpin snowmaking system installed last summer, the future is looking good for this community ski area. The only thing they need now is a detachable summit lift and restaurant overlooking the Town of Jackson with the Tetons in the background. Willamette Pass’ six pack with gondola conversion would be perfect.
A motor room under the bottom dock houses electric motors, two generators, three braking systems and two evacuation drives.
The $31 million Jackson Hole Aerial Tram is the most expensive lift ever built at a US ski area. Constructed by Garaventa over 20 months, the new tram opened to great fanfare on December 20, 2008. It can move a hundred people 4,083 vertical feet in under nine minutes. Compared with a detachable lift, the tram is a relatively simple machine built on a massive scale.
The view from carriage level just above tower 2.
Like most jig-back aerial tramways, there are four track ropes and a single haul rope that that drives both cabins. All five wire ropes were manufactured by Fatzer in Switzerland. Five towers support the line; towers 1 and 2 are the tallest and furthest apart. Two CWA Kronos cabins move 650 passengers per hour per direction at a maximum speed of 10 m/s. Slope length is 12,463 feet.
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