Every Tuesday, I feature my favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.
A base-to-summit six-passenger chairlift is coming to Windham Mountain in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The mile-long Doppelmayr system will replace the Whistler triple, a 1983 VonRoll triple with a ten-plus minute ride. A parallel detachable quad called Whirlwind, built by Garaventa CTEC in 1993, will remain in place at least through this summer. Windham also revealed today it will launch RFID ticketing across its seven lifts next season and Doppelmayr now has at least a dozen lifts to build in the United States and Canada this year.
The Catskill region has seen a number of big new lifts recently, including a gondola at Belleayre and six-pack at nearby Hunter Mountain. Peak Resorts could build another new high-speed lift at Hunter in 2018, raising the bar for the entire region. Windham’s announcement comes after two very quiet months for new lift news, with hopefully a bunch more to come this spring.
Every Tuesday, I feature my favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.
https://www.facebook.com/BlueMtnResort/posts/10156115158282603
Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s vision to add three lifts and 500 acres of intermediate and advanced terrain moved forward last Friday with the release of a Draft Environmental Impact Statement by the Gunnison National Forest. Operated by Triple Peaks, LLC along with New England’s Okemo and Mt. Sunapee resorts, Crested Butte currently has a fleet of 12 lifts serving mostly beginner and expert terrain. The 58 year-old mountain seeks to provide guests more intermediate and advanced options and improve skier circulation. Triple Peaks owners Tim and Diane Mueller were previously blocked from building a five-lift, 2,000-acre expansion on neighboring Snodgrass Mountain in 2009.
Under the new plan, first proposed in 2015, one current lift would be replaced with two more added in an area called Teocalli 2 – far from Snodgrass and nearer current resort infrastructure. The North Face lift, a Leitner T-Bar installed in 2004, would be removed and replaced with a much longer chairlift. This fixed-grip quad would stretch around 5,000 feet with a capacity nearly twice that of the current surface lift. The new lift was orignally envisioned to start between the East River and Paradise lifts but is now slated to load directly adjacent to Paradise.
A second new lift with the working name Teo Park would similarly top out at the summit of the North Face but rise from the Teo 2 drainage behind. This fixed-grip triple would move 1,200 guests per hour with a slope length of 3,050′ and create a link between the proposed expansion area and the already-developed ski area front side.
The heart of the expansion lies lower in the west-facing Teo watershed, where a new high-speed or fixed-grip triple would span approximately 6,000 linear feet. Capacity would be limited to 1,200 skiers per hour and only a handful of new intermediate runs cut, totaling 89 acres. Most of the terrain – 434 acres – would be left as gladed skiing with select trees removed by helicopter. This expansive zone would supplement the popular and sometimes overcrowded intermediate runs serviced by Paradise and East River.
Public comments for this major project will be accepted here until May 10th and the Forest Supervisor is expected to make a decision around October. Implementation of approved elements could begin as early as 2019 and the Mueller family would likely sign with Leitner-Poma for any new lifts as they have for decades at Crested Butte, Okemo and Sunapee.
Every Tuesday, I feature my favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.
Something interesting happened in Western Canada over the past few decades. Just as many struggling small- and mid-sized American ski areas looked toward government ownership or nonprofit charity as solutions, private investors up north did the opposite, convincing communities to sell their publicly-owned ski areas for a brighter future. Residents in the town of Golden, British Columbia voted by a 97 percent margin in 2000 to give up control of a one-Riblet ski area called Whitetooth to a Dutch construction company. After debuting one of the world’s greatest gondolas and two new quad chairs, the renamed Kicking Horse Mountain Resort was sold to the Resorts of the Canadian Rockies conglomerate in 2011.
Seven years after Golden’s experiment, a Denver-based developer bought the Powder Springs ski area from the City of Revelstoke and announced a $22 million contract with Leitner-Poma Canada to create North America’s first resort with a vertical greater than 5,500 feet. One more lift out of a planned 30 was built in 2008 before a mountain of debt and the global financial crisis nearly forced Revelstoke Mountain Resort to close. Now controlled by giant hotelier Northland Properties of Vancouver, the jury is still out on Revelstoke’s viability as a billion dollar destination.
Another public to private transaction took place in 1996, when a group of 150 skiers purchased Castle Mountain from a nearby municipality to form Castle Mountain Resort, Inc. Castle was privately developed with two Mueller T-Bars in 1965 but became insolvent after a 1976 fire and was rescued by Pincher Creek taxpayers. Just across the continental divide from Fernie, BC, the mountain shares the same dramatic scenery as other Canadian Rockies destinations but without the fancy hotels and high-speed lifts. With a local population only around 35,000 and a three hour drive from Calgary, Castle currently averages only 90,000 skier visits despite its terrific snow and terrain. Some 3,200 acres are serviced by five main lifts and a nearly 3,000′ vertical drop exceeds those found at places like Squaw Valley and Alta. Averaging zero winter rain days at mid mountain (a perennial problem in much of British Columbia) and 350 inches of snow, there’s a lot to love for those willing to make the trek.
When the current investors took over, they inherited the two T-Bars, one of which is among the longest remaining in the world at 4,518 feet. Designed to be turned into a chairlift but never actually converted, the dinosaur was named T-Rex in 1996 and these days only rarely drags guests up its 1,670′ vertical. Castle Mountain has installed four new chairlifts since ’96, all of which came used from mountains like Sunshine Village and Beaver Creek. The ski area continues to generate all of its own power with diesel fuel.
In 2016, Castle Mountain Resort partnered with Whistler-based Brent Harley and Associates to develop a road map for the next decades of growth with input from the mountain’s shareholders, the local community and other stakeholders. The new master development plan was completed in May of last year and envisions the replacement of most of the current lifts, construction of up to nine new ones and expanded year-round recreational opportunities.
Every Tuesday, I feature my favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.
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