Lift Blog

• Snow King Mountain formally requests approval for a new $8 million gondola which would load along Snow King Avenue in the Town of Jackson, part of a $26 million improvement plan.
• The new Oakland Zoo gondola went down for a bit on Friday and just about every major news outlet in the Bay Area covered it.
• The SilverStar Gondola wasn’t the only new lift to open in Canada last week.
• Sadly, the gondola emoji has been the single least used on Twitter for 76 days.
• Elk Ridge, Arizona is back on the market, indicating the announced sale to Mountain Capital Partners may have fallen through.
• La Paz opens its seventh urban gondola just 366 days after groundbreaking. The Mi Teleférico system has now carried 135 million commuters since the first lines opened in 2014.
• Timberline Lodge confirms it’s eyeing a gondola or chairlift connection from Summit Ski Area, which it bought last week.
• Winter Park is getting the most money for improvements of all the Alterra mountains this year – $26.2 million.  More than half of it is going to Leitner-Poma for the big Zephyr Gondola.
• James Coleman explains his ambitious dream to create another Snowbasin out of Nordic Valley.
• Episode 5 of Ski Area Management’s podcast, focusing on risk management, covers lots of lift ground: the Squaw Valley tram accident, a grip slip incident, and challenges Pats Peak faced after buying the Lake Compounce Skyride.
• One Hermitage Club lawsuit yields a $1.5 million judgement against the ski area and another one is filed.
• For the second time in recent memory, a falling cigarette is believed to have started a fire under a lift at Heavenly.
• The State of Massachusetts seeks a new operator for Blue Hills Ski Area.
• A private management company passes on operating Ski Cape Smokey, a nonprofit mountain in Nova Scotia with a broken main chairlift.
• Hunter Mountain is making quick work of the Hunter North expansion.
• Is Peak Resorts spending too much money on capital improvements such as new lifts?

“Ever since the company went public in 2014 it has taken advantage of its improved access to capital to finance large infrastructure projects that may have led to growth in visitation and revenues, but haven’t resulted in better earnings or cash flows.”