- Caledon Ski Club is set to replace its Blue Mountain triple with a new Doppelmayr quad this summer.
- Showdown rope evacuates 87 riders from Payload on a busy Saturday.
- Lutsen ropes down 25 from the Caribou Express and has it back in action within hours.
- The New Hampshire Business Review profiles legendary resort developer Les Otten.
- The privately-held conglomerate behind Leitner Ropeways, Poma, Leitner-Poma of America and Skytrac announces the highest revenue in the company’s history for 2018: €1.02 billion. The group built approximately 100 ropeways around the world last year, up from 75 in 2017.
- The State of Washington is poised to grant $750,000 of public money to Mt. Spokane for the Northwood project.
- Edmonton is one step closer to building an urban gondola.
- The Nordic Valley expansion project is in limbo.
- Vail officially owns two more ski resorts.
- Palm Springs reopens its tramway after storms cause $4 million in damage and lost revenue.
- The Forest Service tentatively approves alternative 4 of the ambitious California Express gondola project.
Lift Blog 
That Zermatt 3S was one of the most badly needed replacements I’ve ever seen at any ski area. On a typical day, the options to get from the Swiss side to the Italian side were to either wait a hour and a half for the tram line, or ride the infamous Gandegg, the longest T-bar on the planet, with a length of 9,700 feet, and ride time of 25 minutes.
As somebody who has both waited in that Tram line and ridden the Gandegg, the 3s is worth however much they spent on it. They could mark up tickets by 150%, and I’d still be a lot happier than I was trying to get across that glacier.
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Yeah, I wouldn’t want to ride a T-Bar that’s about as long as the American Flyer lift (American Flyer is 9,900 feet long) and is longer than the Beaver Run SuperChair or Keystone’s Summit Express.
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Oh, and to add insult to injury, for pretty much the entire line, the T-bars are suspended too high to reach for one if you mess up and lose yours. So you can wait in a half hour line, take 15 minutes to make it 7,000 feet through, and be too far to hike to the top, and you just wasted 45 minutes for nothing.
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Breathing a small sigh of relief regarding Nordic Valley. I love the idea of them updating and expanding the mountain but not to that degree. The communities of Eden and Liberty are important to me and so is the quiet non-complicated lifestyle they offer.
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It seemed like such an odd project to begin with, totally out of character for the area. I think MCP has grand ideas of rivaling Snowbasin or even Powder Mountain in the future, but this area needs a lot more than a super long gondola to start with. Additionally, Nordic Valley doesn’t get nearly as much snow as Snowbasin and Powder mountain, so Nordic Valley will need to invest in more snow making.
Take a look at the proposed trail map (https://nordicvalleyproject.com/). VERY ambitious, and I’m not sure where MCP has the capital to pull it off. Websites are cheap, ski infrastructure is not. Many of MCP’s mountains could use lifts, and I’m not sure how Nordic Valley ranks on the “needs lifts” basis. On the other hand, MCP’s bike park venture in Texas seems to be working out successfully for them. It wouldn’t be the first time that a ski company has siphoned money off a profitable operation in order to fund a sinking ship.
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Although a smaller project, and I can’t find a link for it, a friend of mine received an email from Summit at Snoqualmie that they will in fact be replacing the Holiday Double this summer with a quad.
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Just saw you already made a seperate post on it, you’re ahead of me. Thanks for all the work you do by the way, I really enjoy reading the blog.
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The reply to the last “myth” listed on the Squaw website (https://squawalpine.com/gondola) states that they won’t be constructing any access roadways to build the gondola, yet there are some roads marked on the map. What gives?
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