- Blue Mountain provides younger guests with a two minute introduction to how lifts work.
- Soldier Mountain’s major midseason repair is a success.
- Whaleback gets its summit lift operational for the season after replacing bullwheel bearings.
- A crowdfunding campaign seeks to purchase Big Tupper out of foreclosure.
- Drone video shows the damage to Eaglecrest’s Ptarmigan chair (now back open).
- Two class action lawsuits proceed regarding gondola incidents at Mont-Sainte-Anne last winter.
- The girl who fell from a Sugarloaf chairlift last week makes the network morning show rounds.
- Another video shows a perfect catch of a six year old who fell from a Crested Butte triple chair.
- A boy is also uninjured after landing in a net at Diamond Peak.
- Utah legislators weigh funding a Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola amid a long list of wish list projects.
- Speaking of LCC, proponent Chris McCandless joins the Ski Utah podcast to talk gondolas.
- North America’s largest city looks to build a fourth urban gondola line in 2022.
- Bousquet Mountain debuts the Yellow triple following a delay due to six towers needing to be moved.
- Doppelmayr prepares to ship 80 containers worth of lift components from Austria to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
- Italy’s ski reopening is postponed just hours before lifts were set to spin.
- In Wisconsin, a T-Bar ski area opens for the first time in 25 years.
- Aspen Skiing Company puts the Ajax Pandora’s expansion back on the front burner.
- The first riders ascend Mission Ridge on the Wenatchee Express.
- Developers at Moosehead Lake look for up to $135 million in financing.
- For the second time this winter, the Purgatory Express is down due to technical problems.
- Two more resorts get set to join the Indy Pass next week.
- The Forest Service seeks public comments on Arapahoe Basin’s proposal to replace Lenawee with a detachable quad or six pack in 2022.
- Snow Valley blogs about its lift history and claims the world’s fastest fixed grip quad.
- Magic Mountain provides the below update on progress towards opening a third chairlift.
On the Black Quad lift front, there always seems to be something. And, the engineering firm who designed the lift has come back with quite a few changes that need to be implemented by Pfister Mountain Services, including changing out some sheave assembly wheel combinations at a few towers and a major overhaul of tower 13 cross arm and uphill sheave assembly. None of this is a quick fix at this point in our construction phase and comes as unwelcome news. And, of course, tower 13 is in a very difficult spot to get to, especially for what equipment will be needed to execute the cross arm changes. No timetable or budget as been provided as of yet. We will continue to keep you posted as news warrants. Certainly frustrating after all this time as we’d like to see our money put to good use for you. All I can say is that the Quad will be a part of our future here at Magic so we can expand uphill capacity and lift redundancy as we grow.
Lift Blog 
I saw a tower on Black Line the other day with the haul rope off of the downhill sheaves, perhaps that is one of the problematic assemblies. Maybe the cross-arm could have something to do with this strange chair-bunching phenomenon I noticed?
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I think Lenawee will be a six pack for better wind resistance and longer load times.
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I would hope for a quad. Unless they do a fair bit of grading and traffic management, six at a time (even total lift capacity is rated the same) shooting down the offramp, deciding left/right/rope tow will be a mess.
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The orange for the seats on Kanc 8 look really clean and sleek. Great job Doppelmayr for those seats!
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More low-key news: Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows both quietly lowered their posted average annual snowfall numbers from 450″ to 400″. Still a lot of snow compared to most places in the US, but closer to their true number. It does follow the new trend of ski resorts tending to post more accurate snowfall numbers thanks to snow stake webcams and skiers distrusting certain resorts’ numbers. However, I have never seen a resort that does not rely on a moving average for its published annual snowfall number change by this much, especially in the downwards direction.
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It’s not closer is the thing though. Assuming their old snowfall reported numbers are accurate (not just blatant lies), they averaged 465″ a season from 2014-2020 and averaged 469″ from 2009-2013. Tahoe is just so volatile though that it gets skewed by outlier years.
2014-2020 snowfall- https://web.archive.org/web/20200513095744if_/https://squawalpine.com/mountain-information/squaw-valley-snowfall-tracker/?tab=ui-id-3
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I would not say Squaw blatantly lies in their snow report, but they are often a little exaggerated, which they get away with by differentiating 6200 ft (which has pretty accurate numbers) and 8000 ft. Perhaps it is just my experience, but that is what I have always thought.
ZRankings has “Real Snow” numbers for resorts, and Squaw’s is 369″ and Alpine Meadows’s is 363″. Personally, I would say that is a bit low, as I never thought their numbers were almost 25% inflated, but it does show that there is a perception of exaggeration.
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According to https://bestsnow.net/calnet.htm , the true snow of squaw at 8000ft is 422 but only 264 at 6200ft (is there a lot of rain at that elevation?) so 400 would be an appropriate “resort-wide” estimate.
Most resorts still overinflated these numbers so it’s surprising they would hedge on the medium-low side.
Vail claims 350 for Northstar (bestsnow gives 292 and zrankings gives 311) and Breckenridge with 353 (bestsnow confirms 354 for one stake at 11800ft but only 282 for another at 11000).
It’s not just Vail, Crystal Mt gives a whopping 486ft on their site (bestsnow tallies 339ft at the base at 4400ft, and 414ft mid-mountain at 6100ft)
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I still fail to understand Mission Ridge’s logic of replacing an old, unreliable lift with another old, unreliable lift. On another note, at this point I honestly wouldn’t even hope for Magic’s Quad opening next season. I’ve never seen a mountain that took longer to install a lift than they do. They don’t need it, but it’s honestly just a joke at this point and I wouldn’t even trust any estimates put into place anymore. If it opens, it opens I guess.
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I hiked up Magic Mountain this past summer and checked out the black line quad progress. Saw tower 13 that is in question. As it were then, the tower was configured with the former snow bowl lift’s asymmetrical tower head. The sheave assemblies were a 6 hold down 4 support combo on the uphill side and a 4 sheave support on the downhill side. Its seemed a questionable configuration to me, not surprised to hear it needs to be changed. Also saw other towers with 4 support 4 hold down combo assemblies on the uphill side paired with 2 supports on the downhill side which is unconventional. Either way I hope they are able to get their issues sorted as I would like to see this lift open.
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https://scontent-bos3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/151818553_10159067015947829_3614519891526315099_o.jpg?_nc_cat=107&ccb=3&_nc_sid=b9115d&_nc_ohc=YkF3IKVc9b8AX_2RZ9V&_nc_ht=scontent-bos3-1.xx&oh=f8fe650471a885e7cd0b60932f873969&oe=6055ABCD
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