Doppelmayr has been selected to install a new Wilbere Quad next summer at Snowbird, the second new lift announced by Powdr for 2024. The quad will load in a new location in the Creekside base area and terminate near the top of the current Wilbere double, which Doppelmayr built in 1971. The modern AlpenStar fixed grip will feature a loading conveyor and carry 1,800 skiers per hour.
“With a number of short- and long-term projects in the works, we are taking great strides to make our mountain more accessible, more efficient and more engaging for our passholders and our community,” noted Snowbird President and General Manager Dave Fields. Wilbere 2.0 is expected to open for the 2024-25 ski season.
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Welcomed, but minor, improvement. Wish Snowbird would move forward with Mary Ellen
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Dead for good Ive heard. Too difficult to avy control and clear out both bowls when day is over.
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I am working there this past summer and people were talking about this, although most people prefer having the old lift as it is the only not crowded lift in the morning. I hear the new one will follow a new alignment and be mostly for racers. I also heard some talk about Gadzoom becoming a six being the next big thing although I would prefer that first.
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She has served us well.
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With Mt. Bachelor helicoptering out the former Skyliner Express towers, it wouldn’t surprise me if this new lift reuses them as the carriers were sold off.
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I think this makes a lot of sense. Adds a couple more blues to the Wilbere zone, helps move traffic around better, and even the runout from Harper’s East isn’t that bad.
Hopefully an MBX 6 or 8 is one of those projects in the works.
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Here’s to hoping the lift will live on somewhere else. I know ill be fighting to keep it running somewhere else. Most likely wont but at least I have tried.
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In about 1970, Dick Bass, one of the founders of Snowbird, saw the 120 passenger Garaventa tramway that the late Hans Burkhart had installed at the resort then known as Sq*aw Valley in 1968. Bass convinced Burkhart to come to take a look at the Snowbird site and Burkhart agreed to build an aerial tramway there the following year. What Bass DIDN’T tell Burkhart was that he wanted to build three chairlifts simultaneously – he dropped that bombshell sometime later.
Burkhart started working on the tower sites in the fall of 1970 and the Garaventa crew arrived in May of 1971. They worked six days a week on the tramway and on the chairlifts on Sunday. Werner Auer – who went on to have a long career with Doppelmayr USA – fabricated towers for the chairlifts at a rented yard in Salt Lake City. Although delivery of the tram and lift parts was complicated by a longshoreman strike that shut down ports on the west coast for part of the summer, the aerial tram and chairlifts – Gad One, Gad Two and Wilbere – opened on time for the inaugural season of Snowbird.
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Great read Had the pleasure of working with Werner and did not how he came to the US
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From Hans’s account, I think Werner may already have been in the US – i.e. he didn’t come as part of the Garaventa crew, who were all Swiss. Hans said that Werner had a girlfriend who was an American ski racer and she had been trying to find a job for Werner – I think she may have put the arm on Hans in California to put Werner to work and Hans hired him to work on the project in Snowbird.
Hans said Werner kind of got the short end of the stick, because he was sweltering in the Salt Lake City heat building towers while the other guys on Hans’s crew and the Garaventa crew were up in cool, comfortable Snowbird!
A few years later, Werner worked for Hans again repairing the Sq*aw Valley aerial tram after the 1978 accident. I met Werner in 1983 when he was with Doppelmayr and I was working for Hans building the Summit triple (a Doppelmayr detachable) at Mt. Bachelor, Oregon. Super nice guy!
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I will miss old Wilbere. I never rode it all too often, but I have good childhood memories. I had an instructor who decided we would ride every chairlift and count the number of chairs on each lift and write them down on a trail map. I wonder what happened to that map?
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Normally a new lift would be awesome thing but this change of the loading area seems mostly about getting more novice skiers or riders from Creekside over to Snowbird Center where there are more opportunities to monetize them. That’s fine I guess but it’s going to come at the cost of the easiest morning pow laps on the mountain, so that’s a bummer.
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In college we would be sure to come down off the top and hit Wilbere until it closed as it closed later than any other lift to get people back to other parts of the mountain. Super fun bumps down next to the lift line.
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The only time I ever used the Wilbere chair was when I was skiing there for a week in February 1998, the week the Cottonwoods got blasted with the pineapple express-Alta got more than 100 inches that week, including 60 in 24 hours. That morning, the canyon road was closed from av risk and Snowbird ran only the Tram and Wilbere, so I skied powder laps up and down Wilbere all morning. Man what a blast. the only negative was later, Superior had a big slide, burying two cars on the road, but they got them out alive.
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