- Leitner-Poma places the only bid to modernize the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tram for $29 million, 60 percent more than the state’s $18 million estimate.
- A gondola is considered to connect Dawson City to a neighboring town across the Yukon River.
- This week’s viral video shows a skier inadvertently dragging a net up a chairlift in Poland.
- Val Saint-Côme retires the T-Bar that had a fatal accident last winter.
- Hatley Pointe, North Carolina won’t open this winter.
- Neither will Mt. Timothy, BC.
- Mt. Itasca, Minnesota says it needs to raise $100,000 to continue operating.
- Titus Mountain pays tribute to ski patroller Rick Finch, who is believed to have died when his backpack became entangled with a chair.
- Les Otten, designer of Sunday River and The Canyons, talks about his dream for 23 lifts at The Balsams, building America’s longest chairlift, the Killington-Pico interconnect and more.
- The Busch Gardens gondola in Tampa is set to reopen this weekend after four years closed.
- New York State seeks to force a sale of Toggenburg Mountain to an operator who will reopen it.
- Sugarbush addresses recent lift downtime.
- Whitefish’s President explains recent challenges with the Snow Ghost Express both in writing and video form.
- A guest allegedly spent the night stuck on the Heavenly gondola last night.
Lift Blog 
Man do I wish Les Otten was still activelly involved in the ski industry. If Alterra or Vail had him in a senior role, the possibilities would be endless for resort expansions, innovative lift projects, and higher re investment of profits into resort infrastructure. At least Boyne has continued his legacy in many of those areas, and fingers crossed the Balsams gets fully built out.
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Unfortunately I have to think the Balsams is a pipe dream. I get that he wants to build a second Sunday River but… there’s already Sunday River. The Balsams is a substantially worse location for both tourists and employees, doesn’t have decades of branding and momentum already, and would be built in a time that’s economically and ecologically much worse to try this sort of thing. If resort-ifying Jay Peak and redeveloping Newport couldn’t get off the ground, I have to think the Balsams plan would be even more difficult.
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You’re probably right. I have no background in how ski areas ebb and flow in the Northeast. Here in the Rockies, and most likely the PNW as well, if a new or redeveloped area were to open, I think that with some decent advertising they’d be a success. There’s so much demand here.
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Based on the crowds and the lodging crunch at the big Northeast resorts, there’s plenty of demand here too, but I think there are good reasons that we haven’t had any new resorts or even new terrain expansions in decades despite increased skier visits. The financial and logistical hurdles are huge, and get bigger with each passing year.
I can’t stress enough how this place is just so remote, even by the standards of New England ski country. Montrealers, Bostonians and New Yorkers all have big-mountain options that are 1-2 hours closer. Would the skiing or the amenities convince people to make the extra drive? I dunno, looks like lots of skiable acreage but just a bunch of ~1200 vertical ft. pods strung together to me. At least Sugarloaf, Saddleback and Jay have the terrain to make the destination thing work.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some kind of Balsams return happens, we’ve seen a few other small areas make more improbable comebacks in the recent years. But the massive multi-peak expansion, I don’t think so. At this point it’s been a full 10 years Otten’s been pushing this dream and we haven’t gotten very far…
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man it sucks to see all these small ski areas close down to the lack of snow, climate change is a b*tch
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Agreed. “sigh.” Is it really time for dry slopes to be at every ski area?
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Hatley Pointe not opening is not a bad winter issue. New owners just bought it this summer and are bringing the outdated, neglected infrastructure up to snuff and couldn’t pull off their aggressive plan. Especially the basically all new snowmaking system, but really everything it seems. NC is like Ohio, skiing only exist because of snowmaking and the product is only as good as your system. Natural snowfall is pretty irrelevant.
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I wonder if that person who was stranded on the heavenly gondola did did it intentionally hoping for a payday?
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Regardless of guest intent it is the operators’ responsibility to make sure the lift is empty.
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Dig out the old Movie Frozen😨
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Oh, yeah, that movie shot on the defunct Wildcat lift at Snowbasin.
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To recap the incident, per the KCRA article (https://www.kcra.com/article/heavenly-ski-resort-woman-stuck-gondola-15-hours/46557458?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot), seems to be: this individual got separated from her group, and being too tired to ski down, was directed to the gondola. She got on, and then the gondola was shut down for the night. And this individual was stranded overnight because she had no phone with which to contact her group, and was unable to draw attention from late night workers down below because she was in the enclosed space of a gondola cabin.
(Sidenote, the fact that she didn’t have a way to contact her group is the thing that really bothers me. I thought basic 101 of skiing/boarding with a group is that you should have a way to contact one another if you get separated, and more importantly, plan a spot to meet if you should get separated like a chairlift or a base area.)
The question I have is: what are the procedures when making sure a gondola is clear of riders before shutting it down? I know that with chairlifts, it’s a mix of three practices: flipping up seats, marking a last chair with a cone, and/or having a lift operator/patroller ski the lift line (if it’s a lift where this is doable). But what it’s like with gondolas?
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Heavenly has been operating the Gondola, summer and winter for 23 years. They have a procedure that has been working. One little communication breakdown and you can end up with someone stuck or worse.
Obviously they better review and update there procedure given this operational failure.
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At my resort we call last cabin at bottom and top. After that no one gets on and operators are trained to stand outside and look in each cabin as the doors close. Middle station operators also know each last cabin and make sure no one gets on behind them. If someone were to “sneak on” they should at least be noticed and new last cabin communicated.
We have a second fail safe because we park cabins in the winter. If someone ever got stuck, they’d be stranded in a 70 degree warehouse :)
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This is typically not a failure of procedures. They are well established. These days it seems to be a distracted operator who is not paying attention to every cabin or chair. Cellphones are the bane of our existence. Refer to distracted driving for similar examples.
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Sugarbush is doing it the right way with direct honest communication about what is happening with operations. Good or bad they are transparent with their customers and set a good example for operators on mega passes.
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They even mentioned our lift maintenance training programme we (Colorado Mountain College) put on with Alterra last spring.
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Maybe they will reconsider a gondola for Cannon….
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If they replace the Tram II with a gondola, they will lose one of the main things that draws people to Cannon instead of Loon, Bretton Woods, and Vermont in the summer: the novelty of riding a tram. Also, with a gondy, they would have to replace the entire thing. All they want are new cabins and new drive machinery. Everything else but the paint is fine.
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This will sound like pot-stirring, but I’m honestly curious, as someone who absolutely hates being inside of trams: how big of a draw is the big dangly box? I’d love to ski Cannon for its harshness and history, but I’d avoid riding the tram. And in the summer, chairs are way more comfortable. Trams feel unsteady and as though the walls are closing in. Better to be on the floaty floaty couch, face in the breeze like a 90s commercial for some minty-fresh chewing gum.
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The Tram is primarily a summer operation for Cannon – it runs seven days a week in summer, and two days a week in winter. Non-skiers are less likely to want to take a chair in summer or in bad weather (which they might with a tram ride). Some people have difficultly loading and unloading a moving lift, unlike a tram which is stationary.
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Also, the Tram cabins can get somewhat warm on the way up-even with the windows open-while the rides on Peabody and Cannonball are frigid. To make this worse, the trails “Big Rink” and “Easy Rink” (in reality, they’re “Big Link” and such), as their nicknames may suggest, get horribly skied off by midday. Also, even at the speed they run it at, the Tram is still as fast as some high-speed quads (3.9-4.1 m/s). If they wanted to, they could run it up to 10 m/s, but that requires more electricity…whose cost recently tripled for Cannon, according to SkiNewEngland.net.
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as someone who lived in New Hampshire for three years, the residents would of course love a tram to return, but realistically everyday Cannon skiers rather have a Gondola at this point for convenience. I agree the Tram does look way better, especially in the summer, but that price tag is steep.
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I have never heard someone at Cannon say that they want the gondy. Usually, people prefer the chairlifts.
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Yes, but for the tram line a Gondola would be more convenient. I agree that they rather have chairlifts usually, but this section is not very skiable anyway, mainly just used to get up the mountain.
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Spoiler, a new gondola, depending on options would be just as expensive if not more.
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Been following this story for a bit as it’s an iconic lift but I found it funny that a bunch of state government employees decided what the estimate was for replacement before getting any bids. Ropeways are not cheap, if they were everyone would have one. I find it funny when people balk at lift prices, but the truth is if you spend the money up front (and have someone who knows what they are doing spec it out) you will get a very nice machine that likely is going to keep operating for 50+ years. Ropeways make money, ski areas don’t always, if it’s a big draw in the summer time likely it will pay itself off relatively quickly.
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Actually, they used a 2 year old budgetary bid from Doppelmayr to determine the replacement value. They also determined that the towers were reusable, but required the bidder to do an engineering analysis on them. Bandaids are cheaper, I guess.
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