- An avalanche crushes a six pack terminal in France.
- Doppelmayr’s latest customer magazine focuses on North America overtaking Europe as the company’s largest market and achieving more than 50 percent market share in our highly competitive region.
- Two bears climb a very tall tower on Steamboat’s new Wild Blue Gondola.
- A prototype MND Orizon detachable is under construction at the factory and expected to be operational in early summer for testing. The first customer installation may be in Uzbekistan.
- Sun Peaks resumes construction on the West Bowl Express after a winter break.
- Homewood seek approval for its Madden Gondola in a modified alignment.
- Huff Hills, North Dakota to close following a lease dispute with the mountain’s landowner.
- Tenney Mountain eyes replacing Hornet with a detachable lift.
- Alterra’s CEO discuses lift construction costs and more in a wide ranging interview.
- Plans show four major lifts at the planned Stagecoach Mountain Ranch near Steamboat.
- Legoland New York’s new gondola appears mostly complete with the first Diamond EVO cabins in North America.
- Quebec Ski Resorts Company says if it acquired the lease to Mont-Sainte-Anne, it would install a 10 passenger Doppelmayr gondola in 2025 and two detachable chairlifts in 2026. Resorts of the Canadian Rockies insists the mountain is not for sale.
- The Park City planning Commission delays a decision again on Deer Valley’s proposed Lift 7, citing wildlife concerns.
- Park City’s upcoming Sunrise Gondola will be constructed by Leitner-Poma with Vail Resorts’ first direct drive.
- An unnamed New Hampshire resort is looking for CTEC quad chairs for an upcoming relocation.
Lift Blog 
What do you mean Sunrise at Park City will be LPA’s first direct drive? Big Burn at Snowmass is a LPA direct drive, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the only one
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I worded it poorly and fixed it now. Vail Resorts’ first direct drive.
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I heard that Janek passed recently can any LE people confirm.
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Yes that is correct. We had a celebration of live last Saturday. At least 50 Yan/LE lift builders and shop employees attended along with many ski area dignitaries.
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Oh no! He was a visionary, to be sure, pushing the boundaries of what is possible. If only he had tested his ideas more thoroughly. May he rest in peace, and may the remaining lifts of his keep spinning for years to come.
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Interesting you chose a picture of that Lift. We built that in 2022 re-located from Mt. Rose. It’s the last Yan lift built.
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Sad day in the lift world for sure, even if the latest designs were unsafe, Yan’s from the late 70s and early 80s are some of my favorite lifts out there! I especially love the “Y” lifting frames.
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God Speed, Janek.
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Legoland’s gondola has to be one of the shortest gondolas in the world.
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So if I’m understanding this correctly, Deer Valley cannot build their bubble six pack and two fixed quads this summer until the Park City Planning Commission says they ca, can somebody elaborate?
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It’s only Lift 7, the bubble six-pack, that requires approval from Park City as it’s within the boundaries of the city. And as I understand it, that lift wouldn’t open until next year. The 3 lifts for this summer – Lift 3 (which is also a bubble six pack) and the 2 fixed quads, are located in Wasatch County and have already been approved.
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So Alterra still has some time to try to further appeal the issue / escalate it up to guys at higher levels of government with the authority to override the NIMBYs.
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I watched the video of the Park City planning commission meeting this week about Lift 7 at Deer Valley and it took everything in me to remain calm. DV has provided all the necessary documents and studies for this project, they even did an on-site tour of where the lift would go, and still these idiot, brain dead planning commissioners aren’t satisfied and want “more data” as one of them put it.
One of the things they are concerned about is “widlife migration routes”. Um, do they not realize that a lift is up in the air and animals can still move about on the ground the same as if a lift was not there?
They also kept mentioning “guest safety” and were worried about how close the bottom terminal will be to the junction of several trails and that it could cause skiers to run into each other. Despite the fact that both Ecosign and SE Group, world renowned resort planners whose job is to figure out the best alignment, have both signed off on the project.
You could easily tell how angry and frustrated the Deer Valley representatives were in the meeting having to deal with these complete morons that run the planning commission. After what happened with the lift upgrades at Park City and now this, somebody needs to wake these people up in Park City government and tell them that they live in a world class ski town, that development is inevitable, and they need to get off their high horse.
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It really makes you wonder if Park City even wants to be a ski town anymore
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Too many NIMBY’s with too much power is what i see.
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Vail Resorts and the PCMR management definitely extend their sympathies to Deer Valley. The same NIMBYs who blocked Eagle 6 and Silverlode 8 (and are the reason Whistler-Blackcomb got those lifts instead) are basically now turning to doing the same tactics with Deer Valley.
You could easily tell how angry and frustrated the Deer Valley representatives were in the meeting having to deal with these complete morons that run the planning commission. After what happened with the lift upgrades at Park City and now this, somebody needs to wake these people up in Park City government and tell them that they live in a world class ski town, that development is inevitable, and they need to get off their high horse.
It’s clear that what these people want is nothing that could affect their property values / quality of life / whatever.
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it’s staggering how bad the town of park city has been with letting the ski resorts update their infrastructure. I’d highly recommend this article below from the new owner of the local park city paper. He’s spot on.
https://www.parkrecord.com/opinion/we-can-do-better-why-park-city-mountains-infrastructure-is-aging-and-how-to-fix-it/
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While Vail Resorts is an easy scapegoat, and there are literally people on the social media site formerly known as Twitter regularly Tweeting at me that the solution is I step up and buy Park City Mountain, I’m sorry to tell you no white knight will save us because Vail Resorts is not the root of the problem.
So what is?
It turns out, Vail Resorts not only supports but actually proposed most of the ideas I listed above. Why can’t they do them? Because they are limited by an outdated development agreement with the city that was struck with Powdr back in 1998 and hasn’t been updated since. That’s 25 years — a quarter of a century — since we’ve revisited how Park City Mountain can be upgraded and maintained.
Want to add snowmaking? Nope, can’t do any that, as it wasn’t originally contemplated in the development agreement. Want to rebuild the Summit House? Nope, same problem. Want to make the Town Lift not be an 18-minute slog that makes you think about jumping off at Tower 16, after which there’s another 12 minutes of ride and yet only another 100 feet of vertical rise? Sorry, not possible until the City Council approves a new development agreement.
You can be angry at the four people who sued to stop the upgrade of Silverlode and Eagle — and don’t get me wrong, every time I wait in a line at Silverlode I mumble angry epithets in each of their names — but the real villain here is the City Council. The people suing aren’t making it easier, but their pedantic point is that Vail Resorts must stick to the antiquated development agreement.
That development agreement isn’t etched in stone, however. It’s a contract. It can be updated — pretty easily, actually. So it’s the City Council and their failure to do so who are literally letting our mountain’s infrastructure rot.
Incidentally, it’s fair to point fingers at the Planning Commission as well, but the City Council appoints the Planning Commission, so the council is the real root of the problem. If we had a predictable, reliable process, maybe we could live with a quarter-century-old document, but we don’t.
The good news is that these are solvable problems, requiring only a pittance of political will and an ounce of courage. Just look at the new, incredible terrain and the extensive snowmaking about to open at Deer Valley, which because of MIDA and being almost entirely located in Wasatch County isn’t subject to Park City’s broken bureaucracy. Or even the Canyons side of the same resort, also operated by Vail Resorts, which has had significant snowmaking improvements, got a complete gondola cabin upgrade last summer, and is getting another new gondola to replace the Sunrise Lift next season because it is subject to Summit County’s solutions-oriented approach, not Park City’s paralyzed politics.
It’s time for the City Council to take our failing resort infrastructure seriously. It’s time for them to sit down with Park City Mountain and put together a new development agreement that allows them to do many, if not all, of the no-brainer upgrades outlined above.
If the City Council puts in place a visionary plan and Vail Resorts still doesn’t invest in the mountain, then I’ll be back on the “Vail Sucks” bandwagon and so should you.
But I’ll bet that isn’t what happens. Vail Resorts, after all, had two shiny new lifts delivered and sitting in a parking lot ready to be installed. They’ve shown they’re willing to invest, only to be stymied by outdated bureaucracy. Now we need our elected representatives to update the development agreement to allow Vail Resorts to prove they are committed to investing in our community, our mountain and its infrastructure.
Until then, starting today, The Park Record will be publishing a counter of days that have passed where the City Council failed to do the right thing and put in place a new development agreement that allows the mountain we love to stop rotting
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(I was quoting the part of the article that stood out to me.)
I think this issue is also prevalent in places like Aspen.
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Be careful what you wish for.
I’m an east coast guy and haven’t been to Park City/Canyons in many decades so I don’t have a dog in that fight, but I do have experience as a regional planner in the tiny state of Vermont, and at various points I have been part of the permit/planning process involving four ski areas in the southern part of our state. I also work for Vail Resorts as a ski and ride instructor.
Development plans are important guides to how a resort will develop. They represent a unified agreement between interested parties at a fixed point in time, often adjudicated by a regulator.
Over time things conditions, and the experience of initial development often illuminates problems or oversights in the original plan. Those older plans should be updated to reflect the latest knowledge, as well as issues that the community wishes to address. But updating a master plan or other broad development document opens the entire process up to review, and there are often unexpected concerns or advocacy.
When you open a plan to fix this, you’ll often also be challenged with advocacy to fix that, and that, and that, and that, and etc.
Many of the issues raised will be legitimate, and the developers or regulators can find comfortable solutions. But some of the issues will be driven by pretense. Frequently the opposition has a problem with one of the parties, or something that happened long ago or is happening now which is well outside the review process, but that will drive their nit-pick advocacy on a regulated issue. The “anti’s” dig their heels in, and while everybody is fighting over an issue within the domain of the development plan, the fight is really being driven by something else entirely. That often gets viewed as NIMBY-ism, but it’s more than that. It’s real people who feel jilted by a developer or process, and they are righteously pissed off. When the developer focuses on the permitting or planning issue to the exclusion of the human issue, they exacerbate the underlying problem.
I don’t know what the drivers are out there in Utah, but I do know from direct experience that Vail Resorts is terrible at permitting and planning. They tend to centralize and understaff those functions, and operate far removed from the local people who feel aggrieved. In my experience the Vail Resorts team often doesn’t know what’s in local plans or permits, and doesn’t have a handle on what the community wants, or what potential opponents might feel aggrieved by. To that mess, add regulators (town boards, planning commissions, review boards, etc), who do not understand the resort business, and you have a messy mess.
It’s far better to approach an outdated development plan by first carefully engaging with the community and identifying opposition, and understanding what they really want. The “NIMBY’s rarely want no development (think of those as BANANA’s – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), but they might be concerned about getting to the grocery store on the Saturday of Presidents Week, or maybe they are hunters or animal lovers and worry about a specific travel corridor. There are solutions to those issues, but it takes a developer/resort that understands the local community and is there every day.
When I look at the general opposition to Vail Resorts, much of it is uninformed nonsense, but there is enough reality behind the complaints to build a powerful coalition of opponents.
My suggestions from afar: Start with the City Council and elect people who understand the resort AND the opposition, and who want to support reasonable development. Vail Resorts needs to work directly with opponents and build solutions long before a proposed plan is filed. Indeed, Vail Resorts needs to build a local permits and planning team at each of their properties and treat each site as a one-off community, and not generically ramrod their proposals through a surprised population. The problems begin with people-conflict, and Vail Resorts needs to deal with it as such – locally, and well in advance of any firm proposal.
From everything I’ve read, the Park City area isn’t ready to consider a new development plan. Both the city and Vail Resorts need to do massive community groundwork before opening the existing plan to full review. Failure to lay a cooperative foundation will only make the adjudication of the next plan more difficult, expensive, and unpredictable.
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Alterra keeps canceling lift projects for other resorts and sending the lifts to Deer Valley. I hope this project gets blocked.
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Wait really? Do you have specific examples?
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The NH resort looking for chairs could be Pat’s Peak? Supposedly, they are looking at a used quad replacement for Hurricane.
https://www.newenglandskiindustry.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1068
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I would agree – from the NESI post, Pats Peak already owns the Lake Compounce Quad and most likely want to use it to replace the Hurricane lift. That quad is a ’97 CTEC.
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The Komperdellbahn! Wow. I skied Sergfaus Fiss Ladis for a wek in January. That lift is sensational. So nice to see it here int he video, Peter. It is connected to another gondola at the top.
Where could Doppermayr have a gondola like this in the U.S and Canada?
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Wow, lots of squabble over some chairlifts…….
Ya’ll, just let nature be nature. We only have so much of it.
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