- Heavenly reopens the Comet Express following a serious incident that sent five to the hospital but declines to specify what went wrong. From Heavenly: “Comet Express is open and operating normally. Safety is our top priority at Heavenly Mountain Resort, and we take this incident very seriously. Following a thorough inspection by the Heavenly team and the lift manufacturer, the issue was identified and resolved, and the lift was cleared for operations by the U.S. Forest Service.”
- A chair bail on the Lookout Express at Sun Valley cracks in two; the lift has since reopened and the resort declined a request for comment.
- As the Park City patrol strike drags on, most of the mountain remains closed, the COO posts a video message to frustrated guests and Vail looks to hire new patrollers.
- A piece of guidage fails on the only chairlift in the Yukon, leading to a rope evacuation.
- Sugarloaf’s SuperQuad misses some of the holiday week.
- Panama looks to build a six station, 6.6 km urban gondola.
- Sasquatch Mountain, BC’s triple chair will be down for the foreseeable future due to a maintenance issue.
- Mt. Hood Meadows’ Heather Canyon double is damaged by a falling tree.
- Mont Orford opens a pop up bar in a gondola cabin.
- Ski Martock, Nova Scotia closes for the week due to a lift issue.
- Waterville Valley formally seeks approval for a village to summit gondola and southeastward expansion.
Lift Blog 
Here’s a better view of the incident at Mt. Sima:
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that’ll jam things up nice and quick..
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SUN VALLEY. Doppelmayr has a maintenance instruction for conforming and non conforming carrier bails. There is a NDT requirement for the area of the bail that failed in the picture.
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PSBF0107 dated 4 May 2009 (which replaced an earlier bulletin dated 2004).
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Can you clarify things a bit more for those of us not quite as educated in this industry? Thanks NDT = something Destructive Testing? Maybe Non? What do you mean by conforming and non conforming, exactly? Thanks
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NDT does, in fact mean non-destructive testing. As for conforming versus non-conforming, years ago there was a bulletin directing us to do an inspection of all EC/EJ carriers and pull tape on certain dimensions (I’m not entirely sure where, I was a Poma mechanic then). Any bails that fell out of a range were to be rejected and replaced.
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The carrier seats bolts into the bail. If the bail had to be spread open to bolt in the seat, that put the the end of the bail gusset welds in tension. All manufactures like to have that area a natural or slight compression configuration. If that area is in tension it puts more stress on the end of the gusset weld when the chair bounces though hold down sheaves etc.
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Kirk, that sounds exactly like a bulletin we had from Poma.
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Why do the Sununus want to blow money on a Village to Green Peak top gondola at Waterville? How does that improve the day-to-day on hill experience for skiers and riders? How about using the money to replace some of the 6 slow as death Stadeli lifts that date back to 1966 when Tom Corcoran was the owner?
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Especially Green Peak…why they didn’t put in an HSQ in the first place is a mystery to me….
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Easy. They want to connect town, and therefore rental properties, to the skiing, without the need for people to get in a car. If they can boast a true “ski village” they can increase their appeal to a lot of customers.
For reference, here is a link to the MDP as originally submitted in 2019: cjxw4lj3rtj5eanjp8l5n9ec6k7x.pdf
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Waterville is still primarily a day trip area. It doesn’t have the mountain to really support a “ski village”. So the people ride the 21st century super wazoo Gondola only to get to ride only two HSQs and creep to the top of Green Peak on a <400fps triple that barely fits 3 skinny adults like all the Stadeli lifts.
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Well there will be new trails cut and then all of green peak will be lappable by the Gondola. Then they can also go over to the bubble. They’re essentially just copying Loon. But yeah they need to upgrade sunnyside and green peak into HSQs.
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Vail Resorts is apparently sending Colorado employees over to Park City because of the strike.
https://www.9news.com/article/sports/ski/vail-resorts-ski-patrollers-park-city-strike/73-4de7726a-59cb-4831-b501-b44ea357e906
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The patrol director from Mt. Sunapee is out there. Don’t know if there are any others from their east of the Mississippi areas.
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From what I’ve heard they’re encouraging managers and supervisors from all their properties (who are not part of the union) to head out to PC and fill roles.
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I believe the term for this is “volun-told”.
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Is this chair bail failure the same type as the one that caused basically every Yan triple carrier to end up with new large gussets welded onto them around 2007-2009? My understanding with that one is that it was under the taco, but they failed where the tabs that prevented bail rotation in the taco were welded on.
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Supposedly a tentative agreement has been reached between the PC patrol and Vail resorts.
https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/northern-utah/tentative-agreement-reached-to-end-debilitating-park-city-ski-patrol-strike
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