- 19 deluxe cabins arrive stateside for South Carolina’s only gondola.
- Ragged Mountain goes on the market.
- Leitner-Poma posts an ad hiring lift installers for a project at Crystal Mountain, Washington.
- A widow sues Breckenridge following her husband’s fatal fall from the Zendo chair, alleging “an unreasonable amount of snow and ice accumulation.”
- Purgatory acknowleges belt tightening on the mountain as it renegotiates long term debt.
- The Forest Service shows two Mission Ridge expansion proposals as canceled.
- The Forest Service releases a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Grand Targhee’s proposed expansion including three pared down alternatives.
- Big Sky raises $150,000 for charity selling Explorer chairs.
- An idea to connect two Seattle neighborhoods by gondola resurfaces.
- Leitner teases a “New Era of Ropeways” coming at Interalpin.
- Relations sour between the Town of Mountain Village and Telluride Ski Resort owner Chuck Horning with the Town Manager giving a lengthy speech about problems at the resort.
- Skeetawk, Alaska’s only chairlift shuts down for a multi-week repair.
- Stowe’s FourRunner quad has been out of service all week.
- Vail reopens Riva Bahn after a two week gearbox rebuild.
- Kicking Horse’s gondola remains closed indefinitely; the resort will transport gear up to Stairway to Heaven free of charge but guests still have to walk there.
- Vail Resorts presents its strategic vision to investors.
Lift Blog 
I accidentally hit publish on this one before it was quite finished. Sorry to those of you who got a half completed version by email.
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Hoping Crystal’s looking to replace REX, though I’m not really holding my breath with the number of false starts that project has had. They also just announced they’ll be open till Memorial Day, which could complicate things.
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Complicate, but not necessarily delay. They often run just Chair 3 for skiing. My personal hope is Old Chair 7, but that hasn’t been approved unless I missed something.
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Here’s my mostly uninformed theory: this is a Rex rebuild, not a full replace, with new terminals, rope and carriers and the same towers. Which is why we don’t know more publicly about it at this late date.
The thing about the Kelly’s Gap lift on the MDP is that yes, it’s out of base capacity, but that’s it. It doesn’t really give you a lappable terrain pod (you going to put snowmaking in Left Angle Trees?). The cat maintenance shop is in the way. They would want facilities to go with it. We’d know already if that’s what this project was.
I don’t think that the Kelly’s Gap lift is going to get built frankly. I think they will upgrade the gondola if they want to add capacity out of the base. (Also it might cut a lift line through Right Angle which would make me sad.)
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Hopefully the new lift at Crystal is the long-awaited Kelly’s Gap Express. The profile looked nicely steep on their MDP, and it could help alleviate base congestion.
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Here’s Crystal’s Master Plan. It has a few replacements/expansions planned. I would love to see the Kelley’s Gap Express become a reality.
MERGED FINAL Crystal ROD.doc
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Vail’s “strategic” vision slides are no different than the junk they’ve been feeding us during the Leadership Summit at Keystone for the past 6-8 years.
At least it was funnier when Shapiro, Barkin, Campbelll were around.
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Personal gripes about Mr. Horning aside, the Telluride speech rings true as pervasive across much (not all) of the industry right now:
The result being that the most conscientious people get fed up and leave the industry, thereby reinforcing the downward spiral.
Am I on to something, or have I simply been sniffing cold galvi for too long?
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For Telluride specifically, I think the underlying issue is that its status among premier ski resorts has fallen since Chuck Horning bought the resort in 2004. Most of that decline has occurred since the Great Recession, and that delayed onset indicates a lack of investment rather than blatant mismanagement. The most obvious areas are lifts and snowmaking. Sunshine Express is really old and should run much faster with newer tech given its length, many locals park at Carhenge and it is embarrassing that the only lift out of there is an antiquated double, and the Apex terrain pod is completely underutilized due to it being a slow triple. The latter issue, snowmaking, is arguably a bigger problem with Telluride’s snowfall being more variable than some of its peers, and its mere 15% coverage is well-below Ajax (33%), Taos (50%), and Beaver Creek (33%).
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I don’t think you’ve been sniffing cold galvi too long. I’ve seen this as well. My resort, fortunately, does not fall into most of these categories. The 4-season resort model is something all of us larger areas do, but I suspect that many subsidise it with winter ops (as we did for years until summer finally became self-funding). That takes away from being able to invest in employees, infrastructure, and winter, which still is the overwhelming majority of a ski area’s income.
Deferred maintenance is definitely a slippery slope. ‘We can’t afford it this year’ becomes ‘well, we didn’t do it last summer, and nothing happened, so let’s continue to put it off’. It’s one thing if it’s a couple of broken windows in a terminal (although that’s an indicator to the public) but doing the bare minimum year after year will bite you after a while.
I think most of us in this line of work fit into your last two points. I have also seen this around the industry. None of us want things to go south so we’ll do what we can to avoid that regardless of whether management is behind it or directing it. We did recently get a ‘retention raise’ aimed at keeping us grey-hairs around, so our management was proactive there and I’ll take it. I have heard here and elsewhere that that is rare.
I don’t know too much about what’s been going on down south; I used to know a couple of mechanics at Telluride but they’ve moved on. It sounds like the relationship between TelSki and Mountain Village has frayed (not sure about the actual town of Telluride). I haven’t seen too much to tell me that their current ownership is neglecting the area but it’s been a while since I’ve been there. Some of the gripes sound like folks who are unhappy that things like lift replacements and snowmaking aren’t happening as fast as they want.
$0.02
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Re: Mission Ridge, as recently as a month ago they were putting out that the expansion was moving forward:
https://kpq.com/matt-neubauer-the-new-gm-of-mission-ridge-ski-board-resort/
“As for for his predecessor, he hasn’t vanished to parts unknown. According to Scrivanich, ‘Jorgensen will continue to be involved in Mission Ridge’s planned expansion, ensuring a seamless transition and ongoing growth for the resort.'”
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