Washington’s oldest detachable chairlift will be retired this spring to make way for a next-generation high speed quad. Crystal Mountain’s Rainier Express, or “Rex” for short, dates back to 1988, when a group of local shareholders purchased two Poma chairlifts for the mountain. By the mid-1990s, Boyne Resorts acquired Crystal and replaced nearly every lift between 1997 and 2014. Rex endured, however, and has now carried skiers for 37 seasons.
Alterra Mountain Company bought Crystal in 2018 and Rainier Express 2.0 will be their first lift project at Washington’s largest ski area. “Referred to locally as ‘REX,’ this high-speed quad was the first detachable chairlift built in Washington State,” noted Crystal. “Since its construction in 1988, it has represented Crystal Mountain’s pioneering spirit in big-mountain, skier-focused operations and investments.”
Leitner-Poma will build the new high speed quad and expects to break ground in June. The new lift will carry skiers 1,600 vertical feet to the Summit House in under five minutes. For Rex’s final weekend May 2nd-4th, Crystal plans a rail jam, photo contest and 1988 themed party. Most of the old lift will be scrapped and chairs auctioned to the public to benefit the Northwest Avalanche Center. The new Rainier Express is expected to be completed in December 2025.
Lift Blog 
Surprised they’re not going with a six pack … though I wonder if Crystal’s CCC is more limited by access road / parking?
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This is disgusting, but the bigger issue is sewer and water treatment capacity. By order of the Washington Department of Ecology, they can’t add any more building space (or presumably skier capacity?) until they build a new water treatment facility or vastly increase the capacity of their existing system. That’s a big investment they’ll need to make.
It’s one of the reasons Mountain Commons took three years (!) to build and open.
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They did build a new treatment plant a few years ago. Is that one not big enough?
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It’s worth digging into in greater detail, but that was the scuttlebutt. At the very least, they are frequently violating the conditions of their wastewater permitting.
More info from the Department of Ecology here: Paris – Facility Summary
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nope! It was built to service current capacities. Some flaw in disclosure during the sale to ALTERRA occurred. That is why the 100 person slopeside hotel has not been built!
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Piggybacking on Mark’s comment, they have to store a few days worth of, um, stuff, in tanks at the top of B Lot. FloHawks goes up from Puyallup multiple times a week to pump. Source wishes to remain anonymous, but I trust the veracity of the information implicitly.
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Crystal’s former GM said on a podcast a couple years back that there isn’t enough physical space to fit a 6 at the summit
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The unload terminal at the top is very narrow. On the left, there’s a small downslope for folks who have unloaded at the gondola (or who hiked up to the restaurant or to ski patrol or bathrooms). On the right, there’s a small shack for the lift operators, and beyond that, it drops off to a cat track and the Green Valley bowl.
It would be hard to fit 50% more chair width into the limited space, perhaps impossible.
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I thought maybe they’d do a 6 pack for extra wind resistance, but I guess not. No big deal.
Unlike the Chair 2 replacement at Alptental, I’m not sentimental about this one. The old Rex is tired; this should good for reliability.
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Wow time flies – I’m still remembering Riblet’s C2 “Iceberg Ridge” lift along this line like it was yesterday…
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…while reminiscing, remember the old Campbell Basin fixed double that left just south of Rex? It now lives and still runs at Blacktail Mountain near Kalispell…
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I remember the full-length version of Chair 5, since we’re reminiscing.
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Thinking about this project a bit more, I think it would have been maybe more beneficial for Alterra to relocate Sunshine Express at Steamboat to Crystal to replace REX. The line equipment could have more than likely been reused too.
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newer means more years of operation. And Rex, along with Silver Queen and Chinook, make up the core lift network for the “main face” of Crystal. So it will get plenty of hours. If the slightly less in-demand Green Valley had been built in the 80’s, a refurbished relocation might have been an option. But Rex iis too central and makes up a good chunk of the terrain people want to lap at Crystal, and functions as a key connector.
And Alterra hasnt worked with an exclusive manufacturer to come up with a strategy to both buy new lifts and refurbished and relocate old ones like Boyne has. In fact, only Boyne has done that. I’m sure a big reason it’s viable to relocate something like 6-shooter to Sugarloaf are lifts like the flagship new 8 pack and tram at Big Sky. Alterra operates a wider range of mountains, and buys from LPA and Doppelmayr. They don’t have a singular mountain they’ve been absolutely dumping cash into with one builder, allowing deals to be made at their handful of lesser mountains.
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Rex is older but Forest Queen is in more immediate need of replacement. Every day I ride that chair there seems to be some extended downtime. That chair isn’t in good shape and it gets a lot more skier traffic than Rex
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Chair 9 is still fully supported by the manufacturer while chair 10 is increasingly difficult to service. 9 seems in pretty good shape to my professional eye; it has some of the usual electronic weirdness of a twenty-five-year-old machine but nothing outlandish. I would also argue that chair 10 still gets a ton of skier traffic- maybe a bit less now that the gondola is there but there’s still a bunch of terrain that is better served by lapping 10 and not going all the way down.
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Are you sure the “downtime” isn’t just a result of misloads? FQ is the biggest intermediate pod on the mountain, so it’s always slammed and misloads are quite common.
Maybe a loading carpet and better gates could help alleviate some issues, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to replace it. Really the thing that would help FQ the most would be another intermediate pod elsewhere on the mountain––Bullion Basin, perhaps.
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I wrote a reply and then it got deleted.
Good point about Rex no longer being supported by the manufacturer. I’m not trying to argue that Rex should not be replaced, it is quite an old and heavily used lift (although I think it runs quite well for its age). Maybe they can send the old parts up to Castle Mountain in Alberta to be used as spares for that mechanically similar lift they just got from Sunshine.
My point is that it would be a greater positive impact on guest experience to ensure that Forest Queen, which I’m fairly certain is the most popular/most heavily trafficked lift on the mountain, is running smoothly at all times. I’m not a professional in the lift industry so I’m not sure whether an extensive overhaul and maintenance schedule could be as effective as a replacement. I’d be happy with them continuing to use the current lift if they can get it running better.
Anecdotally it seems like every day I take more than a lap or two on that chair, it stops for some extended period of time that cannot be explained by a misload/unload. It is an old chair in its own right, almost 30 years old next season. Last year we were stuck on the chair for an hour and the mountain sent ski patrollers under the chair to tell everyone to hang in there. Another day I watched from the lodge as it appeared there were issues with the diesel generator, it would fire up and belch black smoke and the lift would run for 10-20 seconds before it would shut off again for a few minutes. The lift spent a good chunk of the afternoon running in that state. It’s frequently running at reduced speed as well.
Given that it’s a very popular lift and not redundant (there’s no other way to Chair 6/High Campbell), and that it serves the highest quality intermediate and ski school terrain on the mountain, I hope that Alterra makes it a priority to get that chair running consistently by one way or another in the near future. My concern is that by investing in the Rex replacement and their upgrades at the base area, Alterra will have reached the limit of capital they want to invest in Crystal in the near term and Forest Queen will continue operating in this inconsistent state until some major failure and they have they have to close it for an extended period midseason.
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I agree, having 9 running consistently is key to that side of the hill. Removing old chair 5 without a replacement wasn’t the best idea in my book, but that was two owners ago and is water under the bridge.
I know some of the issues with 9; some were electronic that they solved, another was a blown electric motor. Can’t speak to the diesel activity you saw except to say that any time an emergency stop occurs on a Doppelmayr, the diesel is shut down. My own lift is the same.
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I think a gondola from the base area to Campbell Basin following the old chair 5 lift line was in a recent master plan, although I’m not sure how realistic their plans to build that lift are. Maybe I’m confusing it with the mount rainier gondola or maybe those plans became what is currently the gondola, I don’t remember.
Do you know which lifts at Crystal run off diesel power and which are connected to the grid? I don’t think Crystal is like Baker where every lift is running off a generator, but they do have a lot of winter power outages up there and it often sounds like a lot of lifts are running an engine.
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Hans – all lifts at Crystal are grid-connected. The detaches run on diesel during the not-infrequent power outages the drainage and Enumclaw/Buckley downstream experience during all them rad NE Pacific cyclones, while the fixed grips can run on the PSE generator (located a little below F Lot). The generator can power either the detaches or everything else including Greenwater, but not everything all at once.
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Lp does still support older systems. They do have tire conversion kits that they put on some falcons and they can upgrade the controls from the “Christmas Tree” to the new LPA controls. They are doing that to Angel/ Stagecoach and they did that to American flyer(t) at Copper mtn .
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Hopefully the lift will be built up the old chair 2 line ,Sunnyside, is a better skier fall line .A replacement lift is good.
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It needs to be accessible from 11, which old 2 was not. The new terminal would have to be down in the void between Upper Skid/Deerfly and Lower Bull, and would require some fancy skating for anyone not skilled at carrying speed over that flat cat track. Second, the top of old 2 was right about where the top of the gondola is now. The most likely scenario is direct replacement. (Especially given all the wetlands around Midway, which would likely come with extensive red tape were a relocation to be desired.) Thankfully Sunnyside can be skied without a chair riding audience.
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Sighs very loudly and extremely loudly and very noticeably.
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