- Alta Sierra, California reopens for the first time in several years but has to rope evacuate a lift on day one.
- Indy Pass raises its base pass price, lowers the full pass price and adds Thrill Hills, ND; Pebble Creek, ID and Murray Ridge, BC plus several international and cross country outposts.
- Lost Valley, Maine would like to expand onto the opposite side of its access road with several lifts.
- Aspen Highlands looks to build a year-round gondola, replace Thunderbowl with a detachable and add an Apple Strudel lift.
- Doppelmayr USA partners with Ski Utah.
- Powder Mountain proposes replacing one carrier on Lightning Ridge with a carousel horse. Automated gates will prevent skiers from riding the horse.
- Two empty gondola cabins collide in Austria.
- Another avalanche takes out a lift tower in France.
- Mont-Sainte-Anne runs its gondola on diesel at reduced speed with less than 40 cabins out of 90 operational.
- McConkey’s at Park City has been down this week.
- Sugarbush pulls both Green Mountain Express and Super Bravo Express for a few days to complete repairs.
- Opposition emerges to the proposed gondola in Rock City, Georgia.
- An unseated passenger makes it all the way to the top of Bear Mountain’s longest detachable quad.
- Royal Gorge, Colorado debuts new glass floor gondolas tomorrow.
Lift Blog 
Seems like a lot of regulatory, technical, and operational challenges to put a carousel horse on a chairlift I bet there will be some people that will risk getting their pass pulled (or worse) to be the first one to post themselves riding it to tiktok or instagram.
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Hi Guys, Today we are attempting to ride the horse on Lightning Ridge challenge!!
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This has to be one of the weirdest things at a ski resort. Why even put a carousel horse? Seems like a pretty stupid idea.
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The proposed Aspen Highlands improvements are exactly what the resort needs. The mid-mountain blues are easier to lap, Thunderhead and Apple Strudel collectively provide redundancy for getting people out of the base, and pedestrian traffic can now access Cloud Nine. Honestly, Cloud Nine generates so much revenue that I would not be surprised if that alone pays for the gondola.
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The Apple Strudel lift will effectively be the resurrection of the Exhibition II lift.
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I generally agree. I was not at all expecting a gondola, but it does make sense for summer operations – they’re totally going to have weddings up at Cloud Nine now, and will have problems with the ultra-rich beginners drunk skiing at the end of the day. It seems odd from a skiing perspective, but upgrading TBowl and resurrecting Exhibition II as Appel Strudel makes tons of sense – I wonder if those mid mountain blues will be once again relabeled to greens (as they were originally). I always thought the current alignment of the Cloud Nine lift made very little sense. I’d much prefer the former alignments of Ex II and Olympic.
My only disappointment is no plan for expanding skiing into Loge Bowl. It’s not something we need, but it is something I want.
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They already have issues with drunk guest getting down from Cloud Nine at the end of the day.
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Right you are, I mistakenly forgot the word “less”. I often worked the top shack of the Cloud Nine lift and had to ski down at the end of the day through a mob of drunk tourists, few of which actually knew how to ski in the first place. Good times.
The earliest development plan for Highlands actually showed a base-to-summit gondola that was never built. This gondola is obviously not that, but a neat detail still.
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Ok who in their right mind thought putting a carousel horse on a ski lift was a good idea, let alone replacing a single carrier on a chairlift with one?
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McConkey’s is back up and running, Crescent is now broken.
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It happens :(
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This interview pretty much sums up the average big bear visitor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuhIj_Phx5I
Kind of crazy that they didn’t stop or slow the lift.
Those break over towers are at least 35 feet tall. I would have let go when the line gets low right above the showtime run.
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They probably didn’t know until the person was relatively close to the top. And at a certain point it makes more sense to just get them to the unload ramp, rather than delay (slow) or strand (stop) them away from a lower part of the lift (the terminals).
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The Aspen Highlands plan makes a ton of sense.
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RCR really needs to start investing in their chairlifts. Most of the chairlifts in their ski resorts are really old and worked out really hard. It doesn’t inspire confidence seeing the problems across their ski resorts.
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RCR needs to invest in everything… their lodging suffers from the same lack of maintenance and renewal as the ski hills. However, those issues don’t have the same safety risk as lift incidents.
I think in the case of Mont St Anne, I think it is seriously time for the Quebec authorities to look at a forced sale of the resort to a more competent operator. That many incidents isnt just bad luck, it reveals a culture of neglect and quick fixes that don’t rectify underlying issues.
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I could not agree more.
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Replacements or additions for lifts at each of the RCR resorts
Mont Sainte Anne: All 1980s CLD-260 era Detachables and La Tortue, not sure about the 2 T-Bars
Stoneham: The H Bubble Chair and I Quad
Nakiska: Silver and Bronze Chairs
Fernie: Deer, Elk, Boomerang, and new infill lifts
Kicking Horse: Catamount and Pioneer, new lifts going up to Stairway to Heaven
Kimberley: Helperlift for Northstar Express like in the early 2000s, Easter and Tamarack replacements
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do you know when is that due? Is this actually budgeted or just a master plan that could happen 39 years from now?
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That is just the lifts the people at RCR resorts would want replaced and upgraded
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The MSA ones will probably be all within the next 5 years. The rest are just dreams for now.
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Are DS grips known for slipping or has this just started happening because the gondolas that collided were using DS grips as well as the accident at Heavenly.
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