- New York’s state-owned ski areas report record visitation – a nine percent increase from last season.
- Meadowlark, Wyoming sells to a Florida hedge fund.
- Hermon Mountain, Maine sells to new local owners.
- Hawaii’s legislature passes a complete ban on aerial lifts under any private entity anywhere in the state.
- An interesting but imperfect analysis of European vs. North American lift construction economics. (video version)
- Powder Mountain removes Doodle from this summer’s lift program.
- A GoFundMe is launched for the mechanic who survived a deadly work chair detachment at Mt. Hood Skibowl.
- Little Switzerland auctions Riblet doubles from historic Lift 1/2.
- An Oregon county solicits proposals for a new operator of closed Spout Springs.
- Outgoing detachable quads from the Yellowstone Club may head to Red Lodge and Lost Trail.
- The haul rope is already on Angel Fire’s upcoming Angel Express.
- Anakeesta to open the Crystal Express a week from today – the first gondola in the world with all glass cabins.
- The cost of Steamboat’s proposed transit center and base detachable gondola balloons to $75 million.
- An update on Boone’s Ridge in Kentucky, set to include an MND gondola in phase two.
- Bogus Basin plans to replace and realign Showcase within the next couple years.
- The Park City Planning Commission and public express positivity on Eagle and Silverlode replacements with a final vote possible on May 27th.
- Juneau elected officials to vote Monday whether to end the city’s used gondola nightmare.
- Nordic Valley says goodbye to Crocket.
- Lively, Ontario to replace its Samson T-Bar with a Doppelmayr platter from a nearby lost ski area.
- The Utah Department of Transportation acquires a parcel for the possible Little Cottonwood Gondola base station.
Lift Blog 
The Snowstash article paints it like all the resorts in North America are owned by Vail! I’m no Vail-lover, but they need to recognize that there are other players (Alterra, Powdr and a whole whack of independents) in play. Sure capex lags, but allot of that also plays into government regulations and funding – look at Quebec for a model of the public/private partnerships.
They lost me with: The third is the hardest: the cultural and geographic foundation doesn’t exist. Whistler functions as a summer destination because Whistler Village predated the ski resort, because it sits 90 minutes from Vancouver along a coastal mountain corridor already used by hikers and cyclists, and because it has three decades of reputation-building behind it.
Ummm no. Whistler Mountain came first – the Village was a planned response under the BC Government’s new (at the time) Resort Municipality designation, specifically designed to service the ski area.
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I think they are referring to the fact that other ski towns were there for some other reason. eg mining, and skiing came after. Whistler was always going to be a ski town, right from the beginning.
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I don’t see why it’s a problem that North America builds lifts for ~$10M less than Europe. Constantly taking your skis off to lap a gondola is just not how Americans want to ski.
And maybe this is just me, but in most of the US, bubble chairs just feel kinda jank. Even the new generation with the splashy colors are starting to show their wear. We spend all week sitting inside staring at a screen. When I’m in the mountains skiing, I want a breeze and unobstructed views.
If we’re gonna go on a spending/building spree, I’d much rather see *more terrain.* New trail pods and, ideally, more resorts. The US’s population has grown ~70% since 1970. Lift-served skiable acreage has definitely not kept pace.
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In Europe, lifts are subsidized by the government, while only a handful in North America have been. Telluride’s gondola was paid for under the transportation act.
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No, in Europe Lifts are not per-se subsidized by the government. Some regions do have programs to support small resorts, though. All the big and shiny places that make the news here would not fall into the categories that get any subsidies.
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i think the “summer value prop” is the key difference.
Zermatt’s pitch is this: rise 7000 vertical feet and cross into Italy via a series of progressively more state-of-the-art gondolas. Cross massive glaciers. See the Matterhorn. Get lunch in a different country before doing it all in reverse.
$200-something dollars? I mean, sure. You’re only there once.
Aspen or Vail’s value prop is very different. Take one or two gondolas to a pleasant ridge. No, you can’t see the Maroon Bells from Ajax. You gotta take a bus to that. Yes, there is a LOT of great hiking elsewhere nearby. No, we don’t have glaciers here.
So like, yeah. Very hard to generate the kind of summer revenue Europe does. So the level of investment and the style of the lift is just inherently different. If we strung a 3S up the dissapointment Cleaver on Rainier it’d be a different story. But that’s *definitely* not America’s style.
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But most ski resorts in Europe don’t have a Matterhorn or Mont Blanc either, and are rather unspectacular. There is a big difference between the few places that were originally developed for summer tourism because of their spectacular scenery and your average run-of-the-mill ski area.
The typical summer operation used to be a few more or less interesting hiking trails and various outposts with good food that would attract people. Places that go with the time might have bike park, zip line or dry luge run and maybe some form of child entertainment. They still attract people that just want to be out in the mountain. Both from closer by and also some amount of destination tourists especially in the larger places. The Matterhorns on the other hand have a lot of visitors from overseas and thus a pretty different clientele.
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to the commenter that suggests that unless you’ve got mt blanc or the Matterhorn the alps are not that spectacular. As I’m writing this I’m on a train in the Salzburg region and it is jaw dropping beautiful. And no Matterhorn here. Even the second tier alpine resorts have better scenery and amenities than almost any ski area in North America. The only ones that compare IMO are banff, telluride, maybe mammoth, maybe whistler
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We’re getting a little off-topic, but that commenter lives right in the heart of the alps, and took the train from his home in Tyrol to skiing in Salzburg and back yesterday, and knows the views pretty. He also really enjoyed his rides with views through Glacier National Park and Yosemite as well.
And note that “the Matterhorns” was a catch-all of Mountains with major summer attractions. There’s more than a few dozen, but they are clearly different from your average ski mountain with a few chair lifts, or even the real local mountains with a bunch of T-Bars.
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It would be hard to justify capital investment in terrain expansion or new resorts after this past winter, but I agree. We’re seeing record amounts of skier traffic in many places and overcrowding is beginning to turn off some of our customer base. I would love to see us, for example, add more beginner terrain to the west of the existing area (in a spot that was already on our master plan in the 80s) which would relieve crowded slopes on H, K, and L lifts.
There are places that shut down in the 70s and 80s that could conceivably be resurrected as ‘new’ areas to take some of the pressure off the more popular joints. Geneva Basin (CO) and Mt Pilchuck (WA) come to mind. I doubt that will ever happen but it’s a thought.
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Lots of issues there, also when viewing the European side. Switzerland does not regulate lifts like public transport in general, only when they actually do provide public transport services to communities, which is a very tiny subset of all lifts.
It hallucinates a mandate to support rural jobs into the Austrian “Seilbahngesetz”, which has absolutely not such mandate but is a purely technical regulation. Various state governments pour a lot of money into ski resorts, and some in the east of the country are even state owned, but that isn’t any different from New York state.
Compared to Epic and Ikon the European passes that include everything in a single region seem much more anti-competitive in theory, although as long as price stay decent no one is going to complain.
3.4 times as much investment in the Alps compared to North America isn’t that extreme if you realize that the Alps have about twice as many ski area than North America, and they are on average much larger.
Everyone in the Anglosphere seems to love looking at the big shiny destination resorts in Europe and keeps forgetting about all the rest, including the small and struggling ones.
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Boise Dev is usually a good resource, but this article is as clear as mud. Definitely reads like the author isn’t exactly steeped in Bogus Basin geography. I can figure it out contextually, but the Deer Point dirt trail already does connect to ATM, and the Elk Meadows dirt trail is already connected to the top of Chair 2 via Brewer’s. Ima go ahead and assume she just means the other directions of the trails, but she doesn’t state this explicitly. Also, she says new Chair 4 will go up the south face of Deer Point Mountain–in itself a redundancy cos it’s just Deer Point–but the south side of Deer Point isn’t in the current operating area, and a lift back there wouldn’t serve what locals refer annoyingly to as “The Back Side” as she says it would. (I hate calling the bulk of the hill’s skiable a euphemism for buttocks. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.) Here, I’ll assume she means the South Face of Shafer, which is where for coupla years now I have been hearing rumours it’ll be. https://liftblog.com/showcase-bogus-basin-id/ See final comment. At any rate, I’m still voting Clear Creek. Expansion is the only thing that’ll actually improve Bogus in a meaningful, non-incremental way, cos regardless of the local poor-mouthing going on, Bogus is already pretty damn good as it lays.
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What’s the deal with Nordic Valley, UT removing Crocket!? No longer needed because of Nordic Express?
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I’m not sure about this move either. I wonder if MCP is starting to rethink its view on Nordic Valley entirely. Since the installation of the six pack, they have gone through three general managers and since then, everything seems to be falling apart. The Old Barn is still a burnt out husk of what it once was, Apollo had its certification removed during the season, and night skiing has been phased out entirely. Bridger has been as unreliable as it always is and never manages to make it a full season without being down for an extended period of time. Nordic has acquired the parts from PowMow’s old Timberline but that still doesn’t solve the fact that Bridger is from 1971 with past reliability issues.
Crocket seems to be the most reliable lift at Nordic, I’m surprised its being removed at all since it’s the main lift for most of Nordic Valley’s clientele. Especially after this season where all they could keep open was Bridger and Crocket. I hope that this is just a re-aligning and not a full up removal because this could be a precedent to how MCP views Nordic in the future. For every mountain MCP saves, it throws in the towel for its unprofitable ski areas such as Hespurus and Elk Ridge. Nordic Express has barely operated for the past couple seasons and with an unannounced lift removal, I’m not seeing a bright future to say the least.
I have to hope they’re saving Crocket for something, hopefully a realignment of some sort or maybe even a full up replacement of Apollo? The ambitious master plan doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and I doubt it ever will as long as MCP keeps decreasing Nordic’s offerings.
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I know this winter was bad and the mountain has inherent flaws, but I don’t see how they can’t make money in the Salt Lake market long term. We are still growing rapidly, and several of the traditionally local oriented mountains have gone more tourist/upscale recently. Nordic and Woodward are the only ones really competing for the small local mountain type traffic. Obviously it’s lower margin than Deer Valley gets, but the demand is there.
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https://www.deseret.com/lifestyle/2026/03/28/nordic-valley-ski-resort-utah-billion-dollar-expansion-plans/
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When I’ve been up there on weekends a couple times the last few years it seems to be needed for capacity reasons. I can’t believe they removed it and just have Bridger over there now. Bridger doesn’t even go as high as Crocket.
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re the U.S. vs Alps comparison. First a correction. Whistler village came later. Skiing has existed at whistler since the late 1960s.
one big insurmountable difference is the whole philosophy around managing mountain lands. In the Alps the alpine valleys have been inhabited and farmed since medieval times. The mountains lost their wild nature long ago. Resort development is just an evolution of the centuries old farming economy and in fact the original lift operators were local farmers who put up a ski tow to capture some off season cash from tourists. Now the descendants of those farmers are part owners of multimillion dollar ski resorts.
in North America, the most picturesque mountains are almost all in national parks or otherwise off limits to development. There is still a great deal of summer mountain tourism in North America, it just doesn’t take place at ski resorts. Most ski resorts in the west were installed on terrain that was easier to develop and access – which usually translates to less steep, rugged and picturesque. The writer used the example or deer valley for a potentially European type of year round attraction. Give me a break. Deer valley has no scenic amenities whatsoever. The few North American ski resorts that have viable summer business are very few in number and are in places with great scenic and recreational amenities (eg whistler, banff). You could throw in Tahoe simply because of its proximity to the Bay Area cities.
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