- A damaged tower at Tamarack is expected to take three to five weeks to replace following last week’s “unusual cable entanglement event.”
- Brattleboro Ski Hill in Vermont fundraises for a new Skytrac control system.
- Mont Sutton to auction unique Mueller chairs.
- Roosevelt Island asks the public what to do with original tram cabins.
- Stoneham and Leitner-Poma to complete a CA$1 million renovation of L’Aurore Boréale.
- Mountain Village, Colorado releases a 300 page report detailing local officials’ failed attempt to purchase Telluride Ski Resort.
- Vail Resorts vows not to sell as Matthew Prince continues making his case to acquire Park City.
- Casper, Wyoming expects to order a new chairlift for Hogadon Ski Area this fall.
- Colorado skier visits plunge 24 percent.
- New Hampshire visits rise 5 percent.
- In New Zealand, The Remarkables proposes the nation’s longest gondola.
- A gondola collides with a crane in Austria.
- Enjoy this progress report on the Gelande expansion at Purgatory.
Lift Blog 
Nice seeing the Gelande equipment getting staged.
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I noticed there are CTEC chairs in one of the photos
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From Telluride Plunge along with tower tubes.
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If Powdr hadn’t let their lease lapse on Park City, there is a pretty good chance that they would have sold it to Prince. Not sure I’d believe his promise to be non-profit owning it though.
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Sure, but Prince wouldn’t have wanted to buy it if Powdr had kept it, because the problems never would have developed.
I do think this quote from the piece is particularly notable, and I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I made the same argument a year and a half ago on Twitter during the patrol strike:
The problem is that the individual resorts are worth more than the sum of the company put together. Whistler alone was worth $1.34 billion USD when Vail bought a 75% stake in 2016, and is worth far more alone today, but it’s part of a company that’s worth only $4.8 billion. The other resorts (Park City? Vail? Breckenridge? Northstar?) surely would be worth more if they weren’t part of the company.
I wouldn’t put it past Prince himself at this point to become the activist in $MTN that he’s saying is inevitable.
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I sure won’t be shedding any tears if Vail gets broken up… it would be awesome if some of their resorts regained the individual character that they used to have, instead of every facet being decided in Denver.
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The problem with breaking up Vail is how many billionaires are out there who want to own a ski hill and run it as a non profit? If WB was sold for a billion US to a company or person that had to borrow that money, the operation would suffer forever as all the revenue generated would be paying down that debt, or being returned to shareholders/owners. Many locals here have lamented Vails ownership and wished for some kind of local ownership. This may actually be worse than the current model.
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WB was a publicly traded company on the Toronto exchange prior to Vail buying it. At least the 75% that isn’t owned by nippon cable was publicly traded. Maybe the new management of VR spins it off to a new public company like before. I don’t know how the old public WB performed tho. It may not have been any better than VR as far as shareholder return. I’m sure the customers liked it.
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I definitely don’t think it (or any other VR-operated resort) would go into a nonprofit. But a situation where Vail owns equity (but not a majority share) in a new company would probably be beneficial for all parties from a valuation/share price standpoint.
But Prince is absolutely right that this would require a pretty substantial strategy change from the folks in Broomfield.
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I wouldn’t mind if Nippon cable took their stake in WB to a majority. They fully own Sun Peaks, and the handful of times I have been there, the resort has a homey feel to it that doesn’t reflect being owned by a megacorp (Nippon is a big player in Japan).
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do we think there is anything we can do to push Vail into selling?
repeat emails?
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no.
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Hope Vails finances get so bad that a loan is recalled forcing them to liquidate some assets, or as stated above wait for share holders/board of directors to force to company in a different direction. Those are both extreme measures that would take a lot more pressure to happen at this time.
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Question: How common is it for a ski resort to have a bubble chair to also act as a people mover for non-skiers?
Say you have a rather short chair lift along a ski run but also along a residential area. The run is to short to have a gondola for the skiers, but you also want to let residents use it so they wont need to use a car everytime to go down to the base where shops and restaurants are.
Can you make it useable for the non-skiers aswell and make both going up and downloading easy, without making it less usable for skiers?
And are there any good examples of this?
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I would say that this is a highly uncommon setup, as if the alignment is too short for a detachable gondola as you say, it would likely be more suited to a pulse gondola (such as Sky Cab at Snowmass). One example of a pedestrain-available bubble chair is Foret in Courchevel, France. I rode mixed chairs (pedestrians and skiers on the same chair) several times on that lift.
tl;dr It’s feasible, but extremely rare
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I think a pulse chairlift could fit the bill for this setup. It could go nice and slow during load and unload so that skiless patrons could easily use it, yet be speedy enough between pulses that it wouldn’t be a frustratingly slow ride for everyone, and avoiding the expense and maintenance of a detach.
A couple of lifts that come to mind are Wish Bone @ Snow Valley (skiers) and North American @ Norquay (walkers). To my knowledge, neither lift combines both modes, but I dont see why it couldn’t be done.
The walkers would have to wear proper footwear to walk on snow in the load/unload zones, or have it slow enough that they could safely ride around the bullwheel to platforms on the downhill side.
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Plenty of bubble chairs in Europe that take foot traffic. Usually to restaurants or for hikers in summer.
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