- Eagle Point provides an initial fire assessment; four of five lifts sustained damage.
- Less than a month after a tower was bent on the Tamarack Express, Leitner-Poma and Tamarack install a whole new tower with the lift set to reopen tomorrow.
- The Goldbelt Tram remains closed following an April crash now reported to be caused by inexperienced staff mistakes.
- The story of how a small town in Arkansas got an $8.5 million detachable serving 280 vertical feet.
- Hawaii officially bans commercial chairlifts, gondolas and tramways statewide.
- The family of a child killed on a Quebec chairlift last winter speaks out.
- Deer Valley outlines the next two years of East Village development.
- Donner Ski Ranch offers free lift tickets to guests who photograph distracted lift operators.
- Mont-Sainte-Anne’s upcoming bubble six pack to be named L’Évolution Express.
- Several prominent Vail residents join Matthew Prince’s criticism of Vail Resorts infrastructure and trajectory.
- A filing reveals the precise alignment for Kicking Horse’s recently announced Pioneer Express.
- The Forest Service to host a Waterville Valley expansion open house on July 15th.
- OITAF’s Ropeway Innovations symposium to be held in Park City next June.
Lift Blog 
Awesome work by Tamarack and LP! That is some great teamwork and dedication to get something like that done so quickly. Reflects well on the industry.
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Wishing everyone here in the USA a happy and safe Independence day, and a belated Happy Canada day to our friends to the north.
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Thoughts on Matthew Prince/Vail?
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The people cheering him on are the exact same people who will never get to ski if these guys get their way. They aren’t mad that they have to pay $20 for a burger or that the lifts haven’t been updated. They are mad that there is a finite amount of ski mountains in the world and not enough of them cater solely to the 2% they exist in.
I want to be clear, I am not saying Vail is a perfect model. In fact I would argue that Alterra may be a better business model not being subject to the incessant need for public stocks to show increases and returns. However, Vail already has something akin to the setup he is proposing with Telluride and we have seen over the last year at how that situation is just as infuriating to locals and skiers as the current park city situation apparently is.
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What we see in Telluride would be at least several times worse if it happened to PCMR.
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Prince’s plan is very different and will not be the same as Telluride.
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Didn’t Prince express how different his pilosophy is from Telluride’s?
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He sure did.
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unless he plans to basically run it as a non-profit PR arm of his other businesses, his word is useless.
Compare him to Crown fam. To an extent they care more about running Aspen as ski experience than the Telluride owner does his own mountain.
Prince seems very eager to put his name and face on this, an orange flag at best. Matches the Telluride ego based decision making. He doesn’t understand the world he’s in and thinks being loud can make up for it.
One family or person basically already own Boyne, MCP, Aspen ski co and Powdr/woodward. There’s a reason they aren’t loudly putting their names all over everything they do.
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Monday morning QBs are rarely effective real starters.
If someone with resort operator experience was saying all this, it would mean more. It’s telling that its rich dudes who haven’t spent a minute managing, operating, or improving a ski resort are the ones whining.
If Boyne, MCP, or even a smaller player like Pacific Group were the ones loudly calling for divestment so they could buy, that would be interesting and worth some ears. There’s reasons they aren’t and won’t. They know they’d be facing some if not more of the same challenges Vail already is.
And I’m not defending Vail on all its decisions, I just don’t billionaires who don’t know skiing. They seem enjoy screwing over locals and employees to save like $10.
See: PowMow and Telluride.
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*trust billionaires
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To add to this, I would like to break down Matthew Prince’s approach as something the industry should be wary about. He has hardly discussed viable solutions for Park City, his only proposal so far was a gondola connecting Park City to Little and Big Cottonwoods. He has not mentioned anything for Park City aside from vague and ambiguous posts about “improvement,” many of which is outright false. You can see this in his recent article where he claims that Park City has not installed new snowmaking on the Park City side since its purchase, which is just not true in the slightest. As a skier, how would he know? Even the recent article had to make an edit to this blatantly false claim.
His claim about lifts such as Silverlode being 10 years past their useful life is also outright false. A person who does not know anything about how these lifts are maintained should not be making these claims. I am not sure how anybody can take Prince seriously with all this. So far, he has not proposed anything viable, yet he is urging others to hate on Vail Resorts and praise him for being the disrupter. As much as I dislike a lot of Vail’s operational decisions at Park City, Matthew Prince is building a wave of hate and would expect him to do nothing less than that Reid Hastings is doing to PowMow or Chuch Horning is doing to Telluride. Seeing how he has handled pushback from Vail and other entities, I would be worried myself if he ever acquires Park City.
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From this article, I think he has said exactly what he wants to do on the Mountain village side. He’s also been skiing for 49 years.
https://www.parkrecord.com/2024/04/02/we-can-do-better-why-park-city-mountains-infrastructure-is-aging-and-how-to-fix-it/
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https://www.parkrecord.com/2024/04/02/we-can-do-better-why-park-city-mountains-infrastructure-is-aging-and-how-to-fix-it/
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Ironically, this article is pretty much spot-on in correctly noting that many of PCMR’s issues are the fault of Park City’s city council and not Vail.
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In addition to everything said about Monday Morning QBs (which is spot on), Prince is failing to realize the enormous costs PCMR faces in permitting & insurance. The former is, frankly, the sole reason Vail has not invested more. The latter is the main driver of escalating expenses in the industry. Prince comes from tech, where both of these are non-issues, and he does not have the expertise or experience to solve either better than Vail.
The parts of PCMR and Deer Valley outside of Park City’s municipal boundaries have received substantial investment in recent years, far outpacing anything inside of the border at either resort. If Prince’s goal was to increase investment within Park City proper, he would be better served lobbying Park City’s government to reduce its regulation over the resort to match the oversight the rest of the mountain enjoys.
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fair, but he believes since Vail tried to trademark the word Park City, the City gov. hates them, and makes it as hard as possible, especially for Vail.
Plus, the Epic pass has made PCMR way overcrowded, if it went to 7 or even 14 days like Ikon, a lot of the busy runs the appealers are worried about, would go away.
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PCMR has a ton of terrain compared to its peers and is really only crowded in key areas (Egress from both bases, Tombstone, King Con, Silverlode). Untouched terrain can be found even during peak days if you venture near Super Condor or Thaynes (among other areas). The main issue is skier flow, which is a fixable problem with lift investment, but the town has blocked Vail from doing it.
If Park City indeed refuses to let go of a trademark dispute they ended up winning from 12 years ago, that is the city’s fault and that reflects poorly on them. Regardless of the motive, the town has partially hamstrung Vail as an operator and then complained about Vail’s failures as an operator.
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I completely agree with this. While I do think Prince would do a better job running PCMR then Vail, he never seems to mention the hurdle of getting projects approved by the PC planning commission and instead always blames Vail for not investing.
I’ve watched many of those planning commission meetings on other projects like Pinyon Express at Deer Valley and it’s no wonder either resort wants to ever try and get anything built or upgraded within the PC city limits.
Deer Valley is literally building the Park Peak lodge in a spot just across the Wasatch County border so they wouldn’t have to go through the PC planning commission, even though it’s in a less than ideal location.
If anything, Prince should try and get a spot on the planning commission board and exercise influence over projects that way.
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Plus, the Epic pass has made PCMR way overcrowded, if it went to 7 or even 14 days like Ikon, a lot of the busy runs the appealers are worried about, would go away.
@Luke: To be honest, even if such a restriction was put in place, the NIMBYs would still not be satisfied and would come up with some other contrived excuse to make things difficult for PCMR (something something “it’ll negatively affect our property values”).
And the lifts that PCMR needs to upgrade that are being blocked by these NIMBYs are ones that would fix a lot of these crowding issues (like Silverlode 8 or upgrading and extending Eagle).
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Factually, you should ask all the PowMow employees what it’s like to be paid 20-30% higher wages than industry standard. Even Wasatch Peaks has a hard time keeping cooks, ski patrol, lifties, etc., because many are going to Powder Mtn. Reed is investing heavily in the local communities and local payrolls.
Prior models weren’t working and the mountain was running in the red for years. This hybrid model is crafty to say the least. The towns of Eden and Huntsville were offered opportunities to buy the mountain and it didn’t happen. If Reed didn’t buy, we might have one less resort in todays conversations (and a resort that for 3 years in a row now will have the largest expansions each year besides Deer Valley). So take a look and see who his execs are (all local), ask the lifties and the patrollers about their wages……..the rest is just “I want my $19/day ski passes” in 2026 hearsay.
So, if the Mountains savior happens to be a billionaire, so be it. This one has not screwed over any locals or employees.
Chuckie and Telluride not so much.
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Very interesting point.
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Eden/Liberty and Huntsville would never have been able to buy the mountain anyway if they had wanted to.
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Interesting, thanks!
It dosen’t fit with the current “Eat the Rich”-perspective that has sadly creept into US discourse.
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I still dont understand how that girl died on the lift in Qubec. The way I understand it, her hood got caught when trying to unload, and the lift did not stop until she was halfway around the bullwheel. Then they put the lift in reverse to get her off, but waited until she was at the bottom terminal take get her off? Why not just get her off at the unloading ramp?
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They did not reverse the lift. Many fixed grips cannot reverse (at least without significant effort from experienced maintainers). When they couldn’t get her down from where she was stopped initially, they opted to continue running the lift to get her chair back to the bottom where they could reach her at ground level.
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ahh, thanks for the clarification. What an terrible situation, i feel for the family
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“Score one for the environment and local communities.”
Doesn’t Hawaii do tons and tons of jeep tours? On dirt roads switchbacking all over their mountains? And that’s better than an electric aerial lift with a handful of tower foundations?
They could have passed a law limiting the environmental impact of lifts … protecting sight-lines, requiring helicopters and spider hoes instead of work roads, requiring the use of local contractors and training programs for local technicians.
But instead they’re just like “nope. never. anywhere.” In a state where tourism is a quarter of total GDP (highest in the nation). Kinda stupid.
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Feels like legislation passed by anti-tourist people who might’ve forgotten the importance of tourist revenue to their islands.
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You’re silly if you think the only infrastructure that gets built for a chairlift is the structure itself.
Banning them effectively removes people from turning mountains into restaurants and shopping plazas.
In terms of conservation, banning gondolas and chairlifts is a no brainer.
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There are ways to achieve conservation without having to outright ban chairlifts and gondolas. Like everything Muni listed.
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You hear talk about automated/AI lifts, but is there any talk about doing the same with pist grooming?
I’m thinking that the biggest resorts would probably want this; must be an army of people needed to groom all the miles and miles of runs.
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We need a Roomba/PistenBully merger lol.
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(i saw a roomba-like autonomous lawn mower a couple weeks ago and it was mesmerizing. only had to handle a flat, rectilinear lawn though.
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I’m guessing its a little bit more to it; having to press out the snow evenly etc.
But that would be a good start. :)
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I only operated snowcats at Keystone for a few seasons, but it’s pretty equivalent to dirtwork with heavy machinery. There’s a helluva lot more to it than laying cords. Unlike a car, which has 2 primary inputs (steering and accel/decel), some of the snowcats I operated had 18 inputs, IIRC. As far as an army, we had 2 crews running 6-8 cats all night. So maybe 20-25 operators, tops. I would imagine that skiers and snowboards will begin to suffer the ill-effects of “automated” grooming around the same time we start seeing automated bulldozers, backhoes, and loaders.
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Good point. I was actully thinking that automation would perhaps be a thing on the more easy to get to slopes and cross-country tracks.
More difficult runs and definetly parks with jumps and whatnot a human operator is required.
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For the Donner Ski Ranch situation with tripling down on ratting out lifties using their phones while on the job to get a free day at the resort. Will there an be an exploit that with the use of ai, they could get a photo of a random liftie not on their phone there and edit it to look like they’re on their phone to get a free day?
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