- Highland Mountain Bike Park is closed this week as crews reinforce a 1987 Borvig triple top terminal foundation, surely as a result of the Sunday River Spruce Peak incident. The bike park, which is no longer a ski resort in the winter, hopes to re-open tomorrow.
- At Sunday River, Spruce Peak’s haul rope has reportedly been cut. Its sister lift, the 1984 Borvig Locke Mountain triple had its rope removed from the top bullwheel.
- Cardrona Alpine Resort in New Zealand will build a Doppelmayr 6/8 chondola for next season.
- Splicer Bill Alsup died last Tuesday in a crane accident at the age of 78. He started working for Poma in 1959, ran the Poma distributorship in Vermont for more than 25 years and was also an Indy Car driver.
- Steamboat inches towards two new gondolas.
- Leitner-Poma of America is designing the huge gondola from Queenstown to The Remarkables that would have three stations, 80 towers and cost approximately $36 million.
- Italy’s first heated-seat chairlift will be an 8-pack.
- Ski Magic, LLC signs purchase agreement for Magic Mountain and will immediately begin work required by the Vermont Passenger Tramway Board to make lifts operational. First priority is the Pohlig triple chair that’s sat idle the past two seasons. Geoff Hathaway, President of the new ownership group commented, “it was either Magic or Whistler Blackcomb. I think we got the better deal.”
- Aspenites continue to argue over the placement of 1A’s new lower terminal.
Author: Peter Landsman
Grand Targhee Begins Construction of Blackfoot Quad
Last time I stopped by Grand Targhee, I could still ski down Chief Joseph Bowl as the Blackfoot double was being deconstructed to make way for a new Doppelmayr quad chair. Three months later, workers have finished removing the last of the old Riblet and prepped both station locations for modern terminals. The new Blackfoot will move up to 1,800 skiers per hour 1,200 vertical feet in seven minutes. When completed, Grand Targhee will operate four Doppelmayr and CTEC quad lifts, all built after 1996, with a third high speed quad coming soon.
The new Blackfoot will start a little higher up and further north, though it’s tough to tell where the old base stood with how much dirt has been moved. The new top station is just about in the same spot as the previous one. Lots of rock is getting pushed to make a large unload area in place of the steep wooden ramp at top of Blackfoot since 1974. This week Doppelmayr is tying re-bar for towers and both terminals. The project is still in its beginning stages but will ramp up over as concrete gets poured and steel arrives this fall.
Instagram Tuesday: Euro Cities
Every Tuesday, we pick our favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.
Powder Mountain Plans Two New Lifts for Winter 2016-17
Powder Mountain will build new lifts in Mary’s Bowl and Lefty’s Canyon this fall if all goes according to plans filed with Weber County last month. The Village lift will be a Skytrac fixed-grip quad with a design capacity of 2,000 pph and line speed of 450 fpm. It will be 3,680′ long with a vertical rise of 582′, 105 chairs and 14 towers. A second lift called Mary’s will serve the other side of the new Summit Powder Mountain Village and top out near the Sunrise Platter. Design details for this lift have not yet been filed with the county but it will be similar in length and vertical to Village. “The plan is to have them open to the public and operating for this ski season,” Summit Powder Mountain COO Jeff Werbelow told the Ogden Standard-Examiner. Both lifts will be located entirely on private land but still must pass design review with Weber County. Future plans call for a third lift called Lefty’s linking the bottom of Village to the top of Sunrise.
Skytrac will also build a new quad chair at Christmas Mountain Village, Wisconsin this fall, bringing the company to seven new lifts for 2016. Combined with Leitner-Poma, that makes 18 new lift projects in North America compared with 17 for Doppelmayr thus far. You can see a full rundown of new lifts for 2016 here.
Venezuela Opening Record-Breaking Aerial Tramways to 15,633′
The highest, longest and most expensive aerial tramway system in the world will open this month at the Sierra Nevada National Park in Northwestern Venezuela. Teleférico de Mérida, as it’s known in Spanish, is really four separate jig-backs built in series totaling a crazy 40,735 linear feet with a vertical rise of 10,464 feet. Garaventa won a contract in 2011 to replace ropeways built along a similar route in the 1950s that closed down due to safety concerns in 2008. The world-leader in tramways spent the last four years building four lifts that would each be notable but combine to form an unparalleled 7.8-mile journey from the town of Mérida to 15,633-foot Pico Espejo. Of note, the world record for the longest tramway in a single section still belongs to the 3.5-mile Wings of Tatev, also built by Garaventa and completed in 2010.
The four original ropeways at Mérida were built by Haeckel of Germany and Habbeger of Switzerland and opened in March 1960. Interestingly, both of those companies came under ownership VonRoll and later the Doppelmayr Garaventa Group. Seven 36-passenger cars carried riders to Pico Espejo until 2008, when Doppelmayr advised the Venezuelan government the tramways had reached the end of their useful life and needed to be replaced. The Venezuela Ministry of Tourism, which owns Teleférico de Mérida, opted to invest $468 million towards modern tramways and all-new facilities.
News Roundup: South America
- The White River National Forest conditionally approves new lifts at Arapahoe Basin including a Beavers chair, Zuma surface lift, replacements for Molly Hogan/Pallavicini and removal of Norway.
- The Science Channel profiles the Palm Springs Tramway, which has the largest vertical rise of any lift in North America.
- Two more American urban gondola ideas pop up: Uptown Gondola in Cincinnati and Honolulu Aerial.
- Austrian ski pass merger creates a ticket valid for a record 925 lifts.
- Dubai will get a gondola to serve a $1.6 billion artificial peninsula called Blue Waters Island.
- China reverse-engineers the Doppelmayr Uni-G, with poor results.
- A consortium led by Poma beats out Doppelmayr in the bidding to build a two-stage urban gondola over water in Guayaquil, Ecuador with a second line in the works.
- South America now makes up 17 percent of Doppelmayr’s global revenue, approximately equal to North America.
- Peru’s President recently visited the ancient fortress of Kuelap, where Poma is 90 percent finished with a new 8-passenger gondola. The only problem? The haul rope hasn’t been installed yet. So crews slung cabins from towers for the Presidential photo-op to make it look closer to being done!
- 2017-18 reopening of The Balsams is an open question.
- Burke Mountain Academy will buy a T-Bar to replace the 1956 Mountain Poma at Vermont’s Burke Mountain in 2017.
- Echo Mountain sells to a 27-year old D.U. grad for $3.8 million.
- Jay Peak Resort seeks loan in “extremely tight cash situation” after $2.5 million payment to Doppelmayr/Garaventa for tram upgrades.
- Montana Snowbowl begins work on TV Mountain expansion, to include a used Riblet from Snowmass.
- The Vancouver Sun reveals Vail courted Whistler Blackcomb for months, will cut season pass prices in half.
This is an open thread. Feel free to leave a comment on anything lift-related.
Instagram Tuesday: CWA Omega
Every Tuesday, we pick our favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.
Sweetwater Gondola August Update from Jackson Hole
When riders on the tram ask about the construction going on at JHMR this summer, they rarely believe an entire gondola can be built in one summer. “That’s going to be done this winter?!,” they say. The answer of course is yes, and after a few months of work you can start to see why. Since Doppelmayr flew the new gondola’s towers in late July, work has shifted to the mid and top terminals. Over four days last week, a crane set the steel beams and tunnels for the Solitude mid-station. This station is huge and will eventually serve a beginner complex with magic carpets, a rental center, cafeteria and more. It will also be the site of the gondola’s cabin storage and maintenance facility, to be built next summer.
Not much has changed at the bottom station, where steel was set in early July. The top/drive terminal is now the center of the action, where the last concrete for the masts will be poured this week.
Vail Resorts to Buy Whistler Blackcomb in $1 Billion Deal
The largest ski resort company in the world, Vail Resorts, announced a deal this morning to buy North America’s biggest ski mountain for just over USD$1 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition of Whistler Blackcomb brings Vail Resorts’ portfolio to a dozen mountain resorts including the most-visited in the United States, Canada and Australia. Vail Resorts, Inc. will also own six of the top ten mountains by skier visits in North America. The company has been looking to grow internationally since acquiring Australia’s Perisher Resort in 2015.
Whistler Blackcomb Holdings currently trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange. CEO Dave Brownie says the company’s board has been “monitoring the unique challenges facing the broader ski industry due to the unpredictability of year-to-year regional weather patterns.” As a result, the Whistler Blackcomb board accepted a takeover offer from Vail that places a 43 percent premium over Friday’s stock price, valuing W-B Holdings at CDN$1.39 billion.
The deal is expected to close before the end of the year. On the season pass front, Whistler Blackcomb will quit the Liftopia-powered Mountain Collective pass after this season and join Vail’s Epic Pass. Epic pass-holders will have access to 253 lifts at Vail’s 12 resorts in three countries.
Whistler Blackcomb announced a $345 million capital improvement plan called Renaissance earlier this year that will include new lifts on both mountains over the next 20 years and Vail intends to continue investing in this initiative.
Olympic Spotlight Shines on Rio and its Teleféricos
With the Olympics opening tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, the world looks to a seaside metropolis with more than six million residents and the first South American city to host an Olympic Games. While Brazil has no ski resorts, Rio features aerial lifts ranging from hundred year-old tramways to modern gondolas connecting the city’s favelas to the regional transit network.
The famous Sugarloaf Mountain twin tramways were among the world’s first cableways of any kind when they debuted in 1912. A century later, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff championed development of a five-section Poma gondola connecting some of Rio’s largest slums, modeled after the pioneering gondola network in Medellín. In 2013, Doppelmayr built a three-station gondola in Morro da Providência, serving more than 5,000 residents in one of Rio’s oldest favelas. Further urban cable projects proposed for Rio have faltered as the city works to combat challenges we’ve become all too familiar with leading up to the Games.
Teleférico do Alemão
Teleférico do Alemão is one of the largest and most complex gondola systems in the world with six stations and 152 10-passenger Sigma Diamond cabins. Built by Poma and operated by private train company SuperVia, Teleférico do Alemão opened July 7, 2011. The system is capable of transporting 3,000 passengers per hour over 2.2 miles of dense neighborhoods in 16 minutes. The lift changes angle four times, including a 100-degree turn at Alemão Station.
70,000 residents are eligible for two free rides daily on the gondola, which links favelas in the Complexo do Alemão to the Bonsucesso train station. Six expansive rooftop stations that feature banks, stores and social services rise above the favelas. The gondola system cost approximately $74 million to build and serves 9,000 daily riders. Initial ridership estimates of 30,000 per day have not been realized as Rio has struggled to attract non-residents to ride the teleférico through crime-ridden neighborhoods. Unlike in Medellín and La Paz, residents have criticized the construction of an expensive gondola through communities that lack electricity, clean water and basic sanitation.
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