- Doppelmayr’s latest Wir Magazine has lots on D-Line.
- Vail Resorts looks far and wide for its next acquisition with eyes towards Canada and Japan.
- Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows enters strategic alliance with Genting Secret Garden, one of China’s newest ski resorts with a 6/8 chondola and two bubble high speed quads.
- Great Divide, Montana is buying a new drive terminal for its Good Luck double.
- Jay Peak receiver calls the resort’s financial situation “dire” as he reveals the resort lost $6.2 million last winter and looks for cost savings.
- Queenstown’s Skyline Gondola will be replaced with a $60 million 10-passemger version in 2018. The current 4-place Doppelmayr gondola debuted in 1987.
- The game-changing Leitner 3S gondola to the Stubai Glacier will open July 9th.
News
News Roundup: Setbacks
- The Vermont Passenger Tramway Board won’t allow the Jay Peak Tram to operate until its carriages are overhauled and controls upgraded, which Doppelmayr says will cost $4.9 million. Not to worry, the court-appointed receiver says although “it kind of sucks that it has to happen now,” the work is scheduled and summer tram rides will happen.
- The replacement for the La Bufa Cable Car in Zacatecas faces delays over concerns about visual impacts. Poma delivered parts for the pulse gondola lift last winter.
- Mexico’s National Action Party criticizes the bidding process for Torreón’s new 8-passenger gondola but construction continues.
- Les Otten still hopes to break ground at The Balsams this summer but doesn’t have all the financing he needs.
- Austin’s Wire gondola proposal gets some exposure.
- Sandia Peak mulls the future of its retired tram cars.
- The Kottke survey is out and U.S. ski areas hosted 53.9 million skier visits last season, up slightly from 2014-15. The Pacific Northwest saw its best season ever, up 142 percent, while the Rockies were +8 percent, Pacific Southwest +53 percent and the three Eastern regions declined.
- North America is up to 36 new lifts for 2016, up slightly from 2015. For comparison, resorts in Austria, France and Switzerland have ordered 94 lifts for an area roughly the size of Colorado Austria alone is getting 20 new gondolas! Last year the same three countries built 75 new lifts.
News Roundup: Dramatic
- Leitner Ropeways publishes its Annual Report for 2015.
- Peak Resorts discontinues dividend for shareholders in continuing effort to save cash with $118 million in liabilities.
- Whaleback nonprofit decides a surface lift is key to the New Hampshire mountain’s future.
- Val Neigette, Quebec seized by creditors.
- Big SNOW America inches closer to opening.
- The Roosevelt Island Tramway turned 40 yesterday.
- The Hermitage Club at Haystack Mountain is up to 875 members and $114 million in assets. American Skiing Company sold the property in 2005 for a mere $5 million.
- Wynn Resorts’ $4.1 billion casino in Macau will have a Doppelmayr gondola that runs in a rectangle.
Cascade Mountain Announces $9 Million Expansion with 2 New Lifts
Cascade Mountain will get two new Leitner-Poma quad chairs this summer with more new lifts on the way, the resort announced today. This summer’s $9 million slate of improvements includes a high speed quad replacement for the Cindy Pop chair, a new quad serving seven new trails, an expanded base lodge and snowmaking improvements.
Cascade Mountain became the first ski area in Wisconsin with a high-speed lift back in 1998 and has eight lifts including three quad chairs. The new Cindy Pop Express will be nearly twice as long as the 1991 Borvig quad chair it replaces and will move 2,400 skiers per hour. The new “Lift C” will be a fixed-grip quad east of the current ski area serving new terrain. Cascade owners Rob and Vicki Walz are excited to move forward with the expansion that’s been years in the making. “My dad always envisioned using the far east side of Cascade for an expansion and he started cutting trails many years ago. The time has come to reach the next level for Cascade. Our customers will appreciate the new intermediate trails which are longer than what we have on the west side,” commented Rob Walz in the announcement on the resort’s website.
News Roundup: Skyline
- Two men want to build an iconic gondola called Skyline along the Chicago Riverfront.
- Sandia Peak unveils new tram cabins for its 50th anniversary.
- Sugarloaf updates the public on its summer lift maintenance projects.
- BMF wins contract for its first 10-passenger gondola to be built next year in Switzerland.
- The owner of Gletscherjet 3+4 built last summer in Austria say it has already carried 3 million passengers, believed to be a record for a winter lift. The system is an 8/10 combination lift interlining with a 10-passenger gondola.
- Poma’s 2015 Reference Book is now online highlighting last year’s projects from around the world.
- Are Vail Resorts and Powdr Corp. bidding on Eldora?
- A New Zealand developer will test whether a Whistler-style bike park with its own high speed quad can stand alone without skiing.
- Doppelmayr and its contractors take responsibility for a construction accident at one of the terminals under construction in La Paz that injured ten people on Saturday.
In His Own Words: Carl Skylling of Skytrac on the Leitner-Poma Acquisition
Last week on my way home from the Rocky Mountain Lift Association conference, I stopped by Skytrac headquarters to sit down with Carl Skylling, General Manager of the company that’s shaken up the lift-building industry in North America over the past eight years. If you hadn’t heard, Leitner-Poma bought Skytrac two weeks ago in a move that surprised many. Carl is an industry veteran who worked his way up through Garaventa CTEC, Doppelmayr CTEC and Skytrac in construction, operations and management positions. In addition to kindly agreeing to be interviewed, Carl introduced me to some of the hard-working men and women who design and build Skytrac lifts in Salt Lake City.
Peter: How did you get started with SkyTrac?
Carl: I started out with Garaventa CTEC and then got pulled into the merger with Garaventa and Doppelmayr, becoming Doppelmayr CTEC. Jan Leonard had stepped down in 2008 and by 2010 I was Vice President of Operations but getting restless to do something different.
I approached these guys with a concept I had to continue this whole idea of doing service work and modification work because I saw that there was a big niche in the market that was missing there. So I approached Dave Metivier and Alan Hepner, and about the same time Jan Leonard was also getting interested in finding a way to take care of his former customer base by supporting them with service and parts. So there was this huge potential market to make all those parts.
One thing kind of led to another between [Jan] and I approaching our partners, Dave and Alan, who were running Hilltrac and Skytrac at the time. We ended up taking this Skytrac concept to the point where, with the four of us, we realized why stop with parts? Why not do a design of our own. SkyTrac started in 2008 doing some engineering/modification work with Dave and Alan but we really, in 2010, took it to the next level.
News Roundup: Vermont
- In the wake of fraud allegations and a federal takeover, Q Burke Mountain Resort will lose the Q and likely be sold within a year.
- At Jay Peak, Doppelmayr says the 52-year old aerial tramway needs $4.15 million in repairs. In a press conference, the Florida lawyer put in charge of both properties said “we’re not even sure we have to fix the tram. The company that tells us we have to fix it is also the one that will get the contract.” At least he’s stopped calling it a gondola.
- A new lease for Ascutney Mountain will allow a nonprofit group to build up to three lifts at the ski area, which closed in 2008. Skytrac removed Ascutney’s four CTECs from 2012-2014 and sold them to Crotched Mountain, Pats Peak and Liberty Mountain. A 1970 Hall double remains standing on the property.
- Washington, DC taps the same company that conducted the feasibility study for the Portland Aerial Tram to study the proposed Georgetown Gondola.
- A D-Line gondola is coming to Innsbruck.
- The Mi Teleferico “My Cable Car” network in La Paz carried 43 million passengers in its first 22 months with 99.3% reliability.
Big News! Leitner-Poma Acquires Skytrac
Leitner-Poma acquired Skytrac this week in a deal revealed today. Even more exciting is Skytrac will continue to operate as a subsidiary brand of the Leitner-Poma Group. “We would like to welcome Skytrac to our family,” said Anton Seeber, CEO of the European parent company of both Leitner and Poma. “Like Leitner-Poma, Skytrac also will be managed autonomously and independently to make sure the Skytrac team can focus on its strengths and hone its skills, all while having access to the Group’s resources to be able to benefit from particular synergies.” Leitner and Poma have experience operating in Europe as separate brands while sharing technology such as the latest-generation LPA detachable grip.
Jan Leonard and other former CTEC employees started Skytrac in 2010 to fill a niche retrofitting older lifts and building economical fixed-grip lifts in Salt Lake City. The company has built 19 complete lift systems to date, mostly at small-to-medium sized ski areas from Washington to Massachusetts. Skytrac had its best year in 2014, building as many new lifts as both Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr that year. In addition to building complete lifts, Skytrac also specializes in outfitting older lifts with new terminals and control systems.
News Roundup: Big Lifts
- The St. Louis Zoo maps a gondola connecting to a new hotel.
- Two 230-passenger tram cabins take flight.
- Poma’s building a 5-stage(!) gondola transit system in Algeria.
- Leitner announces the company’s sixth 3S gondola installation will replace a 53-year old jig-back at Voss Resort in Norway.
- California Trail is coming along.
- One of the world’s steepest tramways opens in China with a maximum rope angle of 42 degrees.
- Doppelmayr’s Worldwide 2016 yearbook is now available. Note how few fixed-grip lifts they built last year.
- Also the spring issue of Poma’s magazine is out. Check out the Poma Coaster!
Big Sky Moving Forward with Bubble Six-Pack & Challenger Replacement
Boyne Resorts has firmed up an approximately $10 million deal with Doppelmayr USA to build a flagship detachable lift in The Bowl at Big Sky Resort and replace the damaged Challenger double with an all-new fixed-grip triple chair this summer, according to multiple sources. The resort announced back in February that two new lifts were coming but has yet to officially say much else. These will be the first new lifts built in Big Sky since Moonlight Basin, Spanish Peaks and the Yellowstone Club went bankrupt in 2008-10 and a sure sign that the region has bounced back.
The big story here is the six-pack replacement of the Lone Peak triple which will be just the sixth lift in North America to feature chairs with bubbles and heated seats. The others are at Park City, Sunshine Village, Okemo and the private Hermitage Club in Vermont. The new six pack’s alignment will be altered from the current lift for better traffic flow and the bottom station will feature 90-degree loading. The lift will be just over 3,000 feet long with a vertical rise of approximately 800 feet and ride time of just three minutes.
The new Challenger lift will be a bottom drive/bottom tension fixed-grip triple with loading carpet, capable of spinning up to 500 feet a minute for a 9.5 minute ride. The Challenger double chair that broke in February only ran 396 fpm. Challenger will most likely feature Doppelmayr’s Tristar drive/tension terminal and an expanded unloading area next to the summit of the Headwaters double.
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