News

News Roundup: Peak Pressure

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  • Peak Resorts’ financial footing reportedly worsens amid staff layoffs, reduced operations and spending cuts.  The company owns 14 resorts across the Eastern U.S.
  • Leitner Ropeways celebrates 15 years of DirectDrive with 55 installations to date.
  • Poma has already delivered components for Zacatecas, Mexico’s new gondola but construction that was supposed to start in January has been delayed.
  • The 2002 Garaventa CTEC Chondola at Willamette Pass is still for sale along with the mountain’s Midway triple.  WP apparently can’t afford to maintain its only detachable lift and listed it for sale a year ago.
  • Le Relais also has 2 lifts newly listed (these are being removed to make way for a new six pack.)
  • LST signs La Plagne to launch the company’s first detachable lift next winter. MND Group CEO Xavier Gallot-Lavallee commented, “We are delighted to announce the initial commercial success of our brand new range of detachable chairlifts. The new contract signed with SAP, a subsidiary of leading ski resort operator Compagnie des Alpes, confirms the benefits of the innovative technology that we have developed and positions MND as a leading market player.”
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LST will debut unique new detachable chairs and terminals for a new six-pack chairlift in La Plagne.

News Roundup: Expansions

Peter Landsman3 Comments
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Apologies for the lack of posts this week, I’m on a ski vacation.
  • Snowbird granted unanimous approval to build two chairlifts, a new gondola and upgrade the Mineral Basin Express.  A zip line will share towers with the gondola in Mary Ellen Gulch.
  • Boyne Resorts buys 77 acres on Snoqualmie Pass for an improved connection between Summit Central and Summit West that could someday include a new chairlift.
  • Okemo Mountain Resort files for permit to build a fixed-grip beginner quad chair at Jackson Gore.
  • In other Snowbird news, the two-month project to replace the Aerial Tram’s track ropes begins April 18th.
  • Big Snow America is the latest incarnation of the snow dome at New Jersey’s Meadowlands hoping to be the United States’ first indoor ski slope.  The latest plan pegs an opening next year.  Doppelmayr CTEC completed two lifts for the project – a quad chair and a platter – back in 2008 that have yet to carry any skiers.

Whistler Blackcomb Unveils $345 Million Renaissance

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Whistler Blackcomb’s market capitalization surpassed $1 billion last week as its stock reached an all-time high on the Toronto Stock Exchange.  Already North America’s largest and most visited ski destination, the company today unveiled a $345 million capital plan, the largest in its history.  On-mountain improvements are only part of the initiative which also includes new four seasons attractions, base area revitalization and additional real estate development.

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The Magic Chondola will connect Blackcomb base to Base II.

The big lift news is Renaissance Phase One will include a new chondola to replace the Magic Chair connecting the Blackcomb Daylodge to Base II, where a 16,300 square foot waterpark and skier services building will go up.  The park and chairlift will be just one component of a new Blackcomb Adventure Park with a mountain coaster and more.  The chondola will be open day and night to connect the key destinations at both ends.  I suspect W-B will also expand hours on the first section of Excalibur to create a true gondola transit system between the Blackcomb base areas and Whistler Village.

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News Roundup: Layoffs at Burke

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Arizona Snowbowl & Purgatory Announce New Lifts

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Fresh on the heels of adding three lifts at his collective of Southwestern resorts last summer, James Coleman revealed today he will invest another $10 million to build new lifts and more at Arizona Snowbowl and Purgatory in 2016.

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The Leitner-Poma-built Grand Canyon Express will serve 85 percent of Arizona Snowbowl’s terrain with a 5.8 minute lift ride.  It will run approximately 5,500′ (1,530 vertical feet) in a new alignment starting near the Hart Prarie Lodge and topping out at 10,900′ in elevation near the Agassiz mid-station.  This is the second new chairlift at Arizona Snowbowl following last summer’s Humphreys Peak addition that expanded the mountain’s intermediate terrain with a SkyTrac quad.  The Sunset triple (a 1983 CTEC) will likely be removed and may be used to replace the Aspen double in the future. Arizona Snowbowl’s master plan also calls for a second detachable lift to replace the Hart Prarie double. Exciting times at a mountain whose very survival was questionable a few years ago!

In Colorado, Purgatory Resort will get a new two-way surface lift called T-3 to link the bottom terminals of backside lifts 5 and 8.  The latter is a 1980 Riblet double, the former a 2015 Leitner-Poma high speed quad. Purgatory plans to add a similar connection between lifts 3 and 5 and replace more of the resort’s aging fixed-grip chairlifts (namely #2, 4 and 5) in upcoming years.

Mr. Coleman is the Durango-based businessman who’s owned Sipapu since 2000 and took over operations at Pajarito, Purgatory and Arizona Snowbowl in 2014.  When the Durango Herald asked last year whether he was done buying ski areas, Coleman replied “no.”  That’s great news considering his willingness to invest in capital improvements to the tune of $20 million thus far.

CWA Delivers Monster Cabins for Ha Long Queen

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All photos credit Skyscrapercity forum user tmanhthang

We now know what the world’s largest tramway cabins look like.  One bright yellow and the other red, CWA’s largest Kronos cabins built to date will hold 230 passengers plus one operator each with six sets of doors on two levels.  They will soon be hung on the Ha Long Queen cable car, whose track cables already stretch 5,000 feet across Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay at heights up to 617 feet. The Queen will supplant the 200-passenger Vanoise Express as the world’s highest capacity aerial tram when it opens early this summer.

News Roundup: Noteworthy

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News Roundup: Eurotrip

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Three New Quad Chairs for Wilmot Mountain

Peter Landsman6 Comments

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Vail Resorts announced today it will spend $13 million this summer to modernize Wilmot Mountain, which the company acquired in January.  Improvements include three new quad chairs to replace existing lifts.  Wilmot Mountain currently operates eight chairlifts built by Hall, Borvig and Riblet between 1964 and 1978, meaning upgrades are long overdue. Four chairlifts will be removed, three added and three others overhauled.  The three new quads along with two new carpets will increase Wilmot’s uphill capacity by 45 percent.

“We think our guests from Chicago and Milwaukee will be thrilled with the improvements we are making at Wilmot for the 2016-2017 ski season, which represents one of the biggest transformations ever undertaken for a Midwestern ski area,” said Rob Katz, Chairman and CEO of Vail Resorts. No manufacturer was named, but Vail chose Doppelmayr in 2013 to provide Eco-drive quads as part of a $10 million redevelopment at Mt. Brighton near Detroit.  For those lifts, they re-used quad chairs and towers from retired Doppelmayr lifts at Vail and Beaver Creek.

News Roundup: Gearbox Trouble at Sugarloaf

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  • Sugarloaf’s Whiffletree high speed quad (shown above) will be down 1-2 weeks while its gearbox gets rebuilt in Michigan for the second time in six months.  Cone Drive rebuilt the gearbox in question last Fall and it was back in action a mere two months before failing on Saturday.  Whiffletree is a 1997 Garaventa CTEC Stealth detachable at a mountain that’s had more than its fair share of lift setbacks.
  • Doppelmayr’s latest Wir magazine is online.  Some article highlights: the Penkenbahn 3S gondola turns 6.5 degrees mid-line and Park City’s new gondola transitions between two different line gauges.
  • Leitner Ropeways will break ground on a two-stage gondola in Berlin March 26th to serve guests of the city’s 2017 horticultural expo.  Doppelmayr built temporary gondolas at similar expos in 2009 and 2011.  Must be nice to spend millions on lifts for four months of temporary operation!  To be fair, Whistler did something similar for the Olympics.
  • Garaventa crews pulling rope 600 feet above Ha Long Bay but they took some time off to celebrate the Lunar New Year.  The world’s largest aerial tramway opens next month.
  • The Telluride-Mountain Village gondola transit system, built by CTEC in 1992, has clocked 100,000 hours and elected officials are trying to figure out how to modernize it.