- Three people injured in a March 2014 de-ropement on a Mueller double chair at Crystal Mountain, BC have filed claims against the resort. The BC Safety Authority’s investigation found the cause to be low tension in the haul rope due to the lift’s counterweight resting on the ground. Crystal Mountain has been closed ever since.
- Wolf Creek’s owner still floating the idea of a low capacity jag-back tram on the backside of the mountain.
- Re-opening plan for Antelope Butte Ski Area moves forward with two Riblet doubles scheduled to be back in operation by December 2017.
- Another child falls from a chair, this time on the Glacier Express at Lake Louise.
- Saddleback is probably the largest ski resort ever to go out of business.
- A group has formed in opposition to Arapahoe Basin’s proposed Beavers expansion, which would include a new chairlift.
- Killington’s Skye Peak Express had to be rope evac’d Friday afternoon, possibly as a result of damage from a thunderstorm the day before.
News
News Roundup: Eurotrip
- Leitner highlights its latest project in Mexico, a pulse gondola to access a popular statue in Torreon.
- Gangloff unveils unique aerial tramway cabins fabricated for an urban aerial tramway in France with privacy glass that can be turned on when passing over homes.
- Historic data from Newenglandskiindustry.com suggests this summer could be about average for lift construction in the Northeast or the worst in 63 years.
- 26 green and gold Diamond cabins arrive at Poma’s latest project in Peru, a gondola that will access the ancient fortress of Kuelap.
- Magic Mountain, Idaho wants to re-install Jackson Hole’s old Casper lift as a beginner chair.
- Mt. Sunapee scores approval for its West Bowl expansion with six new trails and a 5,100′ high speed quad chair.
- Check out footage of the multi-year project to build Fansipan Legend, the world’s longest 3S gondola to the roof of Vietnam.
Three New Quad Chairs for Wilmot Mountain
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
- 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.
News Roundup: BMF Builds a Gondola
- The Boston Globe profiles a man who bought 62 lifts at 11 mountain resorts in his career and now wants to build a resort with 25 lifts at The Balsams.
- While states like West Virginia have no government oversight agency, a New Hampshire newspaper asks whether that state’s tramway board goes far enough. Part II of the investigation deals with lift inspections and Part III the recent grip-slip incident at Granite Gorge.
- The writing was on the wall but it’s now official; there will be no season at Saddleback.
- Nippon Cable will build Japan’s first chondola this summer at Niseko along with a pulse gondola.
- A San Diego County Supervisor thinks his city will have a gondola before the Chargers build a new stadium. The San Diego Bay to Balboa Park Skyway would cover two miles in 12 minutes and carry 2,400 people per hour.
- The federal government is in a dispute with the concessionaire that, up until yesterday, operated Badger Pass Ski Area in Yosemite National Park. Deleware North Corporation wants $51.2 million for trademarks including the Badger Pass® name so the National Park Service has re-named the mountain Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area. Its four chairlifts are safe from the litigation and now operated by Aramark Corporation as part of a $2 billion contract.
News Roundup: Making Repairs
- Timberline, WV re-opens the Thunderstruck triple today after getting tower 12’s crossarm back on and reinforcing the lift’s 16 other towers. Meanwhile, the lawyers are circling.
- We might not see many lifts built in the Northeastern U.S. this summer with continued dismal weather hurting business. With plentiful snow across the west, keep track of new lifts to be built this summer here.
- Privately-funded urban gondola proposed for the Don Valley in Toronto by Bullwheel International Cable Car Corp., whose CEO is a man you may recognize from the Gondola Project.
- Cannon Mountain’s Aerial Tramway also re-opens today after being down two weeks following its Valentine’s Day evacuation. The tram’s 500 HP electric motor was shipped to Maine for repair and returned to Cannon on Wednesday for installation and testing.
- Curbed looks into why no one seems to want to buy 14 ski resorts operated by industry titans like Boyne, Vail and Triple Peaks.
Bromont’s Lift 5 Re-Opens Tomorrow Following Fire
The Versant du Lac detachable quad at Bromont, Quebec will carry skiers tomorrow morning for the first time since Feb 3rd. That’s when a fast-moving fire started in the bottom operator house and spread to the return terminal before being put out by firefighters with help from Bromont’s snowmakers. The operator building housed a snowmaking compressor and lighting equipment, which may have led to the fire. For the past three weeks, the resort has been working with Doppelmayr to get the lift back in service as quickly as possible despite the lack of snow in Quebec. If there’s a silver lining, that bad weather was the reason no guests were riding Lift 5 the night of the fire.
Doppelmayr fabricated and painted a new operator house in Salt Lake City which arrived in Quebec on Feb. 19th, just two weeks after the fire. The lift was load tested on Thursday and while terminal damage is still visible, some burned out windows at the return won’t prevent operation for the final month of the season. Presumably, Doppelmayr will return this summer and replace the remaining fire-damaged components. The exact cause of the blaze is still under investigation but in the meantime, congratulations to Bromont crews for getting this key lift back up and running in 24 days.
https://twitter.com/Ski_Bromont/status/703372670310727680
Fallout from Timberline
Timberline Four Seasons Resort plans to have the Thunderstruck lift re-opened Saturday after last weekend’s incident with help from Partek, Aerial NDT and Ropeway Construction. A new crossarm will be installed to replace the one that fell from tower 12 and the lift will be load tested before it re-opens. “We have assembled a world-class team of manufacturers, engineers, and safety inspectors who have been working diligently since the event took place to assess and repair the lift, with multiple levels of oversight at every step in the process,” the resort said in a statement posted to Facebook.
Sugarloaf temporarily closed its Snubber lift (a 1985 Borvig triple) for inspections Monday after news of the incident at Timberline. Sugarloaf notes it completed Borvig’s recommended reinforcement of towers on affected lifts in the late 1980s, as did Sunday River.
The State of Vermont ordered the closure of the 2,000 foot double chair at Suicide Six after cracks were found on two of its towers. This lift was manufactured by Borvig in 1975 and has a different tower design than the ones at Timberline with no lifting frame. Because this particular lift provides the only access to the majority of the mountain’s terrain, the resort is closed until the towers can be repaired.
By my count there are 176 Borvig lifts remaining in operation in 26 states and 3 Canadian provinces. The company built 260 lifts from 1962 to 1991.
Added 2/25/2016: Sugarloaf announced today they performed non-destructive testing on the Skidway double’s towers this week in addition to inspecting Snubber. Skidway is a 1988 Borvig double. While the NDT found no problems, Sugarloaf will voluntarily install U-bolts connecting Skidway’s tower tubes and crossarms this week out of an abundance of caution.
Falling Crossarm Injures Nine at Timberline, WV
Nine people were injured and 100+ others evacuated when a crossarm fell completely off a tower at Timberline Four Seasons Resort around 9:15 this morning, causing skiers to contact the snow. Thankfully, only two of those people required hospitalization despite the fact that numerous chairs fell 10-20 feet during public operation. The lift in question is called Thunderstruck and was built by Borvig in 1986. It has Leitner chairs and is just over 4,100 feet long with 17 towers. Tower 12 is the one that failed. The pictures are harrowing and this incident could have been much worse. Sugarloaf’s two recent high-profile accidents involved Borvig lifts – a de-ropement with chairs contacting the ground in 2010 and rollback in 2015.
News Roundup: Italy Goes Premium
- Leitner Ropeways will build Italy’s first 8-passenger chairlift this summer featuring the Leitner Premium Chair.
- A 16-year old rides up outside of a gondola cabin hanging upside down from the doors. Yikes.
- Sugarloaf’s Lift Safety blog keeps guests informed of hiccups with the mountain’s lifts, most recently the SuperQuad, Sawduster and Double Runner East.
- Snowbird will replace the four track ropes on its Garaventa Aerial Tram starting April 18th. The tram will re-open sometime in June.
- 11-year old boy falls from the Peak Chair at Whistler, is caught by a group of staff and guests to the cheers of onlookers.
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