News

Big Sky Resort Replacing Challenger and Lone Peak Chairs

Peter Landsman14 Comments

It’s official; in the wake of the incident two weeks ago, Big Sky Resort will remove and replace the Challenger double chair this summer rather than repair it. General Manager Taylor Middleton announced, “After exhaustive efforts to make Challenger operational for the rest of the season, we have determined that the best course of action is to replace it with a completely new lift. Skiers will continue to access the Challenger terrain via the Headwaters Lift for the rest of this season.”  The new lift will be built by Doppelmayr but there’s no word yet on model and capacity.

In addition, a letter to passholders announced the Lone Peak triple chair – a 1973 Heron-Poma – will also be replaced this summer in some form.  Big Sky has struggled for years with aging lifts needing replacement.  The mountain’s gondola had a multi-tower de-ropement in February 2008 and never ran again.  Big Sky has been looking to build a new, longer gondola from the base of the mountain to the Lone Peak Tram that would span more than two miles.  With a mid-station, such a gondola could replace the original Gondola One, Lone Peak triple and Explorer beginner double in one alignment.  Elsewhere on the mountain, the Shedhorn double needs more capacity and Big Sky has floated an idea of a lift up Liberty Bowl.

If you include Moonlight Basin and Spanish Peaks, what is now Big Sky Resort built an amazing 13 new lifts in six years between 2002 and 2007 (with 7 more going in at the Yellowstone Club.)  The 2008 recession literally stopped the construction boom in its tracks, with the Stagecoach lift at Moonlight left half-finished and abandoned when owner Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.  I’ve heard SkyTrac will be finishing that lift this summer.  It’s going to be a busy one on Lone Peak.

Cannon Mountain Tram Evacuated

Peter Landsman1 Comment

The Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway was evacuated on Sunday for the first time in its history.  The tram’s two cars stopped around 1:50 pm, only about 75 feet out of the stations due to a yet-to-be-specified mechanical problem a bearing issue with the electric motor.  After an hour and half, tram operators began lowering passengers by rope with the temperature hovering around zero. It took another hour and a half for all 48-passengers to make it safely off the red and yellow tram cars.  Great work by the two operators who performed under pressure with minimal outside help.

Each tram cabin normally carries up to 70 passengers just over a mile between stations. Aguido (now merged with Leitner) built the Cannon Mountain Tramway back in 1979, replacing one built in 1938.    The State of New Hampshire owns and operates Cannon Mountain as part of Franconia Notch State Park.  Mountain management hopes to have the tram back open tomorrow morning. These things always seem to happen on a holiday weekend!  (not far away at Sunday River the workhorse Chondola has also been down all weekend.)

Update 2/15: The tram will remain closed at least through the first part of this week.

News Roundup: Windy in Switzerland

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  • Owner of Echo Mountain files for bankruptcy but will keep operating the closest ski area to Denver.
  • Saddleback, Maine won’t be open in time for February vacation week.
  • Big Tupper, NY pulls the plug on this season entirely.
  • Aspen Highlands looks to expand into Loge Bowl, with the possibility of eventually adding a lift.
  • A quick-thinking 7 year-old hangs onto a dangling classmate for two minutes, long enough for resort staff to make a successful catch from a chair in Ontario.  Canada requires nets to be out and ready whenever a lift is in operation for just this reason.
  • Aspen Highlands chair pusher finally arrested and identified as a 31-year old local man with a history of mental illness. He’s charged with felony assault and misdemeanor reckless endangerment but will go to a treatment facility instead of jail.  The investigation also reveals a 19-year old lift operator saw the 25-foot fall and hit an e-stop but didn’t report it.
  • Gizmodo tackles urban gondolas, revealing La Paz carries 100,000 commuters a day on its 3 aerial lines.

News Roundup: Rope Evac at Big Sky

Peter Landsman7 Comments
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Ski patrollers lower guests from the Challenger double at Big Sky Resort on February 5, 2016.
  • I’ve ridden lifts thousands of times and last Friday at Big Sky was the first time I never made it to the top of one.  A part in the gearbox on Challenger failed around noon with myself among 120 or so riders on line.  Big Sky Ski Patrol did an awesome job getting everybody down safely in about an hour.  Challenger is a reconditioned Riblet double built for Big Sky by Superior Tramway in 1988.  Three days after this incident, it’s still down. This particular lift saw significant downtime last season due to a broken bearing.
  • The Forest Service seeks comments on Arapahoe Basin’s latest master plan.  It includes a fixed-grip triple or quad chair serving the Beavers expansion, a Zuma access surface lift, replacements for Pallavicini/Molly Hogan and removal of Norway.
  • The Gondola Project asserts that cities now account for one in five gondolas and tramways built worldwide.
  • The first new lift for the 2018 Winter Olympics, an 8-passenger gondola, opens in South Korea after months of delays.  Two more detachable quads will be added this summer at the Jeongseon Alpine Center, which is hosting the Downhill and Super-G.
  • The New York Times confirms North Korea’s Masik Pass ski resort got a Doppelmayr 4-passenger gondola this summer.  It’s not new; according to Doppelmayr it came from Ischgl, Austria via a broker called Pro-Alpin who sold it to the Chinese.  The gondola is in addition to the four counterfeit Doppelmayr lifts that appeared to be brand new in 2014.

Replacing a Crossarm in the Middle of Winter

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Big White is a ski resort that lives up to its name.  Like many of its counterparts in British Columbia, the upper mountain gets pummeled by Pacific storms leaving trees and lifts looking like “snow ghosts” all winter.  On January 27th, Doppelmayr issued a service bulletin due to cracks found on the crossarms of depression towers of lifts in California, Colorado and New Hampshire.  Big White crews found damage to tower 14 of the Gem Lake Express and took the lift out of service on January 28th.

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A storm coats the Gem Lake Express in feet of rime January 27, 2016.  Photo credit: Michael Ballingall

More than 8,000 feet long and rising 2,300 feet, Gem Lake accesses a huge portion of Big White’s terrain.  The detachable quad lift was built by Doppelmayr in 1996 and has 24 towers.  Tower 14 sits about two thirds of the way up the line at 5,914 feet in elevation. Gem Lake has a parking rail for some of its 128 chairs at the bottom terminal but not for the entire line.

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Mountain operations folks making it happen.  Here, the Big White grooming team hauls a forklift to the site of the damaged tower.  Photo credit: Michael Ballingall

After the cracks on tower 14 were discovered, Doppelmayr fabricated a new crossarm in St. Jerome and shipped it from Quebec early last week.  Of course, the 20-foot long, 2.5 ton part got stuck in a winter storm of its own and ended up taking 119 hours to cross Canada. Meanwhile, Big White maintenance staff rigged the haul rope and removed the broken crossarm.

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Ski Bromont Lift Heavily Damaged in Overnight Fire

Peter Landsman2 Comments
Photo credit: Bromont Fire Department
Photo credit: Bromont Fire Department

The return station of a detachable quad burned last night at Ski Bromont in Quebec.  The 2003 Doppelmayr CTEC lift is called Versant du Lac or Lift 5.  More pictures of it can be found here.  This is the third such terminal fire in Eastern Canada in as many years.  The drive terminals of high speed quads at Mont Tremblant and Marble Mountain burned in 2014 and were subsequently repaired.  The good news for Bromont is the Uni-G terminal model is still in production so it shouldn’t be too hard to get a new one this spring.  Doppelmayr’s St. Jerome factory is less than two hours away.

Photo credit: CBC News
Photo credit: CBC News

https://twitter.com/mjohnst2/status/695067146490109956

https://twitter.com/Ski_Bromont/status/695071624958210048

Steamboat to Build High Speed Quad at Elkhead

Peter Landsman2 Comments
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Elkhead serves an important trail pod at Steamboat near the summit of the Silver Bullet Gondola.

Intrawest announced in its second quarter earnings call today that Steamboat will get its 8th detachable lift this summer, a high speed quad replacing the Elkhead chair.  The new lift will better serve beginner and low-intermediate skiers.  Intrawest CEO Tom Marano noted, “Elkhead services a high-volume area of the mountain and facilitates lunchtime and end-of-day egress from the popular beginner and intermediate terrain pods on the south side of the mountain.  The increased speed and capacity of this new lift will substantially improve the guest experience at Steamboat.”

Elkhead is a Yan fixed-grip quad built in 1984 with newer Doppelmayr line equipment.  At just under 2,500 feet, the current 5.8 minute lift ride will be cut to just 2.5 minutes with a detachable quad.  The existing chair rises 707 vertical feet at 425 feet/minute.  No word yet on which manufacturer will build the Elkhead Express but Leitner-Poma built the Christie Peak Express for Steamboat in 2007 and the Wildhorse Gondola in 2009.  This is the second major lift announcement from Colorado in recent weeks; Vail announced in December it’s replacing Chair 17 with a detachable quad this summer.  With stellar snow across the west, it might be a busy one for lift manufacturers.

News Roundup: Fansipan Legend Opens

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  • Contract awarded for India’s first urban gondola, to cost $24 million and open within two years.
  • Just a week after sanctions on Iran were lifted, Bartholet announces it’s building a gondola system on the resort island of Kish.  A definite upgrade from the salvaged Yan detachable installed last year in Isfahan (if you’re wondering, it made the journey from Silver Star, BC.)

News Roundup: Penkenbahn

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  • After several high-profile incidents, a good reminder from the NSAA that 86 percent of falls from chairlifts can be attributed to rider error.
  • Lots of questions surround last week’s skier-pushes-snowboarder-off-lift story from Aspen Highlands.  Police say even without an arrest made, the public is not in any danger.
  • Bravo to Bristol Mountain for actually pressing charges against a freeloading teen for theft of services.
  • Only at a tiny mountain in Maine would volunteer ski patrollers derail a double chair they are also responsible for inspecting.
  • An Austrian man is in a coma after the harness he was wearing around his neck became entangled with a platter lift carrier.  At least one lift operator may not have been at his or her assigned post.
  • Mt. Rose Ski Tahoe is for sale.
  • Fun Spot America near Orlando looks to add a gondola ride (thanks Jay T. for the tip.)
  • Dignitaries break ground at Laurel Mountain in preparation for a November re-opening.
  • A mix of public and private groups including Georgetown University are about to spend $250k to study a gondola linking Rosslyn, Virginia with Georgetown (one of Washington, D.C.’s highest-profile neighborhoods without a metro station.)
  • The Balsams Wilderness won’t re-open in 2016 after all.  A revised timeline has three new and two existing lifts spinning in late 2017.
  • This is our 200th post!