Pomerelle Mountain near Twin Falls, Idaho announced they will replace their 39-year old SLI double chair with a new SkyTrac triple. This is SkyTrac’s only publicly announced project for this summer. Apparently they have another contract for a lift in Arizona. Leave a comment if you know where.
Saddleback, Maine has listed their Rangeley lift for sale for $350,000. They had previously listed just the drive terminal for $200k.
Sugarloaf removes the damaged drive terminal for the King Pine lift which rolled back in March to make way for a new Doppelmayr terminal.
Group wants to reopen Mt. Ascutney in Vermont. It’s tough to run a ski resort with no lifts, however. The mountain’s high speed quad was sold to Crotched Mountain and other lifts went to Pat’s Peak.
Germany’s highest mountain is getting a new tram. Photo credit: Bayerische Zugspitzbahn Bergbahn AG
Just weeks after opening two record-breaking aerial tramways on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, the Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group has begun construction on an even more remarkable tramway to Germany’s highest summit. Replacing a 1963 jig-back tram, the new 120-passenger Eibsee Cable Car on the Zugspitze will leave a base terminal at 3,337 feet and top out at 9,718 feet with only one tower in between. Two other aerial tramways that reach the same summit, the Tyrolean Zugspitzebahn and the Zugspitze Gletcherbahn, will remain unchanged.
Summer rendering of the new bottom terminal building. Photo credit: Bayerische Zugspitzbahn Bergbahn AG
The new cable car will maintain the old version’s record for the largest vertical rise of a single tramway span at 6,381 feet, down slightly from 6,398 feet. Its lone tower will be the tallest in the world at 416 feet – 43 feet taller than the current tallest on Austria’s Gletscherbahn Kaprun III. The new cableway will also have the longest unsupported span at 10,541 feet, breaking the current record of 9,941 feet on the Peak 2 Peak Gondola’s middle span.
Okemo Mountain Resort announces new fixed-grip quad and conversion of the Jackson Gore Express into a bubble quad called Quantum 4. Their press release (falsely) claims Okemo will be the first resort in North America with two bubble lifts.
The last two victims of a 2010 de-ropement at Sugarloaf settle their lawsuit with Boyne Resorts, or more likely their insurance company. Next up: claims from the victims of this year’s rollback.
Marshall Mountain, Montana is for sale for $2.95 million. Its lifts – a Thiokol triple and Poma T-Bar – haven’t spun since the 2002-03 season.
The British Columbia Safety Authority releases its incident report on Crystal Mountain’s de-ropement and it’s not pretty. The ski area has been closed ever since the March 1, 2014 incident.
Add San Diego to the growing list of cities that want to build a gondola. This one would have 8-passenger cabins and two mid-stations.
Yesterday Sugarloaf Mountain Resort, the site of two of the worst lift accidents in recent memory, announced $1.3 million in lift safety upgrades including a new Doppelmayr drive terminal for the lift that rolled back in March. The mountain will also launch a new website devoted solely to lift safety and maintenance with a tip line for anyone to submit questions and concerns about lifts. All of this is moving forward despite Sugarloaf’s looming sale.
The King Pine Quad’s bottom drive terminal will be replaced with a new Doppelmayr one.In December 2010, the Spillway East double, built by Borvig in 1975, experienced a de-ropement that caused numerous chairs to hit the ground and drag approximately 40 feet. Eight skiers were injured and the last legal claim was settled just last week. The State of Maine’s investigation found inadequate maintenance records, poor training, high winds, and component failure as probable contributing factors. The full report is here. Spillway was replaced by a Doppelmayr quad the following summer and renamed Skyline.
The King Pine Quad, a 1988 Borvig, rolled-back approximately 460 feet on March 21, 2015, resulting in numerous injuries. Skiers went around the bottom bullwheel at high speed and many others jumped off. Sugarloaf’s internal investigation found that the drive bullwheel’s drop dog failed to deploy due to a faulty switch and the lift was eventually stopped by an operator who manually activated the lift’s emergency brake. The state has not yet released its investigation into this incident. King Pine and its sister quad called Timberline were both closed for the remainder of last season.
King Pine’s new drive terminal will be similar to Skyline’s.Continue reading →
Doppelmayr USA has redesigned all of their controls for 2015.
Apparently Doppelmayr has redesigned their controls for 2015. A new pedestal pictured above looks like an improvement, especially the speed selector replacing slow/medium/fast buttons.
Willard Mountain, NY files for bankruptcy, proving once again it is best to control all of the land your ski resort sits on. The area has a Borvig and Partek doubles.
Saddleback Maine has put the drive terminal for its main lift up for sale on Resort Boneyard for $200k. Hopefully a new lift is on the way.
Whistler-Blackcomb to test snowmaking as a means to preserve summer skiing on Horstman Glacier, home to the only glacier-anchored lifts in North America.
Park City and Jackson Hole just started building new lifts but trail map illustrator James Niehues is already finishing illustrations for their 2015-16 trail maps. Niehues planned to retire last year but apparently some projects are too good to pass up. There is no question Mr. Niehues is the best in the business and I hope he keeps painting as long as possible.
Jackson Hole’s new Teton lift will open up a handful of new trails in between the Apres Vous and Casper areas this coming winter. Mr. Niehues is repainting the portion of the map that was previously known as The Crags while the rest will remain true to his original 1991 painting.
Jackson Hole’s new map showing the Teton lift pod. Photo Credit: James Niehues
Vail Resorts contracted James to paint an all-new, unified map of Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort which will operate as one from 2015-16. I was surprised and pleased to hear they were going with a painting instead of the awful computer-generated maps that Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Northstar have gone to. Niehues admits he had to get creative with portions of the map to show 37 lifts and 7,300 acres of terrain acres in one view. The final result below is impressive and shows why paintings make more compelling trail maps than satellite photos.
Illustration for the new Park City Mountain Resort. Photo Credit: James Niehues
British Columbia’s Minister of Environment has finally killed the Jumbo Glacier Resort, proposed to rival Whistler in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia. Jumbo Glacier is a spectacularly-remote place up a dirt logging road from Panorama Mountain Village and Invermere. It’s more than 200 miles from Calgary, the nearest major city and airport. The plan was to build 20+ lifts on 3,000 hectares of public land above 5,000 feet. You can read the full master plan here.
Leitner-Poma poured some footings last fall in a last-ditch effort.
The project was first submitted to the BC government in 1991 and received environmental approval in 2004. The resort claimed they would get 2,700 skiers per day. This was always a red flag to me as 2,700 skiers is not a big number for a destination ski resort. Take for example a mid-sized area like Mt. Sunapee in New Hampshire. It has six lifts and a comfortable carrying capacity of 5,220 skiers per day. 2,700 could justify perhaps three or four lifts at Jumbo, not 23.
BC has no shortage of large ski areas struggling due to remoteness. Kicking Horse and Revelstoke are perhaps most similar to the Jumbo proposal. Revelstoke was supposed to have 21 lifts; they built three before running out of money in 2008. Lucky for them, the 27th richest person in Canada bought in and paid off over $100 million in debt. Kicking Horse was in similar trouble when it was rescued by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies in 2011. Both of these resorts are on the Trans-Canada Highway, not 50 miles from a town.
A bit further south, Waterville Valley started cutting trees for its Green Peak Expansion. Unfortunately they don’t have funding for a new lift or even a used one.
Also in New Hampshire, Tenney Mountain plans to reopen next season after being closed since 2010. The mountain has a 1964 Stadeli double and 1987 Borvig triple
You can own one of Oregon’s ski areas for only $1.25 million. Includes lifts with charming names like “Happy” and “Echo.”
The Harbour Skylink would be a four-stage gondola in one of the world’s great capitals.
Poma is currently building five gondolas in Latin America, two for the Metrocable system in Medellin, Colombia and one each in Bolivia, Chile and Mexico. They recently received €1.3 million from the French government to lead a consortium promoting ropeway transportation in cities.
The world’s tallest observation tower is coming to Brighton, England, courtesy of Poma, who also brought us the London Eye and the High Roller in Las Vegas.
Sigma takes on CWA with 3S gondola cabins developed by Italian car designer Pininfarina, set to debut in 2018 on the world’s highest 3S in Zermatt.
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