Top station with overhead drive.Lower terminal with grip maintenance bay attached.Loading area on a busy day.Leaving the return.Towers 3-6.Riding up the line.Arriving at the top station next to the River Run Gondola.Upper lift line.Terminal underskin.The breakover.Lift line view.Middle portion of the line.Top station overview.
The lift originally had 168 chairs, but in 2013, it lost 17 of its chairs, which (along with seven chairs from the Peru Express lift) were moved to the Outback Express lift.
So they removed roughly 275 pph off the lift? That wouldn’t have made a huge difference in lift line length, but not nothing, either.
Interesting that the response to the long lines a couple years ago was a sixpack, when they appear to have artificially lengthened lift lines themselves some years ago on the quad. Weird.
I feel like they wanted to slightly increase the spacing between chairs to cut down on misloads. (It’s noticeable that they took 17 chairs off Montezuma, but only 7 off Peru; my guess is this is because Montezuma has more traffic and reducing misloads means fewer stops, and thus more people moving through the maze per hour)
And it also served as a nice stopgap until they could upgrade both of the DS-104s on Dercum Mountain to six packs. (Because with 3,000 pph capacity, the current six pack’s chairs have eight second spacing, vs. the six second spacing of a quad with 2,800 pph)
This lift needed to be replaced mainly because it was a huge chokepoint. Montezuma is one of the, if not the, most popular lift on the mountain. You’ve got intermediates lapping the blues in the River Run area combined with the people who started their day in the Mountain House base area coming from Peru. Now add in all the beginners who don’t wanna ski the full length of Schoolmarm and thus, take this lift, and you’ve got hour long wait times.
Lift Blog 
The lift originally had 168 chairs, but in 2013, it lost 17 of its chairs, which (along with seven chairs from the Peru Express lift) were moved to the Outback Express lift.
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So they removed roughly 275 pph off the lift? That wouldn’t have made a huge difference in lift line length, but not nothing, either.
Interesting that the response to the long lines a couple years ago was a sixpack, when they appear to have artificially lengthened lift lines themselves some years ago on the quad. Weird.
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I feel like they wanted to slightly increase the spacing between chairs to cut down on misloads. (It’s noticeable that they took 17 chairs off Montezuma, but only 7 off Peru; my guess is this is because Montezuma has more traffic and reducing misloads means fewer stops, and thus more people moving through the maze per hour)
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And it also served as a nice stopgap until they could upgrade both of the DS-104s on Dercum Mountain to six packs. (Because with 3,000 pph capacity, the current six pack’s chairs have eight second spacing, vs. the six second spacing of a quad with 2,800 pph)
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When the lift had 168 chairs:
When the lift had 151 chairs during its final years of operation:
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The lift that this replaced was a Riblet double with a Yan top drive:
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Where did they realocate this lift to? Or if they sold it, where did it go? and why did this lift need to be replaced?
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Scrapped, although the chairs and towers were repurposed by Beaver Creek for Red Buffalo.
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This lift needed to be replaced mainly because it was a huge chokepoint. Montezuma is one of the, if not the, most popular lift on the mountain. You’ve got intermediates lapping the blues in the River Run area combined with the people who started their day in the Mountain House base area coming from Peru. Now add in all the beginners who don’t wanna ski the full length of Schoolmarm and thus, take this lift, and you’ve got hour long wait times.
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