Bottom terminal with cabins parked.Riding up in the winter.Tower 2.Breakover towers just below the top.The upper terminal sits right next to the Rainier Express unload.Side view of the Uni-G-S top terminal.Tower 14.Upper station area.Upper part of the lift line.View down the line.Breakover towers.At one point the lift crosses over Iceberg Gulch and gets very high above ground.Upper part of the lift line.CWA Omega IV 8 LWI cabin.View up the line.Middle part of the line.The tallest tower on the lift.View down toward the base area.Lower lift line.The first four towers.View up from the base area.Tower 3.Towers 1 and 2 adjacent to the bottom terminal.Lower terminal.View up at tower 2.Top turnaround area.Side view of the return station.Terminal under cover.Upper station next to Rainier Express and the Summit House.Lift overview.Loading area.Loading area.Parking area.
I believe 12 more cabins are being added this summer. The design of this gondola was to be low capacity to begin with since its used “mainly (not really)” for sightseers due to where the bottom terminal is located. If you want to use it for uphill transport as a skier, you have to zig and zag to get to it and its more of a hassle than whats its worth. However, its still faster having to wait in two lines at times to get to the top of Crystal.
A lower design capacity also saved Crystal a bunch of money. Besides needing fewer cabins, this gondola also has fewer towers, a smaller motor and narrower rope than if it had a bigger capacity.
5 cabins are being added this summer. The initial number was 24 but one was damaged beyond repair and written off. Next winter Crystal will have 28 with an ultimate maximum of 36.
A few of the more had to be written off before this winter. Not sure if they were new cabins, though that would be a bit poetic given how unnecessary this lift is.
Without naming names, a very experienced employee chose to ignore a timing fault because he was at the bottom and the fault was at the top. Many grands of JK’s money down the tubes.
Interesting! I hadn’t heard there was terminal damage as well. Good thing the flagship lift gets such careful treatment. Like never rolling a brand new cabin down into Green Valley. Oh, wait.
That is completely stupid! Boyne was & still is a multi-million dollar company. This lift has the capacity of a good gondola from the 60s. Well, it’s not the 60s anymore, the industry has changed in terms of capacity. You get on the gondola 4 hours from opening ( at least according to my aunt, who skis there all the time ). This gondola needs to be replaced and scraped! Crystal needs a new gondola of at least 3500p/h/d (people an hour and direction), if not, more. The best reuse of the system I could see would be a detachable quad w/ no bubbles (maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, I’m not an engineer.) Alterra needs to stop procrastinating & replace this thing NOW! (I hope Alterra likes Doppelmayr, because that’s what’s needed right now.) Also, there aren’t space constraints at the top! The photos show a generous amount of space, (Again I’m not an engineer, I’m just sharing what I see in the photos) & the bottom definitely has enough space for a large d-line terminal. The lift that should replace this should be a 10 passenger Doppelmayr d-line w/ Omega Vs, a capacity of above 3500p/h/d & a speed of 6-7 m/s NOT 5. I’m sorry if I’m being critical here, but, it’s true. I’m sure people can’t stand these long lines just for one ride! Even in the summertime, it’s bad! One time, I waited about an hour or two to get on the gondola.
I just can’t believe what Everett/ John was thinking when they installed this.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up Everett Kircher and John Kircher.
Everett passed away 8 years before the Mt. Rainier Gondola went in. John did more building on that mountain than most resorts see in 50 years, if ever. He presided over construction of Forest Queen Express, Chinook Express, Green Valley Express, Northway, Campbell Basin Lodge, the Gondola, Quicksilver, Chair 6 and a greenfield snowmaking system. Sure, the gondola implementation proved less than perfect but Crystal will never again see the kind of investment and care as it did under John/Boyne. I feel lucky to have grown up there when we got something new every single year.
Yeah, you guys got something new every year because Stephen/Boyne has always & still is in competition with Vail! It’s the exact same thing that is happening at Snoqualmie! This has been the first time since establishment of the resort that lifts have been installed every year. Heck! Stephen wanted to have 3 lifts installed at the area this year, but got pushed back on Edelweiss because of the pure sheer terrain at king steeps & rocks (a.k.a Alpental). The only difference is the reason why these lifts are being replaces because the lifts are 50 to 60 years old, the doubles (at Crystal at the time they were only 30 years old), were probably replace due to competition (realistically, maybe due to capacity needs.)On the positive side it’s going to be great we will have brand new lifts that are more comfortable than the old ones and not have center poles that will be knocking us down.
if you want to know the reason why I’m writing this it’s because I want not only you to know what’s going on in the industry but I also people who are on this website toknow what is going on in the industry
Everett passed away in 2002, and he was never involved in Crystal’s operation. It was all on JK until he sold. As far as waiting in line here goes, unless it’s the only out of base lift open, just don’t use it. It’s practical if you’re a tourist or only skiing Green Valley, otherwise Chinook is just fine. Heck, even riding 8 and then 4 is fine. The gondola was a bit of a vanity project, and yeah, it probly wasn’t very well-conceived (the span over Iceberg Gulch is super exposed to those thermals that head right on up said gulch, for instance), and it probly doesn’t serve the inteded purpose as well as it should, but to be honest, it wasn’t actually needed in the first place. In 30 years skiing at Crystal, I never once thought that what amounts to an infill lift is what would fix the traffic flow issues. When it arrived, I mostly rode it cos it was there and cos my Pa cut the liftline. Crystal is, and for the foreseeable future will be, a place that skis best once you’ve chased some locals and taken the time to learn it. More lifts or more capacity on existing lifts is just smooshing gull guano around on a windshield. As has been debated endlessly on this and many other forums, especially Rafters I mean The Bullwheel I mean Rafters after few buckets of overly hoppy Puget Sound beer, there just isn’t much to be done with the upper Silver Creek drainage. Let it be what it is. Be there when the crowds aren’t. Better yet, go for a skin up East Peak and find you them mythical chutes on the Cement Basin side. They’re legit.
Would it be at all possible for Crystal to upgrade the gondola so that it could have more gondola cabins, or would they have to completely replace the lift?
The maximum number of cabins the system was designed for is 36. Crystal started with 24, one was written off shortly thereafter so the total was 23. This year five were added, bringing them to 28. Eight more can be added in the future.
Infill towers could be added at a later date as need be. Case in point, Vail’s first Avanti Express had a tower 7A that was added years after all the other towers (and when the lift was upgraded to a six pack, they just added a small extension for the wider crossarms)..
That would all depend on the design of the top and bottom foundations and whether they could handle the additional forces that would be placed on them.
It helps you get to the good skiing up top when conditions are bad on the lower half of the mountain. Also, athletic people like to do full mountain laps.
Also, it is much easier to accomodate early and late season Green-Valley-only openings or the lean years like ’04-’05 when the lower mountain isn’t viable but Rex and 3 are. The cat drivers don’t have to try to keep up the Tom Leonard Memorial Highway down Lower Skid.
On a somewhat related note, I worked Chinook back in ’99 when we opened in late June and the amount of customer faceplants on the summer pavers was surprising. I got a quick introduction to ski area customer service when the pre-Boyne company president’s daughter (how’s that for roundabout?) gave me the beans after she got her boot stuck under her chair and couldn’t unload and the chair dragged her for a bit while I got it stopped. 6-packs don’t stop on a dime. I’d have been pretty pissed, too, had our roles been swapped.
There was talk in the plan at the time of having to move the top terminal of Rex to make room for the tram terminal. It would no longer have been possible to ski directly from the top of Rex to Snorting Elk. I recall reading that at the time and thinking “that’s both a bad idea, and expensive.”
Your telling me. The freaking slow speed, combined w/ cabin coun are the reasons why lines are just so long.
Long length unis are applicable, Boyne just wanted an excuse to not spend money to build a lift in 2010. Same, but not same exact reason why Boyne is making Sugarloaf get 30 year old lifts even though they are the highest in Maine.
My chief complaint about the gondola is that the line cut right through some of the most fun inbounds steep tree skiing – the Upper Bull Run / Upper Exterminator area. I’m concerned that the proposed Kelly’s Gap lift line will do the same thing to Right Angle Trees.
It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? A Kelly’s Gap chair would be so useful on storm days, or to avoid the gondola tourists. Or to lap O Meadows and Niagaras. Hm.
Given the length and steepness along with some pretty large unsupported spans near the top, I don’t think a chair would be a good fit here at all. The plan originally was for this to be a tramway built by Riblet but with their bankruptcy in 2003 that obviously never happened. As Peter pointed out, Crystal’s manager has expressed that he wants this thing replaced with a higher capacity gondola system at some point in the near future with this one being relocated to Campbell Basin.
I somewhat agree w/you, only this is the main lift at Crystal. If you look at my other comments, the only really viable option would be a 3500+ p/h/d gondola d line ONLY from Doppelmayr. This gondola has 1/4 of the required capacity needed for this lift (which is 900 p/h/d) therefore, yielding long lines. They also need a higher speed, a bare minimum would be 6m/s. The long terminals are applicable at the top, only they just don’t try that hard to have a fast lift. I agree w/ you, this gondola is unbearable & despicable & a load of crap.
I’m very curious where y’all have heard the Riblet rumour. They never built a detachable tramway; the best I could see them having designed is a 750-FPM pulse lift with four to eight (most likely eight) pulses of a few gondola cabins apiece. I was in operations at Crystal during the formative years of what wound up as the current MRG and I never once heard any Riblet mentioned as a contender. Garaventa, Poma, and Doppelmayr were all in the mix; as we know, Garaventa and Doppelmayr merged (after I left there) so it was down to two manufacturers by the time this was built.
In 2005 Riblet was not a player, having gone out of business in 2003. I know I’ve said this before, but Riblet and Superior are not the same company. Superior was founded by an ex-Riblet engineer, which through the rumour mill (or modern social media fourth-party ‘I know a guy’ posts) could have morphed into ‘Superior is the same thing as Riblet’, but in all reality is not. The Ellis family were indeed involved with Riblet, but that’s as far as it goes. They were able to buy much of Riblet’s patents; I know they still make insert clips for ski areas with operating Riblet lifts. Superior could definitely have built a tram, but it seems the situation changed.
No. If they do it’ll be under their own name; the Riblet trademark and company is done. Superior has built a few lifts, actually, but they do it under their own aspect. If you need a comparison SkyTrac is the closest example, where former CTEC engineers started their own company but used many of the former firm’s designs.
id argue you’re right and wrong. Superior is a completely separate entity than Riblet was. However a lot of the knowledge and manufacturing expertise, and even machinery, ended up literally down the road at Superior from the old Riblet warehouses in north Spokane. And subsequently acquired most of their existing patents.
It’s not a direct successor but I’d say it’s an offshoot, which is why they get confused to be a “re-named Riblet”. They definitely are not, but Superior wouldn’t exist where and how it does if Riblet hadn’t been there beforehand.
Well, Washington WAS one of the first two states (the internet says first by 3 hours, so take that, Callmeradbro) to legalise the recreational ganj. . .and when we got the first teaser cabin, the instructors all piled in to make it a ganj’ola. Can’t remember if the teaser cabin was green, or not.
Joe, to sum it up without being too critical,the reason why the gondola didn’t fix traffic flow was because John/ D CTEC designed it wrong, both in speed and capacity.
I just don’t get how a modern gondola has less p/h/d than a 2 CLF. It seems impossible.
It was never intended to be a high capacity lift. It works great for a sightseeing lift and the cost was much less than a high capacity lift. John intended to pull skiers out of the parking lot with other lifts, that are now unlikely to be built under current ownership.
Lift Blog 
Why are the cabins spaced so far apart?
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I believe 12 more cabins are being added this summer. The design of this gondola was to be low capacity to begin with since its used “mainly (not really)” for sightseers due to where the bottom terminal is located. If you want to use it for uphill transport as a skier, you have to zig and zag to get to it and its more of a hassle than whats its worth. However, its still faster having to wait in two lines at times to get to the top of Crystal.
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A lower design capacity also saved Crystal a bunch of money. Besides needing fewer cabins, this gondola also has fewer towers, a smaller motor and narrower rope than if it had a bigger capacity.
5 cabins are being added this summer. The initial number was 24 but one was damaged beyond repair and written off. Next winter Crystal will have 28 with an ultimate maximum of 36.
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A few of the more had to be written off before this winter. Not sure if they were new cabins, though that would be a bit poetic given how unnecessary this lift is.
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What happened this time?
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Without naming names, a very experienced employee chose to ignore a timing fault because he was at the bottom and the fault was at the top. Many grands of JK’s money down the tubes.
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Yikes. Do you know how many they lost this time? With the new ones, this season’s total should have been 28.
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Not sure the number. They are characteristically mum about it. I’ll ask around when next I’m up there.
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The new ones would have been numbered 24-28. Shouldn’t be too hard to see what numbers are missing.
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I skied Crystal today and the missing cabins are 10, 11, 12, 15 and 18. It’s not hard to figure out where the latest incident happened.
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Interesting! I hadn’t heard there was terminal damage as well. Good thing the flagship lift gets such careful treatment. Like never rolling a brand new cabin down into Green Valley. Oh, wait.
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That is completely stupid! Boyne was & still is a multi-million dollar company. This lift has the capacity of a good gondola from the 60s. Well, it’s not the 60s anymore, the industry has changed in terms of capacity. You get on the gondola 4 hours from opening ( at least according to my aunt, who skis there all the time ). This gondola needs to be replaced and scraped! Crystal needs a new gondola of at least 3500p/h/d (people an hour and direction), if not, more. The best reuse of the system I could see would be a detachable quad w/ no bubbles (maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, I’m not an engineer.) Alterra needs to stop procrastinating & replace this thing NOW! (I hope Alterra likes Doppelmayr, because that’s what’s needed right now.) Also, there aren’t space constraints at the top! The photos show a generous amount of space, (Again I’m not an engineer, I’m just sharing what I see in the photos) & the bottom definitely has enough space for a large d-line terminal. The lift that should replace this should be a 10 passenger Doppelmayr d-line w/ Omega Vs, a capacity of above 3500p/h/d & a speed of 6-7 m/s NOT 5. I’m sorry if I’m being critical here, but, it’s true. I’m sure people can’t stand these long lines just for one ride! Even in the summertime, it’s bad! One time, I waited about an hour or two to get on the gondola.
I just can’t believe what Everett/ John was thinking when they installed this.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up Everett Kircher and John Kircher.
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Everett passed away 8 years before the Mt. Rainier Gondola went in. John did more building on that mountain than most resorts see in 50 years, if ever. He presided over construction of Forest Queen Express, Chinook Express, Green Valley Express, Northway, Campbell Basin Lodge, the Gondola, Quicksilver, Chair 6 and a greenfield snowmaking system. Sure, the gondola implementation proved less than perfect but Crystal will never again see the kind of investment and care as it did under John/Boyne. I feel lucky to have grown up there when we got something new every single year.
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Dang it! I meant Stephen!!! Sorry. I always use the wrong name! But yes I know that Everett passed in 2002.
I just don’t get what they were thinking. Sorry if I sounded critical.
By the way do you guys do summer ops at JHMR?
Have a good night!
Luke
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Yeah, you guys got something new every year because Stephen/Boyne has always & still is in competition with Vail! It’s the exact same thing that is happening at Snoqualmie! This has been the first time since establishment of the resort that lifts have been installed every year. Heck! Stephen wanted to have 3 lifts installed at the area this year, but got pushed back on Edelweiss because of the pure sheer terrain at king steeps & rocks (a.k.a Alpental). The only difference is the reason why these lifts are being replaces because the lifts are 50 to 60 years old, the doubles (at Crystal at the time they were only 30 years old), were probably replace due to competition (realistically, maybe due to capacity needs.)On the positive side it’s going to be great we will have brand new lifts that are more comfortable than the old ones and not have center poles that will be knocking us down.
if you want to know the reason why I’m writing this it’s because I want not only you to know what’s going on in the industry but I also people who are on this website toknow what is going on in the industry
have a good night!
Luke
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Everett passed away in 2002, and he was never involved in Crystal’s operation. It was all on JK until he sold. As far as waiting in line here goes, unless it’s the only out of base lift open, just don’t use it. It’s practical if you’re a tourist or only skiing Green Valley, otherwise Chinook is just fine. Heck, even riding 8 and then 4 is fine. The gondola was a bit of a vanity project, and yeah, it probly wasn’t very well-conceived (the span over Iceberg Gulch is super exposed to those thermals that head right on up said gulch, for instance), and it probly doesn’t serve the inteded purpose as well as it should, but to be honest, it wasn’t actually needed in the first place. In 30 years skiing at Crystal, I never once thought that what amounts to an infill lift is what would fix the traffic flow issues. When it arrived, I mostly rode it cos it was there and cos my Pa cut the liftline. Crystal is, and for the foreseeable future will be, a place that skis best once you’ve chased some locals and taken the time to learn it. More lifts or more capacity on existing lifts is just smooshing gull guano around on a windshield. As has been debated endlessly on this and many other forums, especially Rafters I mean The Bullwheel I mean Rafters after few buckets of overly hoppy Puget Sound beer, there just isn’t much to be done with the upper Silver Creek drainage. Let it be what it is. Be there when the crowds aren’t. Better yet, go for a skin up East Peak and find you them mythical chutes on the Cement Basin side. They’re legit.
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Would it be at all possible for Crystal to upgrade the gondola so that it could have more gondola cabins, or would they have to completely replace the lift?
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The maximum number of cabins the system was designed for is 36. Crystal started with 24, one was written off shortly thereafter so the total was 23. This year five were added, bringing them to 28. Eight more can be added in the future.
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I meant a little bit more with the system, could they upgrade the motor, cable, and add towers without completely starting over?
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Infill towers could be added at a later date as need be. Case in point, Vail’s first Avanti Express had a tower 7A that was added years after all the other towers (and when the lift was upgraded to a six pack, they just added a small extension for the wider crossarms)..
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That would all depend on the design of the top and bottom foundations and whether they could handle the additional forces that would be placed on them.
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Do many skiers actually use this Gondola… It seems kinda useless
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Yes.
It helps you get to the good skiing up top when conditions are bad on the lower half of the mountain. Also, athletic people like to do full mountain laps.
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Also, it is much easier to accomodate early and late season Green-Valley-only openings or the lean years like ’04-’05 when the lower mountain isn’t viable but Rex and 3 are. The cat drivers don’t have to try to keep up the Tom Leonard Memorial Highway down Lower Skid.
On a somewhat related note, I worked Chinook back in ’99 when we opened in late June and the amount of customer faceplants on the summer pavers was surprising. I got a quick introduction to ski area customer service when the pre-Boyne company president’s daughter (how’s that for roundabout?) gave me the beans after she got her boot stuck under her chair and couldn’t unload and the chair dragged her for a bit while I got it stopped. 6-packs don’t stop on a dime. I’d have been pretty pissed, too, had our roles been swapped.
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Dude, lines are 4 hours long at that dreadful machine, so yes
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Does anyone know why they changed their mind from the Tram that was proposed in the master plan to this low capacity gondola?
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It was cheaper to build a gondola than a tram to the best of my knowledge.
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Also, Superior Tramway (Riblet) was apparently going to build the tramway. Them shutting down in 2003 probably helped contribute to the change.
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Real shame they didn’t make it. This gondola is just disappointing. Feel like a tram here would be a lot more exciting and symbolic.
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Superior Tramway and Riblet are not, and never were, the same company.
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There was talk in the plan at the time of having to move the top terminal of Rex to make room for the tram terminal. It would no longer have been possible to ski directly from the top of Rex to Snorting Elk. I recall reading that at the time and thinking “that’s both a bad idea, and expensive.”
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Very interesting. Since it has low capacity compared to other Gondolas, then why does it run so slow at only 800 fpm?
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Short length UNI-G terminals.
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Your telling me. The freaking slow speed, combined w/ cabin coun are the reasons why lines are just so long.
Long length unis are applicable, Boyne just wanted an excuse to not spend money to build a lift in 2010. Same, but not same exact reason why Boyne is making Sugarloaf get 30 year old lifts even though they are the highest in Maine.
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My chief complaint about the gondola is that the line cut right through some of the most fun inbounds steep tree skiing – the Upper Bull Run / Upper Exterminator area. I’m concerned that the proposed Kelly’s Gap lift line will do the same thing to Right Angle Trees.
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It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? A Kelly’s Gap chair would be so useful on storm days, or to avoid the gondola tourists. Or to lap O Meadows and Niagaras. Hm.
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Something similar to Ramcharger 8 at big sky would be infinitely better than this load of carp we got
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Given the length and steepness along with some pretty large unsupported spans near the top, I don’t think a chair would be a good fit here at all. The plan originally was for this to be a tramway built by Riblet but with their bankruptcy in 2003 that obviously never happened. As Peter pointed out, Crystal’s manager has expressed that he wants this thing replaced with a higher capacity gondola system at some point in the near future with this one being relocated to Campbell Basin.
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🤝 w/ him
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Only this gondola should be scraped due to a downright deplorable design. (It could be used as an HSQ)
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I somewhat agree w/you, only this is the main lift at Crystal. If you look at my other comments, the only really viable option would be a 3500+ p/h/d gondola d line ONLY from Doppelmayr. This gondola has 1/4 of the required capacity needed for this lift (which is 900 p/h/d) therefore, yielding long lines. They also need a higher speed, a bare minimum would be 6m/s. The long terminals are applicable at the top, only they just don’t try that hard to have a fast lift. I agree w/ you, this gondola is unbearable & despicable & a load of crap.
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I meant 900 p/h/d is the current capacity, the required capacity is 3500+ p/h/d as stated before.
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I’m very curious where y’all have heard the Riblet rumour. They never built a detachable tramway; the best I could see them having designed is a 750-FPM pulse lift with four to eight (most likely eight) pulses of a few gondola cabins apiece. I was in operations at Crystal during the formative years of what wound up as the current MRG and I never once heard any Riblet mentioned as a contender. Garaventa, Poma, and Doppelmayr were all in the mix; as we know, Garaventa and Doppelmayr merged (after I left there) so it was down to two manufacturers by the time this was built.
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https://www.spokanejournal.com/local-news/superior-lands-two-jobs-to-add-lifts-at-ski-areas/
Riblet/Superior was definitely going to build an aerial tram at one point.
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Wow. I’m not sure the world was (or is) ready for a riblet traveling 2000 fpm.
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In 2005 Riblet was not a player, having gone out of business in 2003. I know I’ve said this before, but Riblet and Superior are not the same company. Superior was founded by an ex-Riblet engineer, which through the rumour mill (or modern social media fourth-party ‘I know a guy’ posts) could have morphed into ‘Superior is the same thing as Riblet’, but in all reality is not. The Ellis family were indeed involved with Riblet, but that’s as far as it goes. They were able to buy much of Riblet’s patents; I know they still make insert clips for ski areas with operating Riblet lifts. Superior could definitely have built a tram, but it seems the situation changed.
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Do you think Superior Tramway could revive the Riblet name and start manufacturing fixed grip lifts again?
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No. If they do it’ll be under their own name; the Riblet trademark and company is done. Superior has built a few lifts, actually, but they do it under their own aspect. If you need a comparison SkyTrac is the closest example, where former CTEC engineers started their own company but used many of the former firm’s designs.
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id argue you’re right and wrong. Superior is a completely separate entity than Riblet was. However a lot of the knowledge and manufacturing expertise, and even machinery, ended up literally down the road at Superior from the old Riblet warehouses in north Spokane. And subsequently acquired most of their existing patents.
It’s not a direct successor but I’d say it’s an offshoot, which is why they get confused to be a “re-named Riblet”. They definitely are not, but Superior wouldn’t exist where and how it does if Riblet hadn’t been there beforehand.
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I think we’re on the same page, Ryan, just phrasing it differently.
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i rode this yesterday, and the 30th cabin was GREEN!
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Well, Washington WAS one of the first two states (the internet says first by 3 hours, so take that, Callmeradbro) to legalise the recreational ganj. . .and when we got the first teaser cabin, the instructors all piled in to make it a ganj’ola. Can’t remember if the teaser cabin was green, or not.
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Joe, to sum it up without being too critical,the reason why the gondola didn’t fix traffic flow was because John/ D CTEC designed it wrong, both in speed and capacity.
I just don’t get how a modern gondola has less p/h/d than a 2 CLF. It seems impossible.
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It was never intended to be a high capacity lift. It works great for a sightseeing lift and the cost was much less than a high capacity lift. John intended to pull skiers out of the parking lot with other lifts, that are now unlikely to be built under current ownership.
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Uni-G-S, not to be confused with Uni-GS :D
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I think there are 36 cabins now!
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