Fallout from Timberline

Peter Landsman1 Comment

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.

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In this photo from Sunday River, you can see the U bolts that were added in the late 1980s as a second connection between crossarm and tower tube on this 1986 Borvig triple (the same year and make as Thunderstruck at Timberline.)  Borvig issued a bulletin in 1987 calling for this modification on certain lifts.

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.

One Park City and What’s Next for America’s Largest Resort

Peter Landsman9 Comments

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Vail Resorts’ $50 million endeavor to connect Utah’s two largest resorts last summer was one of the biggest infrastructure investments at a U.S. resort since American Skiing Company created The Canyons in 1997.  That summer twenty years ago, ASC bought so many lifts for The Canyons (8!) they had to split the order between three lift manufacturers to get them all done in time for the 1997-98 season. It’s hard to even imagine that happening today. Still, Vail did manage to build a two-stage gondola, add a six-pack, move a detachable quad, construct a mid-mountain lodge and re-brand an entire company over the last eight months.  I got to check out the results this week.

Park City Mountain is now the undisputed largest ski resort in America with 37 lifts and 300+ trails spread across 7,300 acres (it’s worth noting that Big Sky Resort still owns, and seems to have no problem using, the Biggest Skiing in America® trademark.)  The first thing I noticed is Vail did its best to remove all references to Powdr’s old Park City logo and the Canyons name, replacing them with the red infinity branding.  Despite these efforts, everyone still seems to call the northern half of the complex Canyons, or perhaps worse, The Canyons. Thousands of signs were changed over the summer and every employee got a new uniform. Most of the lifts were painted red although a few remain in black and orange.

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The new Park City has 37 lifts moving 78,000 skiers per hour across 11 square miles.
The flagship of “One Park City” is the Quicksilver Gondola and neighboring Miners Camp lodge. Vail Resorts took the design they used for the Tamarack Lodge at Heavenly and Zephyr Lodge at Northstar and brought it east, demonstrating how the company excels at standardizing everything across its resorts. (Pepsi, never Coke, and safety bars on every chair at every mountain are other examples.)

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Falling Crossarm Injures Nine at Timberline, WV

Peter Landsman9 Comments

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

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  • 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.

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.

Mi Teleférico to Add 9th Gondola Line in La Paz

Peter Landsman5 Comments

The world’s largest gondola-based public transit network, Mi Teleférico “My Cable,” announced on social media this week it has ordered a 9th gondola from Doppelmayr for delivery in 2019.  The Linea Plateada (Silver Line) will connect the existing Yellow/Red and under construction Purple/Blue lines in Bolivia’s capitol city of La Paz.  When complete, it will connect nine separate lines and 42 miles of cable together for the first time.

 

The brainchild of President Evo Morales, Bolivia went all-in on gondolas in 2012, ordering three lines (with 4 haul ropes, 11 stations and 450 cabins) for phase one.  The experiment proved wildly successful, offering safe, clean and reliable transport to the masses in La Paz and neighboring El Alto.  Less than two months after the first gondola opened, President Morales announced construction of five additional lines on July 1, 2015.

Not many public transit systems are as revered as this one, which has more than 160,000 likes on Facebook  (the largest subway system in the world, New York’s MTA, has just 50,000.)  Mi Teleférico’s slogan is Uniting Our Lives and it serves more than 100,000 passengers every weekday.  For 40 cents a trip, riders even get free wi-fi.

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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.