Teams from Mt. Hood Meadows have repaired and re-opened the Shooting Star Express that was damaged by falling trees over Thanksgiving. Now the storm recovery turns to the Mt. Hood Express, which received ten feet of snow in one week.
White Pass has more snow than it did at anytime last winter but no one can get there. Crews have been working around the clock to repair washouts that cut off the resort from both sides of the Cascades Dec. 9th. The ski area will re-open Wednesday.
The Berry family says it’s close to a deal to sell Saddleback to a new owner that hopes to open by late January. Passholders can get a refund or gift card now.
Aspen’s 1971 SLI double on Shadow Mountain will be replaced with a detachable quad or gondola in 2016 or ’17. The top terminal will move 200 feet to the southwest resulting in a slope length of 3,600′ with 1,390′ vertical and a capacity of 1,200 skiers per hour.
Park City and Canyons are now one thanks to the Quicksilver Gondola but judging by snow conditions it’s going to be awhile before you can ski between the two.
Sugarloaf and Doppelmayr load test King Pine on Dec. 19, 2015.
James Coleman opens new quad chairs at Purgatory (Leitner-Poma) and Arizona Snowbowl (SkyTrac) with more new lifts on the way.
8-Passenger Sigma Diamond demo cabin in Squaw Valley’s shop. Source
Earlier this fall, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings submitted its formal application to the Placer County Planning Department to build the three-stage gondola connecting Squaw Valley with Alpine Meadows that was first announced last spring. Leitner-Poma will design the system on the heels of completing Squaw’s Big Blue and Siberia six-packs. LPOA has lots of experience building detachable lifts with angle stations including similar three-section gondolas at Breckenridge and Sunshine Village.
The Squaw-Alpine gondola will be around 13,000 feet long with 37 towers and two ridge-top angle stations. The unique system will have three haul ropes but only two drives located at the end stations (Breck and Sunshine’s gondolas have just one rope & drive each.) In this sense, the base-to-base gondola is really two gondolas similar to Whistler Village and Revelstoke. What’s different at Squaw is the center section will operate with the Alpine drive by sharing a common bullwheel where the sections meet. As such, the Squaw section could be run independently but the other two spans must operate together. Regardless, cabins will normally make the entire trip from Squaw to Alpine. The gondola’s hourly capacity will be 1,400 passengers per direction with 8-passenger cabins and a line speed of 1,000 fpm. Squaw also plans full-speed operations during a power outage with generators at each drive station.
The north mid-station on the Squaw side will be sited on private lands near the summit of the KT-22 detachable quad while the south mid-station will be in the Tahoe National Forest within Alpine’s existing permit boundary. Skiers will be able to access some pretty awesome terrain from both mid-stations when conditions allow. The Squaw Village terminal will sit between KT-22 and the Squaw One Express while the Alpine terminal will be between the Roundhouse Express and Hot Wheels. The gondola will actually fly over Alpine’s base lodge and under Squaw’s Funitel. One interesting point from the application is that the Alpine mid-station at just over 7,700 feet in elevation will have no permanent road access or power line to it, which is part of why the central section has no drive motor of its own. The terminal control systems, lights, etc. will run off a line generator and diesel genset.
More pictures and details are filtering out from Hochgurgl, Austria where the Kirchenkarbahn opened Dec. 10th. This 10-passenger gondola wouldn’t be particularly notable but for the fact that it’s Doppelmayr’s first production model of the next-generation detachable lift called D-Line.
First a little history. Doppelmayr introduced the Uni-G terminal in 2000, replacing the “Spacejet” model of the 1990s. After the merger of Doppelmayr and Garaventa in 2002, the company continued to offer Stealth III and Uni-G detachable lifts in the US. In 2003, Doppelmayr CTEC added a North American-design called the Uni-GS and built 88 of them before discontinuing the model in 2009. With the Stealth gone since 2004, the Uni-G became the only Doppelmayr detachable product worldwide until now.
Doppelmayr graphic shows terminals getting shorter over the years despite faster line speeds.
German architect Werner Sobek designed the D-Line terminal and he’s apparently well known-enough to have an English Wikipedia page. His enclosure is almost entirely composed of windows with a modern, boxy look that I’m not sold on. Setting appearance aside, Doppelmayr says D-Line can support line speeds of up to 7 m/s or 1,378 feet a minute. This is a big deal; the fastest circulating ropeway I know of today maxes out at 1,212 FPM. The Kirchenkarbahn uses a gearbox from Eisenbeiss and controls from Frey Austria.
There aren’t many ski resorts that lose $200,000 in a good winter. That’s the loss Snow King Mountain projects for the next four months as it struggles to find a sustainable operating model in downtown Jackson, Wyoming. The ski area opened in 1939, decades before its more famous neighbors even existed. Snow King’s alpine slide, opened in 1978, sees many times more riders in the summer than the entire mountain attracts each winter. Beginner and intermediate destination visitors simply don’t choose to ski the rugged, north-facing mountain with a 12-minute double chair ride to the top.
Snow King managing partner Max Chapman, Jr. outlines his group’s investments to date and vision for the future at a community open house December 11, 2015.
Last year, an investment banker with local ties named Max Chapman, Jr. led a group of investors in purchasing Snow King Holdings from the ownership group that struggled with the ski area since 1992. This past summer, Chapman and company spent a crazy $14 million to build an alpine coaster, base lodge, retail store, ski school building, quad chair and fully-automated TechnoAlpin snowmaking system. General Manager Ryan Stanley overhauled ticketing systems, bought new uniforms and even commissioned a brand new trail map and website. This week, the King held a community open house at Snow King Hotel to outline a vision for phase 2 expansion and begin a multi-year public process in hopes of pushing Snow King to consistent profitability. SKMR operates on a mix of private, federal and town land so Chapman knows he needs the community’s support.
The Panorama House will be re-imagined with a modern facility and integrated gondola (apparently with 1960s Riblet towers!)
The anchor of the project is a base-to-summit gondola to an all-new complex that will serve a variety of visitors year-round. The facility up top would include a movie theatre, planetarium, cafeteria and fine dining overlooking the town of Jackson and Teton Range. As of now the building would also include gondola cabin storage/maintenance and takeoff for a quad zipline plunging into town below at speeds up to 75 mph. Chapman noted, “we want everything we build to be the best.”
Mt. Hood Meadows updates skiers on the windstorm that sent two hundred-foot hemlock trees onto the Shooting Star Express the night of November 17th.
Vail Resorts announces $100 million in capital improvements across its mountains for 2016/17 including replacement of the last major fixed-grip lift on Vail Mountain. The new Sun Up Lift #17 will be a detachable quad, manufacturer unknown.
SkyTrac splices the Humphrey’s Peak Quad at Arizona Snowbowl.
The latest from Sugarloaf on the new King Pine. An apparent Doppelmayr delay will push opening until late-December. Luckily (or unluckily) there’s no snow anyways.
Doppelmayr’s 10th 3S gondola, the Penkenbahn, is ready to go.
A nonprofit ski area in Ontario that’s been unable to operate its quad chair since 2011 due to a 2006 Doppelmayr service bulletin hopes to crowdfund $80,000 for repairs.
West Mountain celebrates their new lift with fireworks rather than skiing and already has the drive terminal up for another new-used lift next summer.
We're upgrading the Sun Up Lift (#17) from a fixed grip triple to a high-speed four-psgr lift for the 16/17 season! pic.twitter.com/LFCL04VEnL
There aren’t many ski areas in this country with as modern a lift system as Crystal Mountain in the Washington Cascades. When I learned to ski at Crystal in the early ’90s, it was owned by a co-operative and featured a bunch of double chairs dating back to the ’60s and ’70s. In 1997, the co-op sold itself to Boyne Resorts in hopes of bringing desperately-needed capital improvements to Washington’s largest ski area.
Modernize Boyne did. In the first two years of ownership, the Kircher family brought Crystal the northwest’s first two six-packs. Two years later the Green Valley double was replaced by a Doppelmayr high speed quad, the mountain’s fourth detachable. In 2007, the Northway lift opened up 1,000 acres of new off-piste terrain. Perhaps the biggest project of all was the addition of the 8-passenger, top-to-bottom Mt. Rainier Gondola in 2010. Last summer, Crystal replaced its final remaining Riblet and Hall doubles with new fixed-grip lifts (one had been destroyed by an avalanche, leaving the mountain with no choice but to replace the only way to the summit.) Now almost 20 years since Boyne arrived on scene, the average lift here is less than 15 years old. It’s a far cry from many of Crystal’s northwest neighbors. Snoqualmie, for example, still operates 11 Riblet double chairs dating as far back as 1967.
Today, Crystal Mountain operates a gondola, two six-pack detachables, two high speed quads and five fixed-grip chairs.By now Crystal has implemented much of its 2004 master plan but a handful of lift projects remain on the horizon. Two aging lifts still need to be replaced. Rainier Express was Crystal’s first detachable, opened in 1988, and is nearing the end of its useful life. The plan is to replace it eventually, possibly with a six-pack. The Discovery beginner lift is also slated to be replaced with a more learning-friendly and extended high speed quad.
Lift Blog 
