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Fixed-Grip Chondola Coming to Anakeesta
Gatlinburg is a national park border town in Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains that attracts more than 11 million visitors annually. This city with 4,000 local residents already includes Boyne Resorts’ Gatlinburg Sky Lift and the Ober Gatlinburg 120-passenger aerial tramway. Doppelmayr also built a quad chair in 2012 called the Wilderness Mountain Chairlift in nearby Wears Valley. Anakeesta is a new project that brings two acres of retail to the center of Gatlinburg with a 65-acre mountaintop adventure park rising above. A unique fixed-grip chondola lift will connect Anakeesta Village with the park, dubbed AerialQuest.
Anakeesta’s developers were kind enough to provide me with a few details on this unique lift. I initially assumed it would be a pulse gondola system similar to the Iron Mountain Tramway that serves a mountaintop adventure park in Colorado. Anakeesta’s chondola will be the first lift of its kind to feature chairs and gondola cabins. I’m pretty sure no one else has done this anywhere in the world on a fixed-grip lift. In order to accomplish the feat, line speed will be very slow – under 200 feet a minute. The system will be 2,032 feet long with a vertical of 528′ and will take about 12 minutes to ride. It will have 104 quad chairs with 8 six-passenger gondola cabins carrying a total of 1,000 passengers per hour. Since no contract has been signed, the developer is not quite ready to say which lift company they are contracting with. But if you know your lifts you can identify the terminal in the drawing above. Anakeesta will open in 2017, crowning Gatlinburg as the lift capital of the southeast!
News Roundup: BMF Builds a Gondola
- The Boston Globe profiles a man who bought 62 lifts at 11 mountain resorts in his career and now wants to build a resort with 25 lifts at The Balsams.
- While states like West Virginia have no government oversight agency, a New Hampshire newspaper asks whether that state’s tramway board goes far enough. Part II of the investigation deals with lift inspections and Part III the recent grip-slip incident at Granite Gorge.
- The writing was on the wall but it’s now official; there will be no season at Saddleback.
- Nippon Cable will build Japan’s first chondola this summer at Niseko along with a pulse gondola.
- A San Diego County Supervisor thinks his city will have a gondola before the Chargers build a new stadium. The San Diego Bay to Balboa Park Skyway would cover two miles in 12 minutes and carry 2,400 people per hour.
- The federal government is in a dispute with the concessionaire that, up until yesterday, operated Badger Pass Ski Area in Yosemite National Park. Deleware North Corporation wants $51.2 million for trademarks including the Badger Pass® name so the National Park Service has re-named the mountain Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area. Its four chairlifts are safe from the litigation and now operated by Aramark Corporation as part of a $2 billion contract.
Does Your State Have a Tramway Safety Board?
As we saw last week in West Virginia, it usually doesn’t take long after a lift-related accident for someone to bring up the issue of regulation. Operation of ski lifts and tramways in the United States follows the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) B77.1 Standard for Passenger Ropeways. ANSI is a non-profit organization that oversees the creation of standards for everything from nut and bolt shapes to paper sizes and computer programming language. States adopt ANSI standards which become the laws of the land. The idea is whether you ride a chairlift in Alaska or gondola in Florida, everything from the lift’s line speed to the signage in the load area is spelled out by the same document. You can download your very own copy here for $175. Update 9/11/2017: There’s a new standard available here, now $200.
The ANSI standard is updated about every five years and some states are faster than others at adopting the latest version. Each state also decides whether to back the B77 standard with licensing and inspections. Without question, the most robust oversight agency in the country is the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board, which oversees Colorado’s 275 aerial lifts and countless surface tows. Colorado is the only state to go so far as to conduct unannounced inspections on every lift every year. CPTSB has three full-time staff members and eight contract inspectors. Only a handful of states directly employ lift inspector(s.) Some states hire contract inspectors like Colorado does but many simply require an annual fee and inspection by somebody certified, usually an insurance inspector. The bottom of this post has a table of each state’s requirements as best I could find.
Instagram Tuesday: Starry Nights
News Roundup: Making Repairs
- Timberline, WV re-opens the Thunderstruck triple today after getting tower 12’s crossarm back on and reinforcing the lift’s 16 other towers. Meanwhile, the lawyers are circling.
- We might not see many lifts built in the Northeastern U.S. this summer with continued dismal weather hurting business. With plentiful snow across the west, keep track of new lifts to be built this summer here.
- Privately-funded urban gondola proposed for the Don Valley in Toronto by Bullwheel International Cable Car Corp., whose CEO is a man you may recognize from the Gondola Project.
- Cannon Mountain’s Aerial Tramway also re-opens today after being down two weeks following its Valentine’s Day evacuation. The tram’s 500 HP electric motor was shipped to Maine for repair and returned to Cannon on Wednesday for installation and testing.
- Curbed looks into why no one seems to want to buy 14 ski resorts operated by industry titans like Boyne, Vail and Triple Peaks.
Bromont’s Lift 5 Re-Opens Tomorrow Following Fire
The Versant du Lac detachable quad at Bromont, Quebec will carry skiers tomorrow morning for the first time since Feb 3rd. That’s when a fast-moving fire started in the bottom operator house and spread to the return terminal before being put out by firefighters with help from Bromont’s snowmakers. The operator building housed a snowmaking compressor and lighting equipment, which may have led to the fire. For the past three weeks, the resort has been working with Doppelmayr to get the lift back in service as quickly as possible despite the lack of snow in Quebec. If there’s a silver lining, that bad weather was the reason no guests were riding Lift 5 the night of the fire.
Doppelmayr fabricated and painted a new operator house in Salt Lake City which arrived in Quebec on Feb. 19th, just two weeks after the fire. The lift was load tested on Thursday and while terminal damage is still visible, some burned out windows at the return won’t prevent operation for the final month of the season. Presumably, Doppelmayr will return this summer and replace the remaining fire-damaged components. The exact cause of the blaze is still under investigation but in the meantime, congratulations to Bromont crews for getting this key lift back up and running in 24 days.
https://twitter.com/Ski_Bromont/status/703372670310727680
Innovative Gondola Coming to Oakland Zoo’s California Trail
This fall, the Oakland Zoo will open a unique new gondola serving a 56-acre expansion called California Trail, enabling the zoo’s 750,000 annual visitors to enjoy two distinct complexes less than four minutes apart. It’s only logical that a ropeway system will serve exhibits on a summit featuring grizzly bears, mountain lions and gray wolves. By choosing to build a gondola, the zoo avoided the environmental impacts of roads, trails, and exhibits on steep slopes and won’t have to run higher-impact shuttle buses. Nik Dehejia, Oakland Zoo’s Chief Financial Officer notes, “the gondola system will be the first urban gondola of its size in Northern California and the second in the state. It will be an iconic feature for the Bay Area, drawing thousands from all over the region to Oakland.”
The detachable 8-passenger system is being built by Doppelmayr USA under general contractor Overra Construction. The gondola will feature 16 CWA Omega IV cabins and 7 towers that are up to 68 feet tall. Slope length of the lift is 1,780 feet with a vertical rise of 309 feet. The system will move up to 1,000 guests per hour/per direction initially with the option of adding 8 cabins to reach 1,500 per hour. Ride time will be a quick 3.95 minutes at an operating speed of 450 feet per minute.
Fallout from Timberline
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.
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.
