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.
CWA Taris cabin design for the Eiger Express in Grindelwald, Switzerland.
Back in September, I wrote about three new 3S gondolas under construction in Vietnam, Switzerland and Austria. As reader Michael E. let me know, there are at least four other 3S systems in the pipeline by both Leitner and Doppelmayr that will bring the total number to over twenty. Below is a look at the systems I missed in my last post, all of which happen to be in the same three countries.
Fansipan Cable Car – Sa Pa, Vietnam
If you look closely, you can see the four tower locations along what will be one of the world’s most spectacular ropeways scaling Mt. Fansipan.
The Fansipan Cable Car is another partnership between Doppelmayr and the Sun Group, which will operate at least five unique ropeways in Vietnam by 2017. Fansipan is the tallest peak in Southeast Asia at 10,312 feet and the cable car, which has been under construction for the last three years, goes just shy of the summit. It will slash a two-day trek up the mountain to 15 minutes. The gondola departs from the town of Sa Pa at 7,000 feet and travels over four towers and 20,063 feet of rugged mountainside. It will be the world’s longest tri-cable gondola when it opens early next year. Doppelmayr designed the system with an hourly capacity of 2,000 at a line speed of 8 m/s and with CWA Taris 35-passenger cabins.
The first non-prototype photos of Doppelmayr’s new detachable terminal that will replace the Uni-G model over the next few years. It’s certainly different; note the huge windows, Frey controls and stairs instead of ladders on the Kirchenkarbahn’s terminals. Thanks for the head’s up, snowtirol.
Maine’s chief tramway inspector releases his report with pictures on the King Pine rollback and Sugarloaf’s GM responds. Eight months after the incident, the replacement drive terminal is nearly finished.
Doppelmayr Garaventa Group revenue was down 7.5% to $841 million in fiscal 2015 while the company’s global employee headcount rose to 2,546.
Still more bad press surrounding Saddleback and the resort’s asking price is down to $9.5 million for 2,000 acres. Meanwhile Boyne offers passholders in the lurch last spring’s rates on New England Passes.
Peak Resorts, the fourth largest operator of lifts in North America, buys Hunter Mountain for $36.8 million. After the deal closes the publicly-traded company will operate 14 ski resorts with 153 lifts in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri.
Two different models of LPOA chairs going up at Okemo and Purgatory.
West Mountain demonstrates an old lift can be new again with help from Leitner-Poma, SkyTrac, Green Mountain Control Systems and Alpine Engineering.
They call it ‘The Beast’ for a reason. Killington opened for skiing on October 19th and is running 240 snow guns nightly, all while flying concrete and adding a mid-station to their Snowdon triple. The 1973 Heron-Poma is evidently going to stick around for awhile. Fun fact: Snowdon had a mid-station in nearly the same spot which was removed in 1990.
Lutsen’s recently retired Hall Skycruiser gondola cabins sold out in 4 minutes on Cyber Monday for $1200 each. A new gondy opens to passengers December 11th after a brief delay. If you missed out on the $1200 gondola cabins, you can still get someone a $150 double chair this holiday season.
The average detachable chairlift has 108 carriers while the average fixed grip lift has 103. Most people would assume the longest lifts have the most carriers but that’s usually not the case. One of the reasons is longer spacing on detachable chairlifts and gondolas. Also many long fixed-grip lifts get designed with lower hourly capacities and bigger spacing to save money. In fact, only one of the top ten lifts with the most chairs is also among the ten longest. Each of the lifts below has more than 200 chairs and, not surprisingly, all but two are fixed-grips.
Cyclone – Sunrise Park Resort, AZ – 352 Yan triple chairs
West Mountain – Sugarloaf, ME – 280 Borvig double chairs
edited to add later: Town – Park City, UT – 264 CTEC triple chairs
Alpine – Copper Mountain, CA – 218 Yan double chairs
Porcupine– Snowbasin, UT – 212 Stadeli triple chairs
American Flyer – Copper Mountain, CO – 203 Poma quad chairs
What about gondolas? There are a bunch of them that stretch two-plus miles. Even so, no gondolas come close to making this list. The Sunshine Village Gondola has the most cabins in North America with approximately 175 CWA Omegas and the Whistler VillageGondola comes in at number two with 160 Sigma Diamond cabins. The average North American gondola has just 74 cabins.
Now, who can guess which lift has the most towers?
Sun Peaks is Canada’s second largest mountain resort with 4,270 acres and 360-degrees of ski terrain spread over three mountains. The biggest of those is Tod Mountain, which was also the original name of the ski area in 1961. Nippon Cable of Japan purchased the resort in 1992 and doubled its size, adding eight new lifts in nine years and expanding onto Sundance and Morrisey mountains. Nippon Cable should be a familiar name; the company licenses and sells Doppelmayr technology throughout Japan. Thus Sun Peaks is North America’s largest 100% Doppelmayr mountain.
Today Sun Peaks operates 9 lifts, all but one of which were built since 1993.
Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners updated the master plan for Sun Peaks Resort in 2013 that aims to expand lift service into new areas and make significant changes to the current lift system. Many of the proposed changes center around the Top of the World, the ski area’s 6,824-foot summit. The two lifts that currently end here will be shortened or removed and three new ones added. The Burfield quad (the world’s longest fixed-grip lift) will be shortened to just above its current mid-station. Primary access to Top of the World will become the Crystal Express, a six-pack replacement of the Crystal triple chair in a new and extended alignment. A 30-passenger aerial tram is proposed from the top of the Sunburst Express to Top of the World for sightseeing. A new high speed quad called Sunnyside Express would come from the west and top out near the two other summit lifts.
The West Bowl T-Bar would be replaced with a new, longer version while two of Sun Peaks’ three detachable quads – Sunburst and Sundance – would be replaced with six packs. The missing link between the village and Mt. Morrisey would finally be added with a new West Morrisey quad chair.
The Balsams will not break ground this year as originally planned but still hopes for a 2016-17 opening with a mix of new and existing lifts.
Leitner-Poma would supply a gondola proposed to run from Queenstown to The Remarkables on the South Island of New Zealand. L-P built The Remarkables’ flagship six-pack “Curvy Basin Express” in 2014. The new gondola system would span 6.1 miles in two sections and take 27 minutes to ride with a potential opening in 2018. It would feature an impressive 4,200 foot vertical rise and 140 8-passenger cabins from Sigma.
Sunshine Village cuts the ribbon on Canada’s first new bubble chair since 1999. Tee Pee Town LX (Luxury eXpress) also has the first seat heating in Canada. Congratulations to Sunshine on completing one of the most modern lift fleets on the continent while others curate lift museums.
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