In July 2011, South Korea won the 2018 Winter Olympics, beating out cities in France and Germany. Almost immediately, North Korea announced plans to build its own ski resort called Masik Pass. The plan required at least five lifts despite the lack of any lift manufacturers in Asia.
Masik Pass Trail Map. All Photos from Uri Tours on Flickr.
Kim Jong Un’s government turned to the usual players, Doppelmayr and Poma. Both refused to build the lifts, citing the international ban on selling luxury goods to the North. Switzerland’s BMF agreed to a $7.7 million order but the Swiss government killed the deal. Ironically, Switzerland is where Kim Jong Un went to private school in the early 1990s and where he learned to ski.
Okemo Mountain Resort announces new fixed-grip quad and conversion of the Jackson Gore Express into a bubble quad called Quantum 4. Their press release (falsely) claims Okemo will be the first resort in North America with two bubble lifts.
The last two victims of a 2010 de-ropement at Sugarloaf settle their lawsuit with Boyne Resorts, or more likely their insurance company. Next up: claims from the victims of this year’s rollback.
Marshall Mountain, Montana is for sale for $2.95 million. Its lifts – a Thiokol triple and Poma T-Bar – haven’t spun since the 2002-03 season.
The British Columbia Safety Authority releases its incident report on Crystal Mountain’s de-ropement and it’s not pretty. The ski area has been closed ever since the March 1, 2014 incident.
Add San Diego to the growing list of cities that want to build a gondola. This one would have 8-passenger cabins and two mid-stations.
Yesterday Sugarloaf Mountain Resort, the site of two of the worst lift accidents in recent memory, announced $1.3 million in lift safety upgrades including a new Doppelmayr drive terminal for the lift that rolled back in March. The mountain will also launch a new website devoted solely to lift safety and maintenance with a tip line for anyone to submit questions and concerns about lifts. All of this is moving forward despite Sugarloaf’s looming sale.
The King Pine Quad’s bottom drive terminal will be replaced with a new Doppelmayr one.In December 2010, the Spillway East double, built by Borvig in 1975, experienced a de-ropement that caused numerous chairs to hit the ground and drag approximately 40 feet. Eight skiers were injured and the last legal claim was settled just last week. The State of Maine’s investigation found inadequate maintenance records, poor training, high winds, and component failure as probable contributing factors. The full report is here. Spillway was replaced by a Doppelmayr quad the following summer and renamed Skyline.
The King Pine Quad, a 1988 Borvig, rolled-back approximately 460 feet on March 21, 2015, resulting in numerous injuries. Skiers went around the bottom bullwheel at high speed and many others jumped off. Sugarloaf’s internal investigation found that the drive bullwheel’s drop dog failed to deploy due to a faulty switch and the lift was eventually stopped by an operator who manually activated the lift’s emergency brake. The state has not yet released its investigation into this incident. King Pine and its sister quad called Timberline were both closed for the remainder of last season.
King Pine’s new drive terminal will be similar to Skyline’s.Continue reading →
I thought it would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of the types of lifts built over time in the US and Canada and see what lifts tend to still be operating today. I previously looked at the average age of lifts in different regions of the US and Canada and found that most lifts operating today are more than 25 years old. The statistics below will show why.
Fixed Grip Chairlifts Built by Type, 1958-2014
First I looked at fixed-grip chairlifts. I was surprised just how long ago double chairlift construction peaked – way back in 1971, when 146 double lifts were built in a single summer. That’s equal to all lifts built in North America over the past five years. Triple chairlift construction peaked in 1984 at 58. Just four years later, the most quad chairlifts were built – 36 in 1988. I would have guessed this to be much later. Since 1988, quad and triple chair construction has remained relatively constant and equal with almost no double chairs built.
Detachable Lifts Built by Type, 1963-2014
On the detachable side, the number of gondolas built each year remains fairly steady, usually under five per year. Of the 473 high speed quads built to date, most went in between 1986 and 2007. Detach quads peaked in 1998, when 32 were built in one summer. Six packs peaked two years later but have always been less popular than quads. Last summer was the worst year for detachable construction since the technology was invented; just eight were built in all of the US and Canada. 2015 will be better with at least 16 being built right now.
The view into Grand Teton National Park from the top of Jackson Hole’s new Teton lift.
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is celebrating its 50th anniversary in December which will coincide with the opening of new terrain and a shiny high speed quad called Teton. JHMR’s first Doppelmayr detachable will serve three new runs in the area formerly known as the Crags. This project is part of a major lift upgrade that included the new Casper detachable quad and will also include a second gondola.
Ready for a Uni-G terminal next to the Lower Werner run.
The new lift will serve approximately 1,800 vertical feet of terrain between the Casper and Apres Vous lifts. With a steep profile, Teton’s ride time will be under six minutes. Having four detachable quads on the north side of the mountain will hopefully take some pressure off the aerial tram.
Funny to see Doppelmayr staging next to a new Leitner-Poma terminal.
Doppelmayr USA has redesigned all of their controls for 2015.
Apparently Doppelmayr has redesigned their controls for 2015. A new pedestal pictured above looks like an improvement, especially the speed selector replacing slow/medium/fast buttons.
Willard Mountain, NY files for bankruptcy, proving once again it is best to control all of the land your ski resort sits on. The area has a Borvig and Partek doubles.
Saddleback Maine has put the drive terminal for its main lift up for sale on Resort Boneyard for $200k. Hopefully a new lift is on the way.
Whistler-Blackcomb to test snowmaking as a means to preserve summer skiing on Horstman Glacier, home to the only glacier-anchored lifts in North America.
Park City and Jackson Hole just started building new lifts but trail map illustrator James Niehues is already finishing illustrations for their 2015-16 trail maps. Niehues planned to retire last year but apparently some projects are too good to pass up. There is no question Mr. Niehues is the best in the business and I hope he keeps painting as long as possible.
Jackson Hole’s new Teton lift will open up a handful of new trails in between the Apres Vous and Casper areas this coming winter. Mr. Niehues is repainting the portion of the map that was previously known as The Crags while the rest will remain true to his original 1991 painting.
Jackson Hole’s new map showing the Teton lift pod. Photo Credit: James Niehues
Vail Resorts contracted James to paint an all-new, unified map of Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort which will operate as one from 2015-16. I was surprised and pleased to hear they were going with a painting instead of the awful computer-generated maps that Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Northstar have gone to. Niehues admits he had to get creative with portions of the map to show 37 lifts and 7,300 acres of terrain acres in one view. The final result below is impressive and shows why paintings make more compelling trail maps than satellite photos.
Illustration for the new Park City Mountain Resort. Photo Credit: James Niehues
British Columbia’s Minister of Environment has finally killed the Jumbo Glacier Resort, proposed to rival Whistler in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia. Jumbo Glacier is a spectacularly-remote place up a dirt logging road from Panorama Mountain Village and Invermere. It’s more than 200 miles from Calgary, the nearest major city and airport. The plan was to build 20+ lifts on 3,000 hectares of public land above 5,000 feet. You can read the full master plan here.
Leitner-Poma poured some footings last fall in a last-ditch effort.
The project was first submitted to the BC government in 1991 and received environmental approval in 2004. The resort claimed they would get 2,700 skiers per day. This was always a red flag to me as 2,700 skiers is not a big number for a destination ski resort. Take for example a mid-sized area like Mt. Sunapee in New Hampshire. It has six lifts and a comfortable carrying capacity of 5,220 skiers per day. 2,700 could justify perhaps three or four lifts at Jumbo, not 23.
BC has no shortage of large ski areas struggling due to remoteness. Kicking Horse and Revelstoke are perhaps most similar to the Jumbo proposal. Revelstoke was supposed to have 21 lifts; they built three before running out of money in 2008. Lucky for them, the 27th richest person in Canada bought in and paid off over $100 million in debt. Kicking Horse was in similar trouble when it was rescued by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies in 2011. Both of these resorts are on the Trans-Canada Highway, not 50 miles from a town.
These days building a detachable lift means a capital investment of at least $3 million plus around $100,000 in annual maintenance. A so-called ‘pulse’ lift offers the speed of a detachable system with similar infrastructure to a traditional fixed-grip lift. Chairs or cabins are grouped together into ‘pulses’ and the entire lift slows down for loading and unloading. When comparing types of aerial lifts there are always trade-offs; here they include low capacity and long headways. Most pulse lifts can only move 300-600 passengers per hour and headway – the time a passenger has to wait for a carrier to show up – can be minutes instead of as low as six seconds. Perfect for certain applications but unsuitable in most.
Pine Ridge lift at the Yellowstone Club, Montana.
There are currently 17 pulse lifts operating in the US, Canada and Mexico; all but three are gondolas. Nearly all were built in the last 15 years. Panorama Mountain Village, Northstar California, Steamboat, Snowmass, Canyons Resort, and Le Massif all use pulse gondolas to connect village areas. These lifts are usually less than 3,000 feet long and convenient for skiers and non-skiers alike. Other pulse gondolas are attractions in their own right such the Iron Mountain Tramway at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, SkyTrail at Trees of Mystery, the Gondola at Royal Gorge Bridge Bridge & Park and the Riverfront Park SkyRide in Spokane. There is also a new Leitner-Poma pulse gondola in Orizaba, Mexico with tripod towers that are hundreds of feet tall.
Riverfront Park SkyRide, built by Doppelmayr.
Snow Valley in Edmonton, Alberta has a very unique pulse chairlift built by Doppelmayr in 2008. Instead of having groups of 3-5 chairs, it has just two groups of 20 closely-spaced quad chairs. Because it is only 850 feet long, the lift can move 1,378 skiers per hour at up to 5 m/s, the same speed as most detachable lifts. In fact the ride is only about a minute. The lift slows to a beginner-friendly 0.8 m/s for loading and unloading. Because of the low speed, skiers ride around the bullwheel at the top and unload facing down the hill. It’s the only lift I know of with 180-degree unloading.
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