- Designer Jared Ficklin talks about his dream for urban cable in Austin.
- More details surface regarding Aspen Mountain’s replacement 1A lift.
- The Yellowstone Club unveils plans for The Village, anchored by a new Eglise Gondola and high speed quad.
- Vail Resorts’ Canyons Village Master Plan includes a strategic new Sunrise lift providing access to the Quicksilver Gondola.
- Peak Resorts lost $3.2 million last year and will not make any major capital investments at its 14 mountains in 2017.
- Another Yan detachable has found its way to Iran.
- Doppelmayr may build another urban gondola project in The Philippines, this one in the southern city of Davao.
- Caberfae Peaks is nearly finished building its new chairlift.
- Sunday River’s insurance company indicates a failure of the grout that secured the top terminal to bedrock caused last week’s failure.
Doppelmayr
Mi Teleférico to Build 11th Gondola Line in La Paz
The urban ropeway revolution will continue in Bolivia’s capital city of La Paz, where President Evo Morales announced Friday an 11th gondola line, Linea Celeste (Sky Blue Line) will join the Mi Teleférico gondola network. La Paz and the neighboring city of El Alto announced the Red, Yellow and Green gondola lines in 2012 and the world’s largest urban gondola system opened throughout 2014. President Morales unveiled plans for phase two with six more lines in 2015 with another added to the mix last February. All 11 lines will be 10-passenger monocable detachable gondolas built by Doppelmayr. This latest investment of $110 million comes on top of $234 million for phase one and $450 million for the first six lines of phase two.
The Sky Blue branch will stretch nearly 9,000 linear feet with four stations, 27 towers and 159 CWA 10-passenger cabins. It is expected to be the busiest line in the system, serving the heart of the city and up to 4,000 passengers per hour at six meters per second. The three existing lines operate at up to 5 m/s. A trip from end to end on Linea Cileste will take 11.8 minutes. A line previously dubbed Sky Blue will now be known as the Gold Line. At the current rate, Mi Teleférico is going to run out of colors soon!
Sweetwater Gondola July Update from Jackson Hole
A lot has fallen into place since my last update on the new Sweetwater Gondola going in at Jackson Hole, the only new gondola at a North American ski resort for 2016. All three terminal sites required significant excavation and utility relocation which is largely complete. A crane set all of the big steel at the bottom terminal last Thursday and Friday. The station is nowhere near as big as the Bridger Gondola’s, which was designed for a rope speed of 1,200 fpm nearly 20 years ago (Sweetwater has a design speed of 800 fpm.) It is significantly longer and taller than the Teewinot quad next door, however. Sweetwater’s custom bottom terminal skin will arrive from Austria later this summer.
All 21 towers arrived in sections from Salt Lake City in early July and will be flown in place at the end of the month next Wednesday. The lifting frames are the “American style” rather than the Euro-style ones Doppelmayr uses on some large gondolas. All the tower foundations are finished and ready for fly day.
News Roundup: Signs of Life
- Another of Ascutney Mountain’s old lifts is headed for Pats Peak.
- A local firm will conduct a feasibility study for an urban gondola across the Hudson River in Albany, NY.
- The 11th International Ropeway Congress will be held in Italy next June.
- Work might begin at The Balsams this Fall.
- Signs of life with lift maintenance ongoing at Saddleback.
- Check out these sweet photos of the big new 3S that turns at Mayrhofner Bergbahnen.
- Doppelmayr will build at least four new D-Line lifts in Europe this summer.
- SAM looks at resorts formalizing training for lift mechanics.
- Grouse Mountain will launch the Skyride Surf Adventure™ on Friday (yes, they trademarked the name.)
News Roundup: Making Moves
- Sunshine Village will spin its gondola this summer for the first time in twenty years.
- ZGF Architects, the firm conducting the feasibility study for the Rosslyn Gondola in Washington, D.C. will hold a community open house on July 7th.
- The Jay Peak Tram re-opened last Saturday.
- More trouble from Vermont as the state pauses investment in the South Face Village EB-5 project adjacent to Okemo Mountain Resort. The developer completed one new chairlift last year while the future of another is uncertain.
- Waterville Valley’s World Cup triple is coming down in advance of a move to Green Peak.
- Doppelmayr confirms talks to build urban gondolas in the capital city of the Philippines.
- Caberfae Peaks shows how it’s done keeping guests informed during a seven-figure lift project.
World’s Largest Aerial Tram Opens for Business
The Nu Hoang Cable Car’s 230-person cabins carried their first public passengers across Ha Long Bay in Vietnam Saturday after a dedication with owner Sun Group, builder Doppelmayr/Garaventa and representatives from the Guinness Book of World Records. The spectacular 7,100′ reversible aerial tramway crushes records for the largest cabins and tallest towers of any lift worldwide.
Meaning Queen in English, the Nu Hoang Cable Car links Ha Long City with Ba Deo Hill and a huge observation wheel. It’s part of a $270 million, 500-acre development called Sun World Ha Long Park. The taller of the tramway’s two concrete tripod towers is 619 feet while the other is only 436 feet. The old record was 373 feet on a tramway in Austria built in 1966.
CWA built the monster red and yellow Kronos cabins in sections and shipped them to Ha Long for assembly. Each cabin has two levels and six sets of doors! With these new cabins, the double-decker, 200-passenger Vanoise Express in France loses the title of world’s largest tram.
The Queen is the latest mega lift project for Doppelmayr and Vietnam’s Sun Group, which also operates the world’s second longest gondola and the longest 3S. In 2015, Sun Group ordered an even longer 3S to link three islands and the mainland on Vietnam’s Southern Coast. This stunning 26,000 foot gondola will become the world’s longest lift of any type when it opens in the second quarter of 2017.
Construction Underway on New Lifts at Big Sky
Next winter is going to be huge at Big Sky with a bubble six-pack detachable opening in The Bowl and a new triple chair replacing the legendary Challenger double. Doppelmayr is off to a solid start with terminal and tower footings going in for both lifts. Big Sky is known for its crazy steeps and rocky terrain which makes both projects challenging.
Challenger Triple
From what I can tell approximately half the old Challenger tower bases from 1988 will be re-used on the new lift. Dyer All Terrain Excavation was working on the upper section of Challenger with a spider hoe today. The only way to the top of Challenger is scrambling on foot or riding the Headwaters chair from the Moonlight side.
News Roundup: Big Week
- Cloudchaser construction begins July 1 at Mt. Bachelor.
- La Paz’s gondola network sets a new daily ridership record – 180,000 passengers on three lines last Monday.
- Poma signs three year partnership with the World Wildlife Fund to promote environmentally-friendly urban cable transport.
- Doppelmayr sponsors exhibition at the Vienna Technical Museum showcasing ropeways in cities.
- Vista Ridge lost a carpet lift and might have to do some extra NDT but came away from the Fort McMurray wildfire relatively unscathed.
- It’s still not entirely clear when Vermont’s only aerial tram will reopen.
- The first LST lift in North America is under construction at Cannon Mountain.
- Local paper gives a progress report on Wilmot Mountain’s Vail makeover.
- Powdr announces Woodward Park City with lift-served downhill mountain biking and terrain parks to be built on 126 acres at Gorgoza Park.
- Powdr also commits to building a new lift at Eldora next summer, most likely the Cannonball six-pack.
- Laurel Mountain hosts a tower flying party.
- The President of Simon Fraser University puts the Burnaby Mountain Gondola back on the table in hopes of replacing 25,000 daily bus trips between campus and Vancouver’s SkyTrain Millenium Line with a 3S.
Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area Lives On Despite Setbacks
In a stunning alpine setting along the Beartooth Highway in Northwestern Wyoming sits the summit of one of America’s most unique ski destinations. “You could call it backcountry skiing with a lift,” proclaims the website for Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area. Located at 10,900 feet between Red Lodge, Montana and the Northeast Entrance to Yellowstone National Park, Beartooth Basin is the only ski resort in North America that opens for summer but not winter. To give a sense of the environment we’re talking about, the parking lot sits 450 feet higher than the top of the Jackson Hole Tram, 115 miles and two national parks to the southwest. I made some turns this spring in Beartooth Basin to check out the lifts shortly after the pass reopened Memorial Day weekend.
In good times, Beartooth Basin offers 900 vertical feet of skiing on six hundred acres serviced by two platter lifts that generally spin late-May through mid-July. But everything here is subject to exception rather than rule and it hasn’t snowed enough for Beartooth Basin to open the past two years. Even in good seasons, storms close the road and ski area, subjecting it to the whims of National Park Service plowing. In 2005, the highway never even opened. Despite years with too much snow, others without enough snow and still more with landslides, the dream lives on for the love of skiing.
Pepi Gramshammer of Vail fame created Red Lodge International Race Camp with help from fellow Austrians Eric Sailer and Anderl Molterer in 1967 with the purchase of a portable Poma from Jean Pomagalski. Named for the closest town in Montana, the ski area actually lies just across the border in Wyoming. A permanent Doppelmayr platter was added in 1983 with another one following in 1984. Five Red Lodge locals purchased the mountain from the original ownership group in 2003 and renamed it Beartooth Basin.
Soelden Announces Record-Breaking Giggijochbahn
Soelden, Austria unveiled its record-breaking gondola today called Giggijochbahn, to open next winter with the ability to carry 4,500 passengers per hour. The ropeway will feature Doppelmayr’s next-generation D-Line components and two modern terminal buildings, one featuring panoramic images of the Alps and the other showing off ropeway technology behind real glass. The top terminal will have parking for most of the lift’s 134 CWA Omega IV-10-D cabins. Innsbruck architect Johann Obermoser designed the stations in collaboration with Soelden and Doppelmayr.
This will be an impressive system by any measure with 3,022 feet of vertical rise and an 8,688-foot slope length. Travelling at the record-breaking speed of 6.5 m/s (1,280 fpm) the ride will take just 8.87 minutes. The fastest monocable gondolas in the world currently top out at 1,212 fpm. The Giggijochbahn will have 26 towers and a 62 mm haul rope driven by a ~2,180 HP electric motor. The biggest innovation will be the capacity – reaching 4,500 passengers per hour, per direction. I believe 3,600 is the current capacity record for a monocable gondola, a record shared between many lifts including the 10-passenger Gondola One at Vail and the 15-passenger Village Gondola at Mammoth.
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