Doppelmayr

Bromont’s Lift 5 Re-Opens Tomorrow Following Fire

Peter Landsman1 Comment
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A new operator house arrives from Utah. Photo credit: Ski Bromont

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.

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Bromont teams load testing Versant du Lac Thursday, Feb. 25th.  Photo credit: Ski Bromont

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

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Temporary repairs as seen on Saturday, February 22nd.  Photo credit: Zoneski.com

Innovative Gondola Coming to Oakland Zoo’s California Trail

Peter Landsman7 Comments
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Berkeley-based Noll & Tam Architects designed California Trail’s striking hilltop visitor center integrated with the gondola’s top terminal.

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.”

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Doppelmayr crews building the top terminal.

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.

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Big Sky Resort Replacing Challenger and Lone Peak Chairs

Peter Landsman14 Comments

It’s official; in the wake of the incident two weeks ago, Big Sky Resort will remove and replace the Challenger double chair this summer rather than repair it. General Manager Taylor Middleton announced, “After exhaustive efforts to make Challenger operational for the rest of the season, we have determined that the best course of action is to replace it with a completely new lift. Skiers will continue to access the Challenger terrain via the Headwaters Lift for the rest of this season.”  The new lift will be built by Doppelmayr but there’s no word yet on model and capacity.

In addition, a letter to passholders announced the Lone Peak triple chair – a 1973 Heron-Poma – will also be replaced this summer in some form.  Big Sky has struggled for years with aging lifts needing replacement.  The mountain’s gondola had a multi-tower de-ropement in February 2008 and never ran again.  Big Sky has been looking to build a new, longer gondola from the base of the mountain to the Lone Peak Tram that would span more than two miles.  With a mid-station, such a gondola could replace the original Gondola One, Lone Peak triple and Explorer beginner double in one alignment.  Elsewhere on the mountain, the Shedhorn double needs more capacity and Big Sky has floated an idea of a lift up Liberty Bowl.

If you include Moonlight Basin and Spanish Peaks, what is now Big Sky Resort built an amazing 13 new lifts in six years between 2002 and 2007 (with 7 more going in at the Yellowstone Club.)  The 2008 recession literally stopped the construction boom in its tracks, with the Stagecoach lift at Moonlight left half-finished and abandoned when owner Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.  I’ve heard SkyTrac will be finishing that lift this summer.  It’s going to be a busy one on Lone Peak.

Mi Teleférico to Add 9th Gondola Line in La Paz

Peter Landsman5 Comments

The world’s largest gondola-based public transit network, Mi Teleférico “My Cable,” announced on social media this week it has ordered a 9th gondola from Doppelmayr for delivery in 2019.  The Linea Plateada (Silver Line) will connect the existing Yellow/Red and under construction Purple/Blue lines in Bolivia’s capitol city of La Paz.  When complete, it will connect nine separate lines and 42 miles of cable together for the first time.

 

The brainchild of President Evo Morales, Bolivia went all-in on gondolas in 2012, ordering three lines (with 4 haul ropes, 11 stations and 450 cabins) for phase one.  The experiment proved wildly successful, offering safe, clean and reliable transport to the masses in La Paz and neighboring El Alto.  Less than two months after the first gondola opened, President Morales announced construction of five additional lines on July 1, 2015.

Not many public transit systems are as revered as this one, which has more than 160,000 likes on Facebook  (the largest subway system in the world, New York’s MTA, has just 50,000.)  Mi Teleférico’s slogan is Uniting Our Lives and it serves more than 100,000 passengers every weekday.  For 40 cents a trip, riders even get free wi-fi.

https://www.instagram.com/p/xOuSB5IrkP/?tagged=miteleferico

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News Roundup: Rope Evac at Big Sky

Peter Landsman7 Comments
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Ski patrollers lower guests from the Challenger double at Big Sky Resort on February 5, 2016.
  • I’ve ridden lifts thousands of times and last Friday at Big Sky was the first time I never made it to the top of one.  A part in the gearbox on Challenger failed around noon with myself among 120 or so riders on line.  Big Sky Ski Patrol did an awesome job getting everybody down safely in about an hour.  Challenger is a reconditioned Riblet double built for Big Sky by Superior Tramway in 1988.  Three days after this incident, it’s still down. This particular lift saw significant downtime last season due to a broken bearing.
  • The Forest Service seeks comments on Arapahoe Basin’s latest master plan.  It includes a fixed-grip triple or quad chair serving the Beavers expansion, a Zuma access surface lift, replacements for Pallavicini/Molly Hogan and removal of Norway.
  • The Gondola Project asserts that cities now account for one in five gondolas and tramways built worldwide.
  • The first new lift for the 2018 Winter Olympics, an 8-passenger gondola, opens in South Korea after months of delays.  Two more detachable quads will be added this summer at the Jeongseon Alpine Center, which is hosting the Downhill and Super-G.
  • The New York Times confirms North Korea’s Masik Pass ski resort got a Doppelmayr 4-passenger gondola this summer.  It’s not new; according to Doppelmayr it came from Ischgl, Austria via a broker called Pro-Alpin who sold it to the Chinese.  The gondola is in addition to the four counterfeit Doppelmayr lifts that appeared to be brand new in 2014.

Replacing a Crossarm in the Middle of Winter

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Big White is a ski resort that lives up to its name.  Like many of its counterparts in British Columbia, the upper mountain gets pummeled by Pacific storms leaving trees and lifts looking like “snow ghosts” all winter.  On January 27th, Doppelmayr issued a service bulletin due to cracks found on the crossarms of depression towers of lifts in California, Colorado and New Hampshire.  Big White crews found damage to tower 14 of the Gem Lake Express and took the lift out of service on January 28th.

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A storm coats the Gem Lake Express in feet of rime January 27, 2016.  Photo credit: Michael Ballingall

More than 8,000 feet long and rising 2,300 feet, Gem Lake accesses a huge portion of Big White’s terrain.  The detachable quad lift was built by Doppelmayr in 1996 and has 24 towers.  Tower 14 sits about two thirds of the way up the line at 5,914 feet in elevation. Gem Lake has a parking rail for some of its 128 chairs at the bottom terminal but not for the entire line.

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Mountain operations folks making it happen.  Here, the Big White grooming team hauls a forklift to the site of the damaged tower.  Photo credit: Michael Ballingall

After the cracks on tower 14 were discovered, Doppelmayr fabricated a new crossarm in St. Jerome and shipped it from Quebec early last week.  Of course, the 20-foot long, 2.5 ton part got stuck in a winter storm of its own and ended up taking 119 hours to cross Canada. Meanwhile, Big White maintenance staff rigged the haul rope and removed the broken crossarm.

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Will Detachable Lifts Get Faster?

Peter Landsman8 Comments

There’s a lively discussion going on over at Alpinforum about the future of detachable lifts, which haven’t gotten much faster despite huge advances in technology over the last thirty years.  The first modern detachable chairlift, Quicksilver at Breckenridge, went 787 feet a minute when it debuted in 1981.  Since then, manufacturers have installed hundreds of gondolas and chairlifts capable of going more than 1,000 fpm.

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Brand new lift: 1000 ft/min

The first lift to go 1,100 fpm was the Whistler Village Gondola in 1988 and the first capable of 1,200 fpm was Stowe’s gondola in 1991.  Both were built by Poma, the early adopter of faster line speeds.  The only detachable installed in North America since 1991 capable of traveling any more than 1,200 fpm is the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, debuting in 2012. As a tri-cable gondola, P2P has an impressive capability of 1,476 fpm (7.5 m/s.) Doppelmayr claims similar systems can go up to 1,670 fpm (8.5 m/s.)  So far, the fastest 3S ever built goes 8 m/s and one that can go 8.5 will debut in Vietnam next year.  Meanwhile, 1,200 fpm (6 m/s) remains the highest speed for a single cable detachable, a stat that hasn’t changed since 1991.

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From 1984 to 2015, the average speed of a detachable lift in the U.S. increased by only 900 feet a minute.

The truth is the vast majority of detachable lifts built these days have the standard design speed of 1,000 fpm (5.08 m/s) and operate even slower much of the time.  In my experience, many ski areas run so-called high speed lifts at 800 or 900 feet a minute on all but the busiest of days.  As users on Alpinforum note, ski resort operators care more about reducing stops, wear and tear than shaving thirty seconds off a ride time that the average guest won’t even notice.

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News Roundup: Fansipan Legend Opens

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  • Contract awarded for India’s first urban gondola, to cost $24 million and open within two years.
  • Just a week after sanctions on Iran were lifted, Bartholet announces it’s building a gondola system on the resort island of Kish.  A definite upgrade from the salvaged Yan detachable installed last year in Isfahan (if you’re wondering, it made the journey from Silver Star, BC.)

Le Relais to Replace Three Lifts with a Six-Pack

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I always find this time of year exciting as ski resorts announce new lifts projects, many of which catch me by surprise.  This week we learned Le Relais Ski Centre, located just outside Quebec City,  will replace three lifts with a Doppelmayr six-pack capable of moving a huge 3,600 skiers an hour. Two T-bars (a 1960s Mueller and 1987 Doppelmayr) as well as a fixed-grip quad (1987 Doppelmayr) will be removed.

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A project like this would normally re-use existing towers tubes, but Le Relais has some crazy offset towers that support both their quad chair and 1987 T-Bar.  Thus the six-pack will get brand new towers in addition to 60 six-passenger chairs.  Slope length will be just under 3,000 feet with a vertical rise of 676′. The ride will take just three minutes at 5.1 m/s.  A Chairkit loading carpet is included in the $5+ million lift, which will be built at Doppelmayr’s plant just down the road in St. Jerome. Congratulations to Le Relais Ski Centre and the Beaulieu family on what’s sure to be a huge hit with guests.

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Lifts B, C and D will be removed.  Next season, Le Relais will operate two modern high-speed chairlifts and two platters.

News Roundup: Ice Heist

Peter Landsman1 Comment
  • Luckily Manning Park Resort was in on letting pro mountain bikers pretend to break into and operate one of their lifts.
  • When chairs can’t spin because there’s no one to staff them.
  • BMF opens its sightseeing aerial tramway in Puebla.  Its 35-passenger cabins were manufactured in Austria by Carvatech.
  • 12 year-old boy falls out of a chair at Wachusett, avoids serious injury.
  • Snowboarder accuses skier of shoving him off Aspen Highlands’ Loge Peak lift mid-ride in a story that goes viral.  Just one day later, the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office thinks they’ve identified a suspect.
  • Doppelmayr is building an 8-passenger gondola this spring at the Oakland Zoo to serve a $62 million expansion called California Trail.  The lift will have 7 towers, 15 cabins and open in late 2017.  The zoo will continue to operate its Safari Sky Ride triple chair that was built by SkyTrans.
  • DCC (Doppelmayr Cable Car) wins a $24 million contract to build its 10th cable-propelled automated people mover in underground tunnels at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.