- The US Forest Service denies much of Eldora’s proposed expansion in a surprise decision. Approved: six-person detachable replacements for Corona and Challenge/Cannonball. Rejected: new Jolly Jug and Placer lifts.
- Crystal Mountain, BC (not to be confused with resorts of the same name in Washington/Michigan) will stay closed for another season. The BC Safety Authority revoked the ski area’s operating permit on March 1st, 2014 when a Mueller double chair de-roped and sent four people to the hospital.
- Doppelmayr’s September 2015 customer magazine Wir is now available online with a huge focus on urban ropeways.
- The President of Austria visits La Paz, the city in Bolivia that bought 34 Uni-G terminals and 1,350 CWA cabins from Doppelmayr.
- Leitner-Poma assembling chairs for Powderhorn’s first detachable lift, the Flat Top Flyer.
- Doppelmayr begins 15 months of construction on a new $16 million gondola to Arthur’s Seat near Melbourne, Australia. As usual, not everyone is happy about a gondola in a public park.
- I hesitate to even post this silliness:
Doppelmayr
Finishing Three Lifts at Once in Park City
Doppelmayr is on a roll at Park City with haul ropes spliced and tensioned for the new King Con Express and Motherlode Express lifts. In case you’ve been living under a rock, King Con is a brand new Uni-G model six pack with a loading carpet while Motherlode is a recycled Garaventa CTEC detachable quad moved from the King Con line. Both are nearly finished 50 days before opening day.
Over at the Quicksilver Gondola, which connects Park City to the former Canyons Resort, the drive terminal is getting a loading platform and what looks like a small cabin maintenance building. A bunch more cabins have arrived from Switzerland; the highest number I saw on a gondola was 61. The angle station is going up now with a crane setting bullwheels today. This station is going to be massive and I imagine the large tire sections will follow this week.
In other news, Payday Express, the last of Park City’s detachables with white paint received its new red and silver paint job last week along with Flat Iron next to the new gondola. Just about every lift at the combined resort has been painted this summer with the exception of a few fixed-grip lifts on the Park City side. Check out more pictures of the construction after the jump.
The New Longest Gondola in Turkey
It used to be when you boarded the gondola to Silver Mountain in Kellogg, Idaho, a huge sign proclaimed, “Welcome to the World’s Longest Gondola.” At 16,350 feet, the Silver Mountain Gondola held that title from its opening in 1990 until May 2009. That’s when Doppelmayr completed the Ba Na Cable Car in the mountains of Vietnam. A hundred and fifty feet longer than Silver’s gondola and a thousand feet taller, it broke world records for both length and vertical rise.
Fast forward a couple years and Leitner has crushed the ropeway length record again with a gondola in Turkey that opened in 2014. Like the Silver Mountain Gondola, the Bursa-Uludag Gondola connects a city with a ski resort but this one is split into in three sections. It starts in Bursa (Turkey’s fourth largest city) at only 1,300 feet above sea level and tops out at the Uludag resort town and national park at 6,000 feet. The combined system is just under 29,000 feet long with a vertical rise of 4,600 feet. It has 139 Sigma Diamond cabins and 44 towers. The entire system takes only 22 minutes to ride at 6 m/s, replacing a 35-kilometer drive on a mountain road that took over an hour.
As if the Ba Na Cable Car and Bursa-Uludag Gondola aren’t cool enough, there’s also a 26,000 foot 3S gondola under construction in Vietnam that will relegate Silver Mountain’s gondola to the world’s fourth longest.
News Roundup: Tower Time
- The East’s next big resort at The Balsams still hopes to break ground before the snow flies and open in late 2016. Still no word on who will supply the lifts.
- Leitner-Poma flies towers at Loveland, Snowmass and Sipapu. Brian from Timberline Helicopters has flown every tower in the west so far this summer with his K-Max. At Sipapu it reportedly only took him 37 minutes!
- Meanwhile, Doppelmayr puts up some big terminals.
- SkyTrans Manufacturing helps crews from Sugarloaf take down the Bucksaw double. Probably means it’s coming soon to a zoo near you.
Chairs Going on the Teton Lift
The Teton lift got its haul rope and commline in the last few weeks and Doppelmayr started launching chairs on Saturday. Agamatic grips were being attached to each chair before going onto the maintenance rail at the bottom terminal. Doppelmayr was launching chairs in groups with the lift running slowly in reverse. All 80 chairs should be on by this afternoon. Next up: adjustments and load test. Impressive to see this project nearly finished two and half months before its scheduled opening (which is December 19th.)
News Roundup: Tragedy in Oklahoma
- OSHA is investigating the death of one of two mechanics who fell while doing line work on the Skyride at the Tulsa State Fair. A work chair on the 1965 VonRoll gondola appears to have failed below the hanger, dangling both men from their harnesses. Steve Shelton, 43, died of trauma as a result. His family set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral expenses.
- Poma is setting steel for Europe’s new highest lift in Russia. The three-stage, two-passenger gondola on Mt. Elbrus will reach 3,847 m/12,621 feet (Breckenridge’s Imperial Express SuperChair goes 350 feet higher.)
- Sugarloaf begins removing its oldest lift as part of a ‘lift safety’ initiative. I guess a lift that doesn’t exist is safer than one that does.
- Hidden Valley, New Jersey’s three Borvig lifts are out and two new Partek lifts are going in. The ski area which closed in 2013 also has a new name – the National Winter Activity Center. Follow the progress live here.
- The city of Cali in Colombia will open MIO Cable, a 10-passenger Poma gondola, on Friday. The 6,800′ system has four stations and 60 Sigma cabins that move 2,000 passengers per hour each way.
- Deer Valley Resort, SkyTrac and the NSAA will host an evening program honoring Jan Leonard on October 14th at Snow Park Lodge.
- Doppelmayr crews fly 11 towers for a new gondola at Lutsen Mountains, Minnesota. The $7 million system is going up alongside the resort’s Hall gondola, which will run through October 18th.
- It’s looking like Saddleback, Maine will have a ski season without a new lift.
News Roundup: Closings and Openings
- When is a ski resort expansion not really an expansion? When the terrain used to be served by a detachable quad that was re-possessed by Bank of America. Kidding aside, Tamarack seems to be getting back on track.
- Another eastern ski area bites the dust; Tuxedo Ridge, NY and its four double chairs will not operate this winter.
- Saddleback has reportedly canceled this summer’s NDT and let go of its lift mechanics.
- Hong Kong’s Ngong Ping 360 (Leitner bi-cable gondola) may get a third section.
- The Indonesian city of Bandung is still studying a $357 million, 26-mile gondola network.
- Dodge Ridge, Soda Springs, Boreal, Sugarloaf, Cannon Mountain, Pat’s Peak and Wildcat are all looking for lift maintenance managers ten weeks from ski season.
- Leitner Ropeways has a brand new website. It even has a station configurator tool to match Doppelmayr’s.
Park City King Con Express September Update
Like the Quicksilver Gondola, Park City’s new King Con Express is just about ready for a haul rope. Both terminals are nearly complete and all the towers have been ready to go since August. The chairs are still down in the base area waiting to be assembled. As far as I can tell, grips and operator houses have not been delivered yet. I’m guessing Park City is getting the pre-fabricated CTEC-style houses for both King Con and the Gondola.
Cabins and Towers for Park City’s Quicksilver Gondola
The most anticipated new lift of the year is starting to look like the really big gondola that it is. The drive terminal for Park City’s Quicksilver Gondola is largely complete and all 27 towers were set last weekend. Doppelmayr opted to use the same K-Max heli they’ve been using for other projects even though gondola towers are huge. The biggest towers – 23 and 24 – were actually set by crane. In fact, a two-mile long road was built just to access T21-23 on the edge of Thaynes Canyon.
The towers that were flown were split into in as many as six pieces because of the limited capability of the K-Max at 9,000 feet. At least two towers have 16-sheave trains that must weigh a ton. Some towers were flown without catwalks and railings just to make weight. I was surprised Doppelmayr did not use a heavy-lift helicopter like the Chinook but I’m sure it all came down to price and what was available.
Building Solitude’s Summit Express
It felt like spring at Solitude Mountain Resort, not because of the weather but because the Summit lift replacement project is really just getting underway. The new Doppelmayr detachable quad is in an entirely new alignment that is extremely rugged. There was obviously a ton of blasting and dirt work just to get to this point. Once the Summit Express is complete, Solitude will have four high speed quads and only three fixed-grip lifts left.
Highlander Lift Services is in charge of this project rather than crews from Doppelmayr or Solitude. Most of the tower forms are in but I did not see any concrete in the ground. The top terminal is just a hole and the bottom isn’t much further along. The lift is going to have around 20 towers and only the crossarms and lifting frames have arrived so far. Unfortunately it looks like these guys are going to be building a lift in the snow.
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