The non-profit organization that bought Soldier Mountain in Idaho from Bruce Willis wants out after three years. Now the entire ski area is for sale for just $149,000 (that’s the amount the organization owes its bank.) Included are two Stadeli double chairs built in 1970 and 1974. I’ve also heard Soldier has at least one lift from nearby Sun Valley in storage for expansion. The ski area’s master plan includes four new lifts that we may never see.
Doppelmayr and Skidata think they have perfected gondola loading with the “easy boarding gate.” The system uses multiple ‘pods’ with turnstiles to enter. Flat screen monitors display how many spaces remain in each pod and guests self-select where to go. As gondola cabins enter the loading area, full pods are assigned to cabins with LED lights directing riders. I’m sure it works but why would a ski area want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what a $9 an hour lift operator can do?
Drone footage of Crystal Mountain, Michigan’s “Backyard” expansion with eight new runs served by a used CTEC triple chair.
Leitner-Poma takes the Facebook plunge. Their counterparts in Europe also have a pretty cool page!
Peak Resorts, the fourth largest operator of lifts in North America, secures a $15 million line of credit for “resort development and acquisitions.” Might we see a new lift at one of their 13 resorts next summer?
Lift tower and terminal components for Solitude’s Summit Express as seen last week. Towers were flown up the hill on Saturday.
Take a photo tour of Doppelmayr’s new six pack and new-used double chair at Sugar Mountain, North Carolina. Looks like it will have 90-degree loading and unloading.
The Gondola Project has a new interactive map showing the world’s urban ropeway systems.
Speaking of urban gondolas, Poma won a $70 million contract for a 10-passenger gondola in Santo Domingo, the capitol of the Dominican Republic. Looks like this one will be built in Europe even though it’s not that far from Miami (where coincidentally Leitner-Poma is currently building an airport people mover.)
The last rides on Lutsen Mountains’ Hall Skycruiser gondola will be this Sunday, October 18th. The gondola is coming down this fall along with the Bull and Eagle double chairs.
Tower footing for the new six pack at the Hermitage Club.
Just south of Mt. Snow in southern Vermont, $75 million is being spent to redevelop the former Haystack Mountain into the Yellowstone Club of the east. Jim Barnes, founder and CEO of the Hermitage Club, purchased 1,400 acres back in 2011 and has sold 250 memberships at $65,000 a pop (up to 250 residents of nearby towns can ski for $85 each day.)
View down the line of the new base-to-summit six pack.
The ski area last operated as a public mountain in 2009 when it was jointly owned with Mt. Snow. Both mountains were part of the American Skiing Company empire from 1991 until 2007. When Jim Barnes purchased the property, it had two Poma triples and a CTEC triple. The club expanded with two SkyTrac quad chairs serving the lower mountain built in 2012 and 2013. This summer, the Barnstormer triple (Poma) was removed and a Doppelmayr six pack with heated seats and bubbles will take its place.
Terminal location on the top of Haystack Mountain.
Support structure for the Doppelmayr Tristar drive terminal.
New England ski areas are building three new lifts this summer and all of them happen to be in Vermont. At Sugarbush, the Valley House double (a 1960 Carlevario-Savio) is out and a Doppelmayr fixed-grip quad is going in. At some point the old lift got a new Poma Alpha drive terminal and Borvig chairs. The perfectly good Poma terminal is off to West Mountain on the other side of Lake Champlain in New York. Sugarbush’s new lift looks like it’s going to have the Tristar-model terminal like many other recent Doppelmayr lifts in New England. The bottom terminal has been moved downhill to be much closer to the Super Bravo Express than the old lift. This will be Sugarbush’s 8th quad chair between Lincoln Peak and Mt. Ellen. Doppelmayr still has a ways to go on this project with just a couple towers and sections of both terminals standing but all the important concrete work is done.
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.
Finally the relocated King Con got some new paint. Haul rope is on too.
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.
King Con Express with a brand haul rope and freshly-painted tower tubes.
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.
Top of King Con with the new gondola in the distance.
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.
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.
The Ba Na Cable Car in Vietnam was the world’s longest from when it opened in 2009 until 2014. Photo credit: Doppelmayr
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.
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!
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.)
Chairs going on in reverse.Towers 13-15 just below the top terminal.
A work chair on the VonRoll Skyride at the Tulsa State Fair failed earlier this week causing two mechanics doing line work to fall.
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.
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.
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