A proposed settlement could see the Hermitage Club parent company give control of the Barnstormer chairlift to the investors who bought it.
Pajarito reopens one of two chairlifts which became inoperable over a month ago.
A gondola window falls hundreds of feet and nearly injures a farmer working below in Taiwan.
The one year old T-Bar at Burke Mountain is now the D-Bar, named in honor of longtime supporter Don Graham. Mr. Graham once saved the mountain from closure, covered years of operating losses and personally financed half of the Mid Burke Express.
A Denver TV reporter heads to Texas for a two-part interview with the husband of Kelly Huber, the woman killed during a lift malfunction last year at Granby Ranch.
Two loaded chairs collide at Owl’s Head, Quebec after the Green Chair was pressed into rare operation amid downtime on a neighboring high-speed quad. The 1972 Heron-Poma is the former Big Hitch lift from Stagecoach, Colorado.
China Peak’s owner wishes he still had the $900,000 he spent to build a new lift last summer that can’t open with no snow.
The new Peak triple was rope evac’d at Pats Peak last Monday, apparently due to a gearbox issue.
Disney Skyliner’s first tower is up and it’s tapered in the cool Wolfurt style.
Ian Cumming, founder of Powdr and majority owner of Snowbird, dies at age 77.
Granite Gorge’s chairlift opens for the season after a gearbox issue and other problems.
Ariel Quiros officially settles with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $82 million, paving the way for the sale of Jay Peak and Burke Mountain.
Killington formally applies to replace the South Ridge triple with a quad chair, manufacturer unknown. The sample profile confusingly shows a Poma Alpha drive and Doppelmayr Eclipse return terminal.
Skier visits have declined 30 percent in South Korea over the last five years and there are several lost ski resorts in the Olympic region.
The Sawtooth National Forest tentatively approves Sun Valley’s project to replace the Cold Springs lift with a longer high-speed quad as soon as this summer.
A chairlift will be studied studied for one of Alabama’s most popular state parks.
Alterra names Mammoth veteran Rusty Gregory as the company’s first CEO.
Skier records volcano erupting from a Doppelmayr detachable in Japan. One person was killed and a gondola damaged by rockfall.
ORDA, the state owner of Belleayre, Gore Mountain and Whiteface, lost $20.8 million last year.
Powder catches up with Alterra President and COO David Perry, who stresses the company will do things differently than Vail.
Public comment period opens for Mt. Rose’s Atoma expansion, which would include construction of one or two new chairlifts as early as 2019.
The draft environmental impact statement is also out for Steamboat’s expansion, to include a second gondola, Rough Rider chairlift, new Bashor lift and Pioneer Ridge pod with groundbreaking possible by May.
Just upgrading electric infrastructure for Disney’s Skyliner gondola system will cost $3.8 million, around the total price tag of a typical ski lift project!
Billionaire philanthropist Barry Diller considers gifting a $30 million gondola to the people of Los Angeles, which would travel over 2.2 miles of parkland from the city’s zoo to the Hollywood sign.
One Hall double at the defunct Big Tupper ski area will reopen next winter, with another needing extensive work before it can spin.
A report suggests Sunrise Park mechanic Reggie Antonio lost his life when the lift he was working on moved while he was in a work chair but still attached to a tower.
LiftDigital safety bar screens go live on five chairs at Winter Park.
Garaventa completes the world’s steepest funicular railway in Switzerland.
New owner of Mt. Whittier, NH weighs the future of a lost ski area with a 1963 Mueller gondola that still stands adjacent to a McDonald’s drive through.
Taos says goodbye to two more chairlifts – that’s four in one summer!
Song Mountain, NY is replacing its 1965 Thunderbird T-Bar with a chairlift. Anyone know where it’s from?
The Rainforest Adventures crew gets one Skytrac back in action and works to repair the other following Irma’s devastation of St. Maarten.
Scroll through these photos of a new high-speed quad in Switzerland with four stations, three sections, two haul ropes and only one drive!
Albany gondola group to be led by former chief executive of the New York State Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration Thomas Madison, Jr.
The Quickdraw lift at Granby Ranch, Colorado is a 1999 Leitner detachable quad where a “rare dynamic event” last December caused a a chair to contact this tower, killing one and injuring two children.
The Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board released its 151-page final report on last December’s fatal accident at Granby Ranch this afternoon. The investigative team included seven professional engineers with more than 250 years of combined lift experience with support from Leitner-Poma and Granby Ranch personnel, among others. The team conducted extensive tests on the Quickdraw lift from the afternoon of the accident through January 5th and spent months writing this detailed analysis, identifying contributing factors and making recommendations for changes. Appendices include witness statements, photographs and prior inspection reports but the core of the document is 13 pages which everyone who works on ski lifts should read. I’ve done my best to summarize below.
Chair 58 contacted tower 5 at a 40-degree angle that morning due to two contributing factors. The first was the tuning of a new drive installed last Fall by an independent contractor. Two specific parameters may have created pulses of energy and rope instability, the report notes. “It is probable that the combined effect of [these two settings] may have resulted in the drive trying to respond too aggressively to lift demands when changing from ‘Fast’ to ‘Slow’ and back to ‘Fast’ again.” The second contributing factor was the influence of one or more speed changes leading up to the incident.
Other potential contributing factors were:
Control system complexity resulting from the new ABB DCS800 drive’s interface with older Pilz/Leitner low-voltage controls.
A control board replacement from February 2016.
Possible damage to the electric motor encoder.
Unknown electrical cycle shown in data logs that had occurred at a 3.7 second interval over the entire life of the lift.
Tension factor(s) that would require more testing to determine.
Natural instability of the profile. “There appears to have been a very unique combination of rope tension, carrier spacing, tower spans, tower height, carrier loading and natural carrier movement that led to the transverse carrier swing that resulted in Carrier 58 hitting Tower 5,” the document states.
Natural harmonic response of the haul rope.
Wind was not found to be an outside influence, nor was passenger conduct. “The incident that occurred on December 29th, 2016 at Granby Ranch was unprecedented,” the investigative team wrote. “Although many factors may have combined to amplify the effect of the rope instability leading to Carrier 58 colliding with Tower 5, the performance of the new drive is considered to be the primary cause of the incident.” The report explains electronic drives such as the DCS800 added to Quickdraw last year and used on many lifts are also used in a wide variety of other applications. The tuning and “fine-tuning” of a drive is complex and unique to each application and lift. “It appears the new drive was not comprehensively tuned to this particular lift during installation,” the document says.
Intrawest re-invested 8 percent of revenues at its resorts between 2013 and 2017 (compared with 11 percent across Vail Resorts.) The company had 173 interested buyers, 16 of which were ski industry players.
Early summer update from the Magic Mountain rebirth and Green Chair project.
Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group buys Frey AG Stans, a leading global provider of ropeway control systems.
Lifts from the defunct Talisman Mountain Resort have been sold; one is headed to Sunridge, Alberta.
The Denver Postreports a joint Aspen/Intrawest/KSL/Mammoth pass is in the works for 2018-19, meaning the Mountain Collective could lose seven members and 43 percent of its lifts. The MAX Pass might fare better, losing the six Intrawest resorts and 85 lifts (20 percent.) I chart one scenario below.
Hesperus Ski Area voluntarily closes, possibly for the season following unannounced visit by Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board inspectors. Hesperus similarly closed for a season in the mid-1990s after being found to be running the same lift without an operator.
Cherry Peak finally opens Sundays, still has not completed promised Summit lift.
Suit seeks at least $75,000 from Sugar Mountain, where a teenager apparently went around a bullwheel at closing time, became stranded and jumped from a chair overnight last season. edit: Resort says rescuers were close by when teen jumped.
Snow King Mountain abandons plans for East side lift, will try for backside lift instead.
Snow King’s latest master plan concept abandons a lift east of Rafferty in favor of a south-facing lift. The Summit double would be replaced with an 8-passenger gondola.
Leitner-Poma wasn’t involved in recent work that likely caused last month’s fatal fall at Granby Ranch, but the original manufacturer of the lift will fix it. Ten days after re-opening using only the lift’s diesel auxiliary, Granby Ranch has a plan to restore Quickdraw to full capacity with a new electronic drive. In a statement issued today, The ski area acknowledged a third-party company modified the drive system over the summer, as I reported last week. “Preliminary investigation has revealed that the issue that likely caused the incident was the independent contractor’s modification to the lift’s electrical drive/control system,” the release notes. The third-party installed system only operated 13 days before a chair hit a tower Dec. 29th, killing 40-year old Kelly Huber of Texas and injuring her two daughters.
The Quickdraw lift at Granby Ranch seen last summer, when a third-party contractor installed a new electronic drive system.
Earlier today, Granby Ranch said Quickdraw would be closed today and tomorrow for additional testing, as ordered by the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board. The area hopes to re-open again under diesel power in the next few days and Leitner-Poma will install the new electronic drive system in the near future. The CPTSB will release its official report on the December incident in the coming months.
Update 1/21/17: A state spokesman says the CPTSB ordered the lift closed until further notice at an emergency meeting after reviewing “unusual/irregular conditions” observed while Quickdraw was operating with the diesel auxiliary.
