Teams from Doppelmayr and Timberline Helicopters put on a show yesterday in Teton Village as they flew 21 towers for JHMR’s new Sweetwater Gondola. The new gondola rises out of the base area with a mid-station at Solitude and tops out next to Casper Restaurant. With each tower flown in 4-6 sections, Brian and his co-pilot completed somewhere around a hundred laps up the hill over six hours using a UH-60 Black Hawk. There’s still a lot of work to go before November 24th but Sweetwater is starting to look like a lift!
The new Sweetwater Gondola return terminal seen from the tram on July 13th.
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.
Return terminal and operator house in progress.Line gauge bullwheel seen from below.
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.
Construction on Jackson Hole’s second gondola is ramping up as the last of the snow melts. The new Sweetwater Gondola will run from the base of the Teewinot high speed quad to the Casper Restaurant with a mid-station unload, boosting out-of-base capacity and providing an improved experience for beginner skiers. As the photos below show, the project is off to a solid start with awesome weather in the last few weeks after a very wet spring.
Tower and terminal components have begun arriving in Teton Village.The mid-station will be located about dead center of this photo. The old Sweetwater lift is headed to Pine Creek Ski Area near Cokeville, Wyoming.The Doppelmayr crew used a spider excavator to dig holes for many of the 21 new towers.
Grand Targhee wasted no time removing Blackfoot, starting even before they closed for skiing.
New lifts are coming to both sides of the Tetons this summer and that means three old lifts are coming down. At Grand Targhee, the Blackfoot double is being replaced with a Doppelmayr fixed-grip quad. All 20 towers have been removed along with the top terminal. Blackfoot had wooden ramps at both ends that will be burned down once all the steel is out of the way.
From the tree cutting that’s been done, it looks like the new lift will start to the skier’s left of the old one.Still no word on where these chairs are headed.
The sign went up this week at Jackson Hole, which will become the 12th mountain in the United States with the distinction of having two gondolas. The new Sweetwater Gondola will replace the Eagle’s Rest and Sweetwater chairs in two stages. Built by Doppelmayr, it will boost out-of-base capacity by 25% and provide direct access to beginner and intermediate terrain at mid-mountain. In the future, a dedicated learning facility with dining, lessons and rentals will open at the mid-station just north of Sweetwater’s existing bottom station. Though expensive, gondolas have proven to be extremely efficient and less intimidating than chairlifts for people learning to ski and snowboard.
It looks like Doppelmayr will modify its Uni-G terminal skin in an effort to match the Poma terminals next door at Teewinot and Bridger.
This section of Rendezvous Mountain has an interesting lift history. A Riblet double chair named Crystal Springs served a similar alignment but with no mid-station from 1978 until 1997, when it was removed to make way for the Bridger Center and Bridger Gondola. If you ride Eagle’s Rest today, there is still one Riblet tower where the old Crystal Springs crossed under on its way up. Eagle’s Rest is one of three original lifts opened at Jackson Hole in 1965, even before the first tram. When Eagle’s Rest is retired this spring there will be just six Murray-Latta lifts remaining in service worldwide. The new gondola also replaces Sweetwater, a triple chair that found its way to Jackson in 2005 by way of Winter Park. It was the Zephyr triple from 1983 to 1990 and Eskimo from 1990 to 1999 before sitting in storage for six years. Built by Lift Engineering, it was upgraded over time with Poma chairs/line gear and Doppelmayr CTEC controls. Assuming it gets re-installed somewhere, the equipment will be in its fourth home!
Sweetwater’s two sections will have around 8 towers each.
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