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Jackson Hole
Fly Day in Teton Village
Last night I heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter flying over my house. Around here it’s usually a search and rescue chopper but this time I looked out to see the double rotors of a Kaman K-Max. It’s the same helicopter that did the concrete footings for the Teton lift last week. Doppelmayr started flying towers early this morning and the crew worked their way down from the top, setting towers 15 through 5 before wind and snow shut them down around noon.
The K-Max can’t fly complete towers at 9,000 feet so the tubes, crossarms and sheave trains were flown separately. As the wind picked up, the pilot had to call it a day while working on tower 5 so it sits for now missing a crossarm. Tower 1 can be done with a crane when the lower terminal goes in so there are only a handful left to fly.
Top Ten Biggest Lifts in North America by VTFH
Vertical transport feet per hour (VTFH) is the best way to measure how lifts move people up mountains. VTFH combines hourly capacity and vertical rise into one number, usually measured in millions. Ski Area Management uses this metric each fall when they look at how good of a year it was for the lift-building business.
For a lift to score big it has to have a high hourly capacity (think lots of carriers, high speed) and large vertical rise (think big slope length with many towers.) The Jackson Hole tram has a huge vertical (over 4,000′) but very low capacity so its VTFH is only 2,654,600 – not even in the top 400. The Peak 2 Peak Gondola has a huge capacity but only rises 119 feet for a dismal VTFH of 243,950. There are 49 lifts in the US and Canada that move enough people high enough to achieve a VTFH over five million. Below are the top ten.
1. Revelation Gondola Stage II, Revelstoke Mountain Resort, British Columbia
2007 Leitner-Poma 8-passenger gondola
2,952′ vertical x 2,800 passengers per hour = 8,265,600 VTFH
2. Gold Coast Funitel, Squaw Valley, California
1998 Garaventa CTEC 28-passenger funitel
2,000′ vertical x 4,032 passengers per hour = 8,064,000 VTFH
3. Heavenly Gondola, Heavenly Mountain Resort, California
2000 Doppelmayr 8-passenger gondola
2,874′ vertical x 2,800 passengers per hour = 8,047,200 VTFH
4. Gondola One, Vail Mountain, Colorado
2012 Leitner-Poma 10-passenger gondola
1,996′ vertical x 3,600 passengers per hour = 7,185,600 VTFH
5. Centennial Express, Beaver Creek Resort, Colorado
2014 Doppelmayr 6/10 chondola combination lift
2,102′ vertical x 3,400 passengers per hour = 7,146,800 VTFH
Flying Concrete for the Teton Lift
It’s mid-July and construction is ramping up on the north side of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. A K-Max helicopter from Timberline Helicopters was on-site Sunday to fly concrete for the towers that couldn’t be accessed by road. The rest of the tower footings were already finished and back filled. Concrete work is also complete at the top terminal and steel will be going up shortly. The bottom terminal is a few weeks behind. Down in the parking lot, towers are mostly assembled and terminal components will be headed up the hill soon.
News Roundup: SkyTrac Gets a Lift
- Pomerelle Mountain near Twin Falls, Idaho announced they will replace their 39-year old SLI double chair with a new SkyTrac triple. This is SkyTrac’s only publicly announced project for this summer. Apparently they have another contract for a lift in Arizona. Leave a comment if you know where.
- Saddleback, Maine has listed their Rangeley lift for sale for $350,000. They had previously listed just the drive terminal for $200k.
- Steamboat’s new master plan including two new six packs approved by Routt County.
- State of Pennsylvania opens bidding for a new quad chairlift at the troubled Laurel Mountain State Park.
- Jackson Hole’s new Sweetwater 8-passenger gondola approved by the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
- Sugarloaf removes the damaged drive terminal for the King Pine lift which rolled back in March to make way for a new Doppelmayr terminal.
- Group wants to reopen Mt. Ascutney in Vermont. It’s tough to run a ski resort with no lifts, however. The mountain’s high speed quad was sold to Crotched Mountain and other lifts went to Pat’s Peak.
- The Pope rides one of Bolivia’s new Doppelmayr urban gondolas. The entire line had to be closed until he finished his ride.
North America’s Top Ten Longest Lifts
North America’s top ten longest lifts are all gondolas or aerial tramways and only half of them are directly used for skiing. Silver Mountain’s Gondola is number one although it is no longer the world’s longest. Since 2014, that title has belonged to the Bursa Uludag Gondola in Turkey which is a ridiculous 28,871 feet. This list does not include systems which have multiple haul ropes, such as Blackcomb’s Excalibur, which I consider to be two separate gondolas.
1. Silver Mountain Gondola, Silver Mountain, Idaho – 1990 VonRoll 8-passenger gondola
16,350′ ride time 16.4 minutes
2. Sunshine Village Gondola, Sunshine Village, Alberta – 2001 Poma 8-passenger gondola
14,894′ ride time 12.4 minutes
3. Peak 2 Peak Gondola, Whistler-Blackcomb, British Columbia – 2008 Doppelmayr 3S tri-cable gondola
14,497′ ride time 9.8 minutes
4. Sandia Peak Tramway, Albuquerque, New Mexico – 1965 Bell 50-passenger tramway
14,338′
5. Silver Queen Gondola, Aspen Mountain, Colorado – 1986 Poma 6-passenger gondola
13,216′ ride time 13.2 minutes
News Roundup: Planned Openings
- Lifts from two resorts in Vermont arriving to be re-used at West Mountain, New York.
- Solitude Mountain Resort will join Park City and Alta in getting new trail maps painted by James Niehues for 2015-16.
- Reopening planned for another long-lost ski area in Wyoming. The last one to get new life was Sleeping Giant near Cody.
- Mont Blanc’s two new Doppelmayr aerial trams open for business, taking riders up 7,000 vertical feet in ten minutes.
- Up in British Columbia, Jumbo Glacier Resort is dead, Valemount Glacier Destination is not.
- A really, really bad Photoshop job of a gondola proposed to be built in Amsterdam.
- A 2.2 mile gondola project is moving forward in a Malaysian national park despite the objections of environmentalists.
Work Begins on Jackson Hole’s Teton Lift
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is celebrating its 50th anniversary in December which will coincide with the opening of new terrain and a shiny high speed quad called Teton. JHMR’s first Doppelmayr detachable will serve three new runs in the area formerly known as the Crags. This project is part of a major lift upgrade that included the new Casper detachable quad and will also include a second gondola.
The new lift will serve approximately 1,800 vertical feet of terrain between the Casper and Apres Vous lifts. With a steep profile, Teton’s ride time will be under six minutes. Having four detachable quads on the north side of the mountain will hopefully take some pressure off the aerial tram.
New Trail Maps
Park City and Jackson Hole just started building new lifts but trail map illustrator James Niehues is already finishing illustrations for their 2015-16 trail maps. Niehues planned to retire last year but apparently some projects are too good to pass up. There is no question Mr. Niehues is the best in the business and I hope he keeps painting as long as possible.
Jackson Hole’s new Teton lift will open up a handful of new trails in between the Apres Vous and Casper areas this coming winter. Mr. Niehues is repainting the portion of the map that was previously known as The Crags while the rest will remain true to his original 1991 painting.
Vail Resorts contracted James to paint an all-new, unified map of Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort which will operate as one from 2015-16. I was surprised and pleased to hear they were going with a painting instead of the awful computer-generated maps that Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Northstar have gone to. Niehues admits he had to get creative with portions of the map to show 37 lifts and 7,300 acres of terrain acres in one view. The final result below is impressive and shows why paintings make more compelling trail maps than satellite photos.
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