- 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.
- Views from the air of Snowmass’ new High Alpine detachable quad and Arizona Snowbowl’s new SkyTrac.
- 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.
Leitner-Poma
Okemo’s Two New Lifts
Leitner-Poma is busy this summer at Okemo Mountain Resort installing one new lift and turning the Jackson Gore Express into Quantum Four, Vermont’s fourth lift with bubble chairs. The new Sunshine Quad will have 11 towers and provides access to a new real estate development called South Face Village. As of this week, all concrete footings are finished and steel is going up. It will have a bottom drive/tension Alpha terminal with a fixed return up top.
News Roundup: Hauling to 12,000 Feet
- 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:
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.
Instagram Tuesday: Fall
Instagram Tuesday: Wheels
A Chondola for Gatlinburg, Tennessee?
Gatlinburg, Tennessee is the surprising home to a half dozen aerial lifts including the Gatlinburg Sky Lift and Ober Gatlinburg ski resort with a 120-passenger VonRoll aerial tramway. This town of less than 4,000 may now be adding a Leitner-Poma chondola to the mix. A new mixed-use development called Anakeesta includes the AerialQuest Adventure Park and a new hotel with a chondola connecting the two. The project’s website is unclear on exactly what type of system is coming, but apparently it will take 12 minutes each way and have between four and eight passenger cabins (the photoshopped cabins on the website are Gangloff, not Sigma.) The site calls it a chondola and Telemix although its not clear the person who wrote the copy actually knows what those terms mean. Websites are cheap, gondolas are not so we will see if this one really opens in the Spring of 2017.
Lift Profile: Vail’s Gondola One
When Vail opened the 10-passenger Gondola One in 2012, it marked the return of gondola service to Vail Village for the first time since 1976. Gondola One is named after the original Bell gondola at Vail, which opened fifty years earlier in 1962. After a de-ropement on that gondola the Lionshead gondola that killed four, various chairlifts served Vail Village for the next thirty years. Gondola One replaced the Vista Bahn, one of Vail’s original detachable quads from 1985. The Vista Bahn was a beast of a lift – over 9,000 feet long with 216 bubble quad chairs that could move 2,650 skiers per hour to the heart of Vail Mountain. By 2011, the Vista Bahn had reached the end of its useful life and needed replacement.
Gondola One is an impressive upgrade, full of modern features and an example of how the gondola is staging a comeback. Built by Leitner-Poma, it has 120 10-passenger Sigma Diamond cabins with heated seats, LED lighting and Wi-Fi. Cabin 50 is painted gold to celebrate Vail’s 50th anniversary which was celebrated the year it opened. Exterior ski racks on the cabins have space for ten pairs of skis or six snowboards and bikes can fit inside the cabins in the summer.
News Roundup: Eco-Friendly
- Leitner-Poma flies concrete for Loveland’s new Ptarmigan lift, a triple which will replace two lifts in a new alignment.
- Aerospace Engineer Michael Bouchard is determined to reopen Tenney Mountain after five seasons being closed.
- Season pass sales have been suspended at the troubled Magic Mountain in Londonderry, Vermont. The classic New England ski resort is down to two working chair lifts (in 1990 it had five.)
- Poma has a new brochure about its urban lift projects.
- Mt. Rose is relocating the Ponderosa quad (1993 Garaventa CTEC) to become the Wizard beginner lift. It also looks like their James Niehues trail map is out and a Gary Milliken VistaMap is in.
- One of Garaventa’s retired engineers has written an 834-page book called Ropeway Technology. It can be yours for only 125 Swiss Francs (plus $32 for shipping to the USA.)
- Sugarloaf pours foundations for their new terminal on an old lift.
Lift Profile: Casper at Jackson Hole
Jackson Hole’s Casper lift is an example of how the right lift can revitalize an entire section of a mountain. Prior to 2012, Casper was a 1974 Heron-Poma triple chair with a 10-minute ride time. The lift and nearby trails felt like no-man’s land in between the much newer Bridger Gondola and Apres Vous high speed quad. Casper had a race course and restaurant, but few people wanted to ride the lift.
In the summer of 2012, Jackson Hole invested $5 million to build a new Casper high speed quad and re-grade three major runs in the Casper pod. The race course was moved elsewhere and the entire area dubbed “all new, all-blue.” The new Casper opened December 6, 2012 and completely changed intermediate skiing at Jackson Hole.
Casper is one of Leitner-Poma’s first dozen lifts to utilize the new LPA terminals and grips, which debuted at Vail in 2010. While not without the usual hiccups, Casper is a machine well-liked by mechanics, operators and skiers. The lift shacks and terminals are spacious with many thoughtful features. For example, the chairs have clips that prevent seats from blowing up in high winds. The lift can auto-slow and auto-stop at pre-set wind speeds. A touchscreen at the return terminal gives operators just as much information as at the drive. Tower ladders extend all the way to the top of the lifting frames.
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