Teams from Mt. Hood Meadows have repaired and re-opened the Shooting Star Express that was damaged by falling trees over Thanksgiving. Now the storm recovery turns to the Mt. Hood Express, which received ten feet of snow in one week.
White Pass has more snow than it did at anytime last winter but no one can get there. Crews have been working around the clock to repair washouts that cut off the resort from both sides of the Cascades Dec. 9th. The ski area will re-open Wednesday.
The Berry family says it’s close to a deal to sell Saddleback to a new owner that hopes to open by late January. Passholders can get a refund or gift card now.
Aspen’s 1971 SLI double on Shadow Mountain will be replaced with a detachable quad or gondola in 2016 or ’17. The top terminal will move 200 feet to the southwest resulting in a slope length of 3,600′ with 1,390′ vertical and a capacity of 1,200 skiers per hour.
Park City and Canyons are now one thanks to the Quicksilver Gondola but judging by snow conditions it’s going to be awhile before you can ski between the two.
Sugarloaf and Doppelmayr load test King Pine on Dec. 19, 2015.
James Coleman opens new quad chairs at Purgatory (Leitner-Poma) and Arizona Snowbowl (SkyTrac) with more new lifts on the way.
CWA Taris cabin design for the Eiger Express in Grindelwald, Switzerland.
Back in September, I wrote about three new 3S gondolas under construction in Vietnam, Switzerland and Austria. As reader Michael E. let me know, there are at least four other 3S systems in the pipeline by both Leitner and Doppelmayr that will bring the total number to over twenty. Below is a look at the systems I missed in my last post, all of which happen to be in the same three countries.
Fansipan Cable Car – Sa Pa, Vietnam
If you look closely, you can see the four tower locations along what will be one of the world’s most spectacular ropeways scaling Mt. Fansipan.
The Fansipan Cable Car is another partnership between Doppelmayr and the Sun Group, which will operate at least five unique ropeways in Vietnam by 2017. Fansipan is the tallest peak in Southeast Asia at 10,312 feet and the cable car, which has been under construction for the last three years, goes just shy of the summit. It will slash a two-day trek up the mountain to 15 minutes. The gondola departs from the town of Sa Pa at 7,000 feet and travels over four towers and 20,063 feet of rugged mountainside. It will be the world’s longest tri-cable gondola when it opens early next year. Doppelmayr designed the system with an hourly capacity of 2,000 at a line speed of 8 m/s and with CWA Taris 35-passenger cabins.
The first non-prototype photos of Doppelmayr’s new detachable terminal that will replace the Uni-G model over the next few years. It’s certainly different; note the huge windows, Frey controls and stairs instead of ladders on the Kirchenkarbahn’s terminals. Thanks for the head’s up, snowtirol.
Maine’s chief tramway inspector releases his report with pictures on the King Pine rollback and Sugarloaf’s GM responds. Eight months after the incident, the replacement drive terminal is nearly finished.
Doppelmayr Garaventa Group revenue was down 7.5% to $841 million in fiscal 2015 while the company’s global employee headcount rose to 2,546.
Still more bad press surrounding Saddleback and the resort’s asking price is down to $9.5 million for 2,000 acres. Meanwhile Boyne offers passholders in the lurch last spring’s rates on New England Passes.
Peak Resorts, the fourth largest operator of lifts in North America, buys Hunter Mountain for $36.8 million. After the deal closes the publicly-traded company will operate 14 ski resorts with 153 lifts in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri.
Two different models of LPOA chairs going up at Okemo and Purgatory.
West Mountain demonstrates an old lift can be new again with help from Leitner-Poma, SkyTrac, Green Mountain Control Systems and Alpine Engineering.
They call it ‘The Beast’ for a reason. Killington opened for skiing on October 19th and is running 240 snow guns nightly, all while flying concrete and adding a mid-station to their Snowdon triple. The 1973 Heron-Poma is evidently going to stick around for awhile. Fun fact: Snowdon had a mid-station in nearly the same spot which was removed in 1990.
Lutsen’s recently retired Hall Skycruiser gondola cabins sold out in 4 minutes on Cyber Monday for $1200 each. A new gondy opens to passengers December 11th after a brief delay. If you missed out on the $1200 gondola cabins, you can still get someone a $150 double chair this holiday season.
When Sigma decided to develop a new 3S gondola cabin, they turned to a designer of Ferraris and Maseratis to create Symphony. Now Leitner is giving its chairs the same treatment with automotive-style upholstered seating. The new ‘Premium Chair’ combines real leather with heated seats and bubbles for the ultimate in rider comfort. The chair also has automatic locking footrests for safety. One of Audi’s design firms created the chair and it is manufactured at Leitner’s plant in Telfs, Austria. In a press release announcing the new option, Martin Leitner remarked, “The Leitner Premium chair delivers optimum comfort, ergonomics, and elegant design in one luxurious package. ‘Business Class for ski resorts’ sums it up perfectly.”
Leitner’s new ‘Premium Chair’ will debut in Austria next month.
Kitzbühel is the launch customer for the new chair, debuting 62 of the 8-passenger version on their new Brunn chairlift this winter. Brunn is the resort’s eighth Leitner installation and will serve a pod of three new runs. The lift will also feature a 980-horsepower DirectDrive that Leitner claims will reduce noise and electric consumption by 20 percent versus a standard drive with a gearbox. Brunn will haul an impressive 3,300 skiers per hour at up to 6.0 m/s. The lift is 4,790 feet long and rises 1,417 feet with 17 towers. Kitzbühel’s total investment in the Brunn lift and trails is $22.1 million.
Creeping on North Korea’s ski lift construction in Google Earth yields a new building at the summit of Masik Pass. It looks to house a detachable lift terminal with a lift line stretching all the way to the base area with towers and gondola cabins also visible. The existing summit double is on the lower right.
In British Columbia, first Crystal Mountain and now Mt. Baldy will not open this season. Baldy has a T-Bar, Mueller double, and 2007 Leitner-Poma quad that last operated in 2013.
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!
Sigma Diamond cabins in France waiting to be shipped across the pond. Photo credit: Sigma Cabins
Park City and Lutsen Mountains in Minnesota won’t have the only new gondolas in this part of the world come December. Leitner Ropeways is in the final stages of building a $72 million gondola system in Ecatepec near Mexico City. Two connected gondola lines will include seven stations and 184 10-passenger cabins. They will feature the first Leitner DirectDrives in North America. DirectDrive technology eliminates the need for a gearbox and associated points of failure.
Map of the two lines and seven stations.
The longer of the two lines will have a slope length of 9,577 feet while rising 180 feet in 10.5 minutes. It will have 20 towers and 108 Sigma Diamond 10-passenger cabins. The second line will be 5,922 feet long with a slightly larger vertical of 203 feet and ride time of 7.5 minutes. This one will have 76 cabins and 16 towers. Both lines will travel at a max speed of 1,181 feet a minute and transport 3,000 riders an hour each way. With five mid-stations, it would be difficult for cabins to be shared between the two haul ropes. A fault or stop at any of the seven terminals would halt the entire system which is just one of the reasons it is being split up with cabins turning around in the middle.
The 3S Gondola is today’s finest lift technology with large, comfortable cabins quickly moving thousands of people per hour over virtually any terrain. Doppelmayr and VonRoll pioneered the technology with Poma and Leitner developing their own versions in recent years. Thirteen of these systems operate worldwide with at least three more in development in settings as diverse as the Swiss Alps and islands of Vietnam. Here is a summary:
3S Bahn – Zermatt Bergbahnen AG
Klein Matterhorn’s first 3S will be the second built by Leitner Ropeways.
The world’s highest elevation 3S will open on the Matterhorn in Zermatt for 2018. It will feature Leitner’s DirectDrive technology and new Sigma Symphony cabins designed by the famous Italian firm Pininfarina. Its 25 28-passenger cabins will move 2,000 skiers per hour at 7.5 meters per second. The lift will cover almost 13,000 feet laterally and 3,000 feet vertically in nine minutes. Zermatt will be the first non-urban 3S gondola for Leitner or Poma. Construction begins next summer.
Sugarloaf Mountain Resort announces a new director of lifts to oversee maintenance and operations after two high-profile lift accidents. He’s not exactly a Boyne Resorts outsider.
Group hoping to reopen the Antelope Butte ski area near Sheridan, Wyoming will make a down payment to the Forest Service within two weeks. The area has two Riblet double chairs that last operated in 2004.
Switzerland sets the maximum blood-alcohol content for a person operating a cable car at 0.05% (the same limit as for drunk driving there.)
A national park in South Korea may be getting a $39 million 10-passenger gondola, the country’s 155th ropeway. South Korea will also be hosting the next Winter Olympics.
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