Skytrac

Tahoe Donner Chooses Skytrac for New Beginner Lift

Peter Landsman2 Comments
Tahoe Donner’s 1971 SLI will go by the wayside this summer and be swapped for a new Skytrac triple chair.

It may not be the biggest lift project I write about this week but Tahoe Donner near Truckee, California has signed a contract to replace its Snowbird SLI double this summer.  The Tahoe Donner Association is one of the country’s largest homeowner associations and therefore the process of assessing the old lift, designing a new one and funding it is all detailed on the neighborhood’s website.  Tahoe Donner staff solicited quotes from multiple manufacturers and looked at the used marketplace but ultimately settled on a brand new Skytrac Monarch fixed-grip triple chair to improve safety and reliability.

The new $1.5 million lift will be bottom drive and bottom tension with an increased line speed of 400 feet per minute.  Capacity will jump from 900 pph to 1500 with a comfortable 7.2 second chair interval.  New terminals will be smaller than the old ones and located off to the side of the Snowbird ski run for better circulation.  The lift will go from nine towers to six with a slope length of 1,600 feet.


Tahoe Donner is open to the public and popular with California families as an affordable option near Lake Tahoe. It’s great to see homeowners committing to the future of the mountain with this new lift.  Thanks to Kirk and Max for letting me know about the project.

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Instagram Tuesday: Crafted

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Every Tuesday, I feature my favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.

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Still drooling over last night’s sunset.

A post shared by Boyne Mountain Resort (@boyne.mountain) on

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In Whitefish, a Disused Lift is Born Again

Peter Landsman7 Comments
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A 35-year old chairlift is proving very popular in Whitefish, Montana this season after moving from an alignment redundant with other lifts to an underutilized corner of the mountain.

Exactly half of the 14 lifts at Whitefish Mountain Resort stand in a second location, with some even finding a third home in Northwestern Montana.  By strategically re-engineering and relocating lifts from elsewhere on the mountain and beyond, Whitefish has been able to grow faster than many of its competitors and now encompasses 3,000 acres of glades, groomers and chutes.  This year’s move of Chair 5 creates the East Rim lift and turns a machine that sat idle for years into a dedicated lift for some of the finest advanced terrain in the Inland Northwest.

wmr_trailmap_frontside_1718For the first 50 years, every lift on Big Mountain was purchased new from a manufacturer.  That changed in 1999 and 2000, when the the Bigfoot and Sunrise T-Bars joined the Whitefish fleet just as consolidation and new technology were making new lifts increasingly expensive.  In 2002, the ski area acquired a Hall triple for a new beginner lift.  Continuing the pattern, Big Mountain, as it was then still known, snagged Moab’s failed Skyway experiment for another new beginner pod.  When the first-generation Glacier Chaser detachable needed to be replaced the following year, Whitefish had no choice but to go new for the flagship Big Mountain Express.  But instead of scrapping the old Doppelmayr, it shifted west to become the Swift Creek Express.  That summer’s lift shuffle also turned the old Easy Rider triple into Elk Highlands, a real estate egress lift.  In 2011, the Bad Rock lift was brought in all the way from Pennsylvania and now runs out of the base lodge in both winter and summer.  With a major lift renewal complete, Whitefish set its sights on expansion for winter 2014-15, opening the Flower Point lift and 200 additional acres.  That machine came from across the border, the old Rosa triple from Kimberley (and the predecessor to the Whistler Village Gondola before that.)  To summarize, Whitefish impressively built “new” lifts in 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2014 and now 2017.

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This morning’s scene on the East Rim.

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Instagram Tuesday: Shades

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Every Tuesday, I feature my favorite Instagram photos from around the lift world.

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Night creature sunrise!

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News Roundup: Storied

Peter Landsman14 Comments
  • The Eglise expansion at the Yellowstone Club looks like something straight out of Europe!  Thanks Everett K. for the photos.
  • The Alameda County Fair will debut a Skytrac skyride next year, the fourth such lift in California.
  • Disney teases more Skyliner renderings and the first tower footings going in the ground are massive.
  • Gearbox problem turns into a rope evac at Windham Mountain.
  • Power surge blamed for a three hour evacuation at Sasquatch Mountain.
  • Belleayre’s gondola proves itself from day one in subzero temperatures.
  • If it can raise enough money, Frost Fire, North Dakota plans to build a Skytrac fixed-grip chairlift next summer to replace two broken lifts.
  • A clearance issue needs to be resolved before Bear Valley can launch the Mokelumne Express.
  • A mechanic dies while working on a carpet lift at Loveland and a GoFundMe page has been set up to support his widow and three children.
  • With a “full pipeline,” Skytrac is hiring for construction positions.
  • North Korea’s second ski resort reportedly includes lifts manufactured locally, a result of UN sanctions prohibiting the import of luxury goods.
  • Silver Mountain celebrates a storied 50 years with a look back to construction of the world’s longest gondola, uniquely funded by federal, state and local governments along with VonRoll Tramways.
  • As we enter prime time for lift construction announcements, keep track of the 2018 roster here.

Construction Rises Significantly to 51 Lifts in 2017

Peter Landsman16 Comments
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The Doppelmayr-built Wildcat Express comes together at Snowbasin, one of seven new six-place chairlifts built throughout the western US this year.  More six-packs were added in 2017 than any other year except 2000.

With commissioning wrapping on eleven more lifts than last year at this time, 2017 represents an impressive ten-year high for North American lift building.  Six-passenger chairlifts, T-Bars and urban gondolas in Mexico and the Caribbean drove much of the growth in a year that saw continued changes in the manufacturer landscape.  Compared with 2016, more of this year’s chairlifts were expensive detachable models (12) compared with 17 fixed-grips (in 2016, the split was 7 detachable, 23 fixed.)  A total of nine new gondolas and three T-Bars went up in 2017, both increases from the year before.  Ten additional lifts were relocated and re-purposed, a three-year high with lifts originally built by Blue Mountain, CTEC, Doppelmayr, Riblet, Roebling, Stadeli and Yan finding new homes.  Combined, this year’s new lift class represents a solid 27 percent increase from 2016.

Consistent with last year, about two thirds of the projects in 2017 represented one-for-one replacements in existing alignments.  Interestingly, at least six resorts removed older lifts outright without replacing them.  At many mountains, the era of building and maintaining extra chairlifts that rarely run is over.

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Mt. Baker Swaps a Riblet for a Skytrac

Peter Landsman5 Comments
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Mt. Baker Ski Area’s new Chair 7 is the first on the mountain with an electric prime mover.

Replacing a fixed-grip quad with another fixed-grip quad might not seem like much of a change, but Mt. Baker took a significant step forward this summer building an all-new Chair 7 with loads of upgrades.  The only lift out of the White Salmon base area is now a Skytrac, the first for this Pacific Northwest favorite with seven fixed-grip quads.

The Riblet Chair 7 opened in 1990 to serve an eastward expansion along with Chair 8 in 1992.  The last of Baker’s seven Riblets went in for the 2001-02, the second to last Riblet lift built anywhere in the world.  Beginning the following year, a series of four Doppelmayr CTEC quad chairs replaced lifts 1, 3, 5 and 6.  All of these lifts were powered directly with diesel engines.

Mt. Baker Ski Area’s new Chair 7 is the first on the mountain with an electric prime mover.

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Buttercup Update from Mt. Hood Meadows

Peter Landsman9 Comments

Many resorts are adding bigger chairlifts this season but Mt. Hood Meadows’ new beginner lift is notable for a couple reasons.  The quad follows an all-new route from the double it replaces, opening up more teaching terrain in the base area.  Second, it appears to feature Skytrac’s first height-adjustable terminal at its return station.  The drive and tensioning systems will now be located at the top.  The new Buttecup is 30 percent longer than the Yan version and will move 70 percent more people.  It will also spin 30 percent faster thanks to a loading carpet, which is also height adjustable.

When I stopped by Meadows this weekend, Mt. Hood had received nearly six inches of rain on top of early snow in classic Pacific Northwest fashion.  Timberline is already open for the season while lift construction continues next door.  Concrete work for the new lift is almost finished and the weather looks much better this week as Meadows prepares for its 50th season.

 

Bridger Bowl Invests $5 Million to Transform Beginner Experience

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Located near Bozeman, Montana, Bridger Bowl is a nonprofit day-use ski area that has seen major growth and investment recently.  This year’s projects cater to beginner skiers and snowboarders.
Bridger Bowl is creating a first-rate learning center this fall, with four new lifts under construction to serve exclusively green terrain.  Following years of attendance records and upper mountain expansion, the move is similar to what Beaver Creek, Jackson Hole, Taos and the Yellowstone Club did recently combining short gondolas, new chairlifts and/or covered carpets to create dedicated teaching hubs away from facilities for other guests.  At Bridger, the Snowflake lift is being moved away from conflicting skier traffic to a completely new area, the Virginia City double replaced with a Skytrac triple chair with loading carpet and two new SunKid conveyors added.  An addition to the Saddle Peak Lodge and new Snowflake Hut cap this major investment by the Bridger Bowl Association, the mountain’s nonprofit owner for the past 63 years.  Impressively, the entire expansion is being paid for with cash reserves.

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2017-18 Bridger Bowl trail map showing the new lift layout.
Bridger Bowl’s redevelopment over the last two decades is a model for nonprofit community ski areas everywhere.  At the turn of the millennium, the mountain ran one modern quad chair and five Riblet doubles built between 1964 and 1978.  Every lift was subsequently replaced with new fixed grip triples and quads with loading carpets from Garaventa CTEC, Doppelmayr CTEC and now Skytrac.  With six Chairkit systems, Bridger Bowl is the largest operator of loading carpets in North America.  “The conveyors are very effective in reducing mis-loads and allow the lifts to be operated closer to full speeds,” Four Mountain Advisors noted in the mountain’s master plan.  “This helps maintain lift capacity without the added costs of a high-speed lift.”  While at one point Bridger operated two mile-long doubles, the new strategy relies on a larger number of shorter, well-placed fixed-grip triples and quads.  Virginia City and Snowflake are the fifth and sixth modern lift replacements in new alignments.

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Big Sky Quietly Adds 27th Lift

Peter Landsman18 Comments
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The Stagecoach lift stands partially completed with Lone Peak looming in June 2016. After two owners, two bankruptcies, two names, two installers and almost a decade, it will open this winter at Moonlight Basin.

We’ve heard little about the two lift projects surrounding Lone Peak this summer, even though they will bring North America’s largest contiguous ski complex to a record 43 lifts before counting carpets.  As I covered before, the biggest development is at the Yellowstone Club, where a new Doppelmayr gondola, high-speed quad and triple chair will create one of the largest beginner skiing facilities in America, though few will be lucky enough to learn to ski there.

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Most of the towers for Big Sky’s Stagecoach lift flew October 10, 2008. Skytrac recently installed the rest and a lot happened in between.

Over at Big Sky Resort, anyone with a ticket to the Biggest Skiing in America will be able to ride the new Stagecoach double chair this winter.  Stagecoach extends the long tradition of so-called lodging access lifts here, begun with Pony Express in 1995 and followed by White Otter, Cascade, arguably all five of the Spanish Peaks lifts, and most recently Little Thunder.  Amazingly, almost half of the 43 lifts on Lone Peak and the surrounding mountains exist to create ski-in, ski-out real estate.  At Big Sky Resort, most of these machines are seconds from other Boyne mountains and they have their own color on the trail map: purple.

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Can you find it?  The approximate location of the new Stagecoach lift on the expansive Big Sky trail map is marked in red.

In the five years prior to the real estate bubble bursting nationwide in 2008, a crazy 18 lifts were built in Big Sky at four separate ski operations.  One of those, Moonlight Basin, opened in December 2003 as Lone Peak’s second public ski resort.  The development’s first two lifts had simply connected to neighboring Big Sky Resort in 1994 and 1995. Between 2003 and 2006, founder Lee Poole and his partners went it alone, adding four more lifts including Montana’s first six-pack.  Three of these were among the last CTECs off the line following the Doppelmayr merger.

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