- Wire Austin gets some attention from folks who matter – the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority.
- Peak Resorts loses $7.9 million in the first quarter (it owns Alpine Valley, Attitash, Big Boulder, Boston Mills, Brandywine, Crotched Mountain, Hidden Valley, Hunter Mountain, Jack Frost, Mad River Mountain, Mt. Snow, Paoli Peaks, Snow Creek and Wildcat.)
- The deropement and evacuation of the pulse gondola between the Aiguille du Midi and Pointe Helbronner makes CNN.
- Austria’s Foreign Minister meets with former London Mayor Boris Johnson to talk Brexit. The mayor says the Doppelmayr cowbell that came with the Emirates Air Line is one of his most prized possessions.
- Federal receiver hopes to sell Jay Peak in the spring, says resort President Bill Stenger was duped.
- Laurel Mountain’s new Skytrac is complete.
- Maine’s Attorney General sues the owner of Big Squaw Mountain for not operating the ski area as promised.
- Tamarack Homeowners meet to discuss the future of Idaho’s newest ski resort ahead of an October lift auction. Owner Credit Suisse and its operator Replay Resorts appear to be on the way out.
- The owner of Montana Snowbowl tells the Missoulian he started construction on a new TV Mountain lift a few weeks ago and there’s a chance it will be completed in time for the coming winter season.
- Preservation group calls abandoned mines in American Fork Canyon a “ticking time bomb,” calls on Snowbird to turn private land over to the Forest Service where the resort plans to build two new lifts.
Skytrac
Powder Mountain Plans Two New Lifts for Winter 2016-17
Powder Mountain will build new lifts in Mary’s Bowl and Lefty’s Canyon this fall if all goes according to plans filed with Weber County last month. The Village lift will be a Skytrac fixed-grip quad with a design capacity of 2,000 pph and line speed of 450 fpm. It will be 3,680′ long with a vertical rise of 582′, 105 chairs and 14 towers. A second lift called Mary’s will serve the other side of the new Summit Powder Mountain Village and top out near the Sunrise Platter. Design details for this lift have not yet been filed with the county but it will be similar in length and vertical to Village. “The plan is to have them open to the public and operating for this ski season,” Summit Powder Mountain COO Jeff Werbelow told the Ogden Standard-Examiner. Both lifts will be located entirely on private land but still must pass design review with Weber County. Future plans call for a third lift called Lefty’s linking the bottom of Village to the top of Sunrise.
Skytrac will also build a new quad chair at Christmas Mountain Village, Wisconsin this fall, bringing the company to seven new lifts for 2016. Combined with Leitner-Poma, that makes 18 new lift projects in North America compared with 17 for Doppelmayr thus far. You can see a full rundown of new lifts for 2016 here.
News Roundup: New Manufacturer?
- Brian Hepler wants to start a ski lift manufacturing business that builds exclusively double chairlifts for Midwestern mountains under the name Sno Technology.
- Skytrac built a custom Skyride in Sacramento this spring that proved extremely popular during the California State Fair.
- The Poma/Sigma-built British Airways i360 observation tower opens tomorrow.
- Whaleback completes a $100,000 capital campaign to install a West Side T-Bar this fall.
- Nicholas Clesceri, VP of Maintenance at the Palm Springs Tramway and owner of NJC Advisers talks tram maintenance, rime ice and urban ropeways.
- The initial section of the first detachable in the Caribbean will open in the first quarter of 2017.
- Check out photos and video of a four-section system with two haul ropes, glass-floor cabins and Leitner Ropeways’ first gondola aligned in the shape of a triangle, set to open this month at a nature park in Spain.
- Two mechanics were airlifted from Bogus Basin Monday after falling from the Showcase lift while performing line work. Please keep them in your thoughts.
Construction Underway on New Lifts at Big Sky
Next winter is going to be huge at Big Sky with a bubble six-pack detachable opening in The Bowl and a new triple chair replacing the legendary Challenger double. Doppelmayr is off to a solid start with terminal and tower footings going in for both lifts. Big Sky is known for its crazy steeps and rocky terrain which makes both projects challenging.
Challenger Triple
From what I can tell approximately half the old Challenger tower bases from 1988 will be re-used on the new lift. Dyer All Terrain Excavation was working on the upper section of Challenger with a spider hoe today. The only way to the top of Challenger is scrambling on foot or riding the Headwaters chair from the Moonlight side.
In His Own Words: Carl Skylling of Skytrac on the Leitner-Poma Acquisition
Last week on my way home from the Rocky Mountain Lift Association conference, I stopped by Skytrac headquarters to sit down with Carl Skylling, General Manager of the company that’s shaken up the lift-building industry in North America over the past eight years. If you hadn’t heard, Leitner-Poma bought Skytrac two weeks ago in a move that surprised many. Carl is an industry veteran who worked his way up through Garaventa CTEC, Doppelmayr CTEC and Skytrac in construction, operations and management positions. In addition to kindly agreeing to be interviewed, Carl introduced me to some of the hard-working men and women who design and build Skytrac lifts in Salt Lake City.
Peter: How did you get started with SkyTrac?
Carl: I started out with Garaventa CTEC and then got pulled into the merger with Garaventa and Doppelmayr, becoming Doppelmayr CTEC. Jan Leonard had stepped down in 2008 and by 2010 I was Vice President of Operations but getting restless to do something different.
I approached these guys with a concept I had to continue this whole idea of doing service work and modification work because I saw that there was a big niche in the market that was missing there. So I approached Dave Metivier and Alan Hepner, and about the same time Jan Leonard was also getting interested in finding a way to take care of his former customer base by supporting them with service and parts. So there was this huge potential market to make all those parts.
One thing kind of led to another between [Jan] and I approaching our partners, Dave and Alan, who were running Hilltrac and Skytrac at the time. We ended up taking this Skytrac concept to the point where, with the four of us, we realized why stop with parts? Why not do a design of our own. SkyTrac started in 2008 doing some engineering/modification work with Dave and Alan but we really, in 2010, took it to the next level.
Big News! Leitner-Poma Acquires Skytrac
Leitner-Poma acquired Skytrac this week in a deal revealed today. Even more exciting is Skytrac will continue to operate as a subsidiary brand of the Leitner-Poma Group. “We would like to welcome Skytrac to our family,” said Anton Seeber, CEO of the European parent company of both Leitner and Poma. “Like Leitner-Poma, Skytrac also will be managed autonomously and independently to make sure the Skytrac team can focus on its strengths and hone its skills, all while having access to the Group’s resources to be able to benefit from particular synergies.” Leitner and Poma have experience operating in Europe as separate brands while sharing technology such as the latest-generation LPA detachable grip.
Jan Leonard and other former CTEC employees started Skytrac in 2010 to fill a niche retrofitting older lifts and building economical fixed-grip lifts in Salt Lake City. The company has built 19 complete lift systems to date, mostly at small-to-medium sized ski areas from Washington to Massachusetts. Skytrac had its best year in 2014, building as many new lifts as both Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr that year. In addition to building complete lifts, Skytrac also specializes in outfitting older lifts with new terminals and control systems.
News Roundup: Hauling
- Doppelmayr isn’t the only one building in Bolivia. Poma is 55 percent complete with the city of Ororu’s new gondola.
- SkyTrac has a new website!
- RiverWalk at Loon Mountain will open a Doppelmayr pulse gondola crossing the Pemigewasset River in 2017.
- Lift ticket revenue was up 19 percent and skier visits +13 percent at Vail Resorts’ ten mountains in 2015-16.
- Snowbasin seeks approval to build two more high speed quads – one to replace Wildcat and the other to supplement the Strawberry Express Gondola.
- Garaventa splices and celebrates in Ha Long.
- New tram cabins arrive at Sandia Peak from CWA.
News Roundup: 115.4 mph
- Mt. Hood Meadows updates skiers on the windstorm that sent two hundred-foot hemlock trees onto the Shooting Star Express the night of November 17th.
- Vail Resorts announces $100 million in capital improvements across its mountains for 2016/17 including replacement of the last major fixed-grip lift on Vail Mountain. The new Sun Up Lift #17 will be a detachable quad, manufacturer unknown.
- SkyTrac splices the Humphrey’s Peak Quad at Arizona Snowbowl.
- The latest from Sugarloaf on the new King Pine. An apparent Doppelmayr delay will push opening until late-December. Luckily (or unluckily) there’s no snow anyways.
- Utah’s new ski resort, Cherry Peak, announces a December 21st debut with two lifts.
- Doppelmayr’s 10th 3S gondola, the Penkenbahn, is ready to go.
- A nonprofit ski area in Ontario that’s been unable to operate its quad chair since 2011 due to a 2006 Doppelmayr service bulletin hopes to crowdfund $80,000 for repairs.
- West Mountain celebrates their new lift with fireworks rather than skiing and already has the drive terminal up for another new-used lift next summer.
Summer 2015: The Good and the Bad
It’s almost November and by my count construction is wrapping up on 33 lifts across the US and Canada. With the usual caveat that there could be a lift project I haven’t heard about, 2015 will be the fourth year in a row that the total number of new lifts has declined. Nonetheless there are some encouraging trends – namely more of this summer’s lifts were (expensive) detachables and more were brand new rather than re-installations of used lifts.
Looking geographically, there’s no question the dismal snow situation last winter killed the market for lifts in the Sierras and Cascades. In a typical year, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia account for five new lifts and this year they had zero. The Rockies were a bright spot this summer, with at least one new lift being built in every Rocky Mountain state except Montana. Colorado had a particularly strong year, building five new lifts including four detachables. Utah had almost as good a year, thanks largely to Vail Resorts’ mega-project at Park City. Colorado averages 4.4 new lifts a year and Utah 3.3 and both came out ahead of those numbers this summer.
The Midwest was about average for snowfall last winter but its ski areas built just one new lift and one used lift this year. The one bright spot was Lutsen in Minnesota which spent $7 million with Doppelmayr to rebuild the Midwest’s only gondola. Looking further east, Vermont was a success story, getting three brand new lifts from both Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr. Despite averaging more than five new lifts a year, nowhere else in the Northeast invested in a new lift despite a stellar winter in 2014-15.
Canada had a tough year with only three lifts going in at Sunshine Village, Boler Mountain and Mont Cascades. In a normal construction season the country’s resorts build 7-8 new lifts. My take is newer resorts in Western Canada – places like Sun Peaks, Revelstoke and Kicking Horse – were hit particularly hard by the Great Recession and still haven’t recovered.
Pomerelle Mountain Gets a SkyTrac
SkyTrac, the new American lift builder based in Salt Lake City, is building two complete lifts this summer including one at Pomerelle Mountain near Burley, Idaho. SkyTrac seems to be gaining a following with smaller, independent resorts that need new lifts but are price-sensitive. By the end of this summer SkyTrac will have built 19 complete lifts in 12 states. Only two of those were purchased by companies that own multiple resorts (Boyne went with SkyTrac for the latest lifts at The Summit at Snoqualmie and Crystal Mountain.)
Pomerelle originally had Stearns-Roger and SLI double chairs, built in 1964 and 1975, respectively. The longer of the two was replaced by a CTEC triple in 1988 and now a SkyTrac triple will replace the shorter double chair. Work didn’t begin until late July but the SkyTrac crew has already installed most of the lift. Because of the mellow terrain, towers are being set without a helicopter and only numbers 7 and 10 are left to go up. The top terminal is finished and the bottom station just needs a motor room. I didn’t see a haul rope or chairs yet. The lift also apparently still needs a name!
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