- Another of Ascutney Mountain’s old lifts is headed for Pats Peak.
- A local firm will conduct a feasibility study for an urban gondola across the Hudson River in Albany, NY.
- The 11th International Ropeway Congress will be held in Italy next June.
- Work might begin at The Balsams this Fall.
- Signs of life with lift maintenance ongoing at Saddleback.
- Check out these sweet photos of the big new 3S that turns at Mayrhofner Bergbahnen.
- Doppelmayr will build at least four new D-Line lifts in Europe this summer.
- SAM looks at resorts formalizing training for lift mechanics.
- Grouse Mountain will launch the Skyride Surf Adventure™ on Friday (yes, they trademarked the name.)
Urban Gondolas
News Roundup: New in New Zealand
- Whistler Blackcomb Foundation raises $221,000 at 5-course charity dinner aboard the Peak 2 Peak Gondola complete with in-cabin chandeliers.
- Mt. Baldy, BC gets a new owner and plans to re-open next season.
- Powderhorn says its big new lift boosted visits.
- Poma will build a 3-stage urban gondola in the Moroccan port city of Tangier.
- The latest plan for Aspen Mountain’s 1A envisions a bubble quad chair and possibly a platter lift.
- Whaleback, NH buys the old Hall T-Bar from Plattekill, NY for its West Side Project.
- Poma leads a group of French companies on a trip to Iran promoting mountain development.
News Roundup: Vail Effect
- The state of Utah hosted 4.5 million skier visits last season, a new record credited in part to the “Vail effect” and six new lifts.
- The Boston Globe autopsies New England’s nightmare season.
- Bloomberg Businessweek talks urban ropeway growth with Doppelmayr and Poma, so does The Wall Street Journal.
- Snowbird’s tram track cable replacement project is finished a week early.
- Disneyland will demolish historic VonRoll Skyway terminal to make way for Star Wars Land.
- Fatzer finishes six 27,000 foot ropes for the world’s longest 3S, set to open in 2017 in the Gulf of Thailand.
- Powdr buys Eldora.
- Jay Peak works on a plan to get its grounded tram running sometime this summer.
See How CWA Builds Gondola Cabins in Switzerland
Cesar Dockweiler is the General Manager for Mi Teleferico, the growing state-owned gondola network in Bolivia’s capitol city. This week, he’s in Switzerland visiting suppliers working on the Blue and White lines for La Paz, which are about 75 percent complete. Throughout the trip, Mr. Dockweiler has been tweeting updates from CWA and Fatzer to his more than 3,000 followers.
Pictures from CWA show how workers still make gondola cabins one at a time and largely by hand. Because the company builds on demand, even a lift with just four cabins can have its own custom design.
Mi Teleférico to Add 9th Gondola Line in La Paz
The world’s largest gondola-based public transit network, Mi Teleférico “My Cable,” announced on social media this week it has ordered a 9th gondola from Doppelmayr for delivery in 2019. The Linea Plateada (Silver Line) will connect the existing Yellow/Red and under construction Purple/Blue lines in Bolivia’s capitol city of La Paz. When complete, it will connect nine separate lines and 42 miles of cable together for the first time.
The brainchild of President Evo Morales, Bolivia went all-in on gondolas in 2012, ordering three lines (with 4 haul ropes, 11 stations and 450 cabins) for phase one. The experiment proved wildly successful, offering safe, clean and reliable transport to the masses in La Paz and neighboring El Alto. Less than two months after the first gondola opened, President Morales announced construction of five additional lines on July 1, 2015.
Not many public transit systems are as revered as this one, which has more than 160,000 likes on Facebook (the largest subway system in the world, New York’s MTA, has just 50,000.) Mi Teleférico’s slogan is Uniting Our Lives and it serves more than 100,000 passengers every weekday. For 40 cents a trip, riders even get free wi-fi.
News Roundup: Rope Evac at Big Sky
- I’ve ridden lifts thousands of times and last Friday at Big Sky was the first time I never made it to the top of one. A part in the gearbox on Challenger failed around noon with myself among 120 or so riders on line. Big Sky Ski Patrol did an awesome job getting everybody down safely in about an hour. Challenger is a reconditioned Riblet double built for Big Sky by Superior Tramway in 1988. Three days after this incident, it’s still down. This particular lift saw significant downtime last season due to a broken bearing.
- The Forest Service seeks comments on Arapahoe Basin’s latest master plan. It includes a fixed-grip triple or quad chair serving the Beavers expansion, a Zuma access surface lift, replacements for Pallavicini/Molly Hogan and removal of Norway.
- The Gondola Project asserts that cities now account for one in five gondolas and tramways built worldwide.
- The first new lift for the 2018 Winter Olympics, an 8-passenger gondola, opens in South Korea after months of delays. Two more detachable quads will be added this summer at the Jeongseon Alpine Center, which is hosting the Downhill and Super-G.
- The New York Times confirms North Korea’s Masik Pass ski resort got a Doppelmayr 4-passenger gondola this summer. It’s not new; according to Doppelmayr it came from Ischgl, Austria via a broker called Pro-Alpin who sold it to the Chinese. The gondola is in addition to the four counterfeit Doppelmayr lifts that appeared to be brand new in 2014.
Subway in the Sky
There is a ropeway revolution going on in the Bolivian city of La Paz. Last month, Doppelmayr won the largest lift construction contract in history to expand the region’s urban gondola network. The government of Bolivia will pay $450 million for six new 10-passenger gondolas. To put it in perspective, Doppelmayr’s total revenue last year was $915 million. The company says 80% its business still comes from building lifts at ski resorts but that seems poised to change with La Paz as an urban ropeway success story.
La Paz already has three Doppelmayr gondolas that opened last year. They have already carried more than 16 million people. Each line operates 17 hours per day and a ride costs less than fifty cents US. There are 11 Uni-G terminals where passengers load and unload. The only major incident happened when a eucalyptus tree fell on the yellow line back in February, causing a deropement and rope evacuation.
Phase II of the system will add 6 lines and 23 terminals between 2017 and 2019. Once completed, the network will include 19 miles of gondolas spread across 9 haul ropes. There will be a total of 34 stations and a ridiculous 1,350 CWA 10-passenger Omega cabins.
There are plenty of examples of urban ropeways scattered around the world, but no other city has gone all in on gondolas like La Paz. It will be interesting to see if any American cities follow their example.
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