Twenty years ago this spring, 15 resorts faced near-disaster when the high-speed lifts they spent more than $50 million to build proved to be of faulty design and had to be retrofitted or replaced just a few years later. Lift Engineering, the company founded in 1965 by Yanek Kunczynski and more commonly called Yan, entered the detachable lift market in 1986 at June Mountain, CA reportedly after just one year of development. Yan built a total of 31 detachable quads in the US and Canada between 1986 and 1994. The majority of Yan’s customers were repeat clients such as Whistler Mountain Ski Corporation, which bought three high speed quads and the Sun Valley Company, which purchased seven. Whistler’s general manager would later write to Lift Engineering describing his team as the “unwitting recipients of a research and development project.”
Frenchman’s is one of seven high speed quads on Bald Mountain built by Yan and retrofitted by Doppelmayr after accidents elsewhere. The original Yan teardrop chairs are some of the most comfortable I’ve ever ridden.Three incidents in two years sealed the fate of Yan detachables and eventually forced Lift Engineering to liquidate. On April 4, 1993, a 9-year old boy was killed and another child injured when loose bolts and a subsequent derailment caused two chairs to stack up on Sierra Ski Ranch’s Slingshot lift. The same lift had sent an empty chair to the ground two months prior when a grip failed. Lift Engineering settled a wrongful-death suit after the accident for $1.9 million. Sierra Ski Ranch’s marketing director would later state, “we found they just didn’t withstand the test of time” when the company committed $6 million to replace its three Yan detachables in 1996.
A Yan type-11 grip with marshmallow rubber springs on a bubble chair from Whistler’s Quicksilver high speed quad.On December 23rd, 1995, a routine emergency stop on the Quicksilver high speed quad at Whistler Mountain initiated a chain reaction crash of four down-bound chairs, plunging skiers 75 feet onto the Dave Murray Downhill course below. 25-year old Trevor MacDonald died at the scene, nine people were seriously injured, 200 had to be evacuated and a second guest died 12 days later. The coroner’s investigation revealed Yan’s design failed to maintain the required 15-degree lateral swing clearance over towers, causing damage to grips over time. The type-11 grips could not maintain adequate clamping force for the maximum 38-degree rope angle on Quicksilver between towers 20-21 (Quicksilver was the only lift built with Yan’s type-11 grip owing to its heavier chairs with bubbles, the rest had the type-7 grip.) On two prior occasions, empty chairs had fallen from Quicksilver’s line, including one time three weeks prior to the deadly accident and in the same location. Leading up to December 23rd, mechanics were getting grip force faults 20+ times a day and had reportedly stuffed paper into the corresponding alarm. At the time, detachable lifts were relatively new and not required to stop automatically as a result of a grip force fault.
Sugarloaf’s Lift Safety blog keeps guests informed of hiccups with the mountain’s lifts, most recently the SuperQuad, Sawduster and Double Runner East.
Snowbird will replace the four track ropes on its Garaventa Aerial Tram starting April 18th. The tram will re-open sometime in June.
11-year old boy falls from the Peak Chair at Whistler, is caught by a group of staff and guests to the cheers of onlookers.
Whistler Blackcomb is the greatest resort success story on our continent – from humble beginnings in 1966 to a resort municipality with 53,000 beds, Olympic host and the first to draw two million skiers in a season. While Whistler and Blackcomb mountains were developed independently, they are now linked by one of the most iconic ropeways ever built. Today, the mountains have a fleet of thirty lifts including seven gondolas and 14 detachable chairs over 8,200 sprawling acres. Despite being the largest ski resort in the US or Canada, W-B still gets crowded and has opportunities for continued improvement and expansion. The resort’s master plan prescribes replacing nine lifts and adding eleven more, primarily on Whistler Mountain. Many of the lifts add new out-of-base capacity with the goal of “staging” both mountains with 32,000 skiers in 2.5 hours or less.
On the Whistler side, the plan includes a major expansion to the south, creatively dubbed Whistler South. It would include an 8-passenger gondola from a new “Cheakamus” parking area and another base facility part way up. At just 2,000 feet above sea level, The lower base would have no trails to it, just the gondola to the upper base area. A second gondola would connect to here from Whistler Creekside. Trail pods above would include a beginner area and three detachable chairlifts including one in Bagel Bowl.
Whistler’s Master Plan includes removing 5 lifts and adding 14.
The Creekside base would also get a fourth gondola direct to Whistler’s Chic Pea, bypassing the Creekside Gondola/Big Red choke point. Higher up, Franz’s chair and Whistler’s two original T-bars would be replaced by a single detachable quad from the bottom of the former to the top of the latter. At the heart of Whistler Mountain, Emerald Express is slated to be swapped with a six-pack. The quad would move to a parallel alignment ending slightly higher. Talk about an increase in capacity!
If you’ve ever been in Symphony Bowl, you know the high speed quad built in 2006 serves an area larger than most ski resorts. As such, Whistler Blackcomb plans two more lifts starting at the Symphony base fanning out in opposite directions. One called Robertson’s goes towards Harmony while the other serves either Flute Peak or Flute Shoulder with a detachable four or six-passenger chair. Access to the alpine from Whistler Village stays exactly the same; the only change on this side of the mountain is replacement of Magic (a Yan triple) with a 6/8 chondola.
In any given year, about a third of ski areas’ “new lifts” are actually lifts removed from other locations that are finding a new home. There are entirewebsites dedicated to the buying and selling of second-hand ski lifts. By my count, at least 374 lifts in the US and Canada have been re-engineered and re-installed at new places, either at the same ski resort or clear across the country.
Jackson Hole’s Sweetwater lift, originally built by Yan in 1983, is in its second state and third location. Along the way it picked up some Poma chairs and Doppelmayr controls.
The ski area that has sent the most lifts to other places is, not surprisingly, Whistler-Blackcomb. Ten of its former chairlifts live on at ski areas across the US and Canada. Some resorts operate fleets of lifts pieced together entirely from other places. Big Sky Resort operates nine used lifts, many of them hand me downs from other Boyne Resorts. Removed lifts that don’t get snapped up by other ski areas often end up at amusement parks and zoos.
A single Garaventa CTEC fixed-grip quad was installed three different times at The Canyons over just five years in what I call the Raptor shuffle.
A handful of lifts have been moved multiple times. The Dreamscape lift at Park City (formerly Canyons) is in its third location on the same mountain. Originally installed by Garaventa CTEC in 1996 as the Saddleback quad, it was replaced the very next season by a detachable quad. The fixed-grip quad became Raptor, which served the runs between Super Condor Express and Golden Eagle for three seasons, after which it was removed (and still not replaced.) That same summer, Raptor went to the opposite side of the mountain to anchor a major expansion called Dreamscape. I would not be surprised to see Vail Resorts replace Dreamscape this coming summer, giving the still-not-that-old quad chair a chance at a fourth life.
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