Skilifts.org / SORT Forum

Very Smooth! Glad to see an old lift being resused. Was at Snowbird from what the article said so I did some digging on skilifts.org

Here she is while she was still in use at Snowbird...

http://www.skilifts.org/images/resort_imag...an/peruvian.htm

Public gondola planned for 2009
Wildhorse project moving forward
Steamboat Springs — The developers of Wildhorse Meadows have formalized plans to link their multi-phase residential project with the base of Steamboat Ski Area via a new gondola.

Resort Ventures West President David Hill announced last week that Wildhorse Meadows has entered into an agreement with Leitner-Poma to engineer the public gondola that will ferry passengers from the new Trailhead Lodge to an upper terminal near the ski area’s gondola building.

“The gondola will come in two phases,” Hill said. “You’ve got to design it and then final price it.”

Resort Ventures West Vice President Brent Pearson said his company has provided Leitner-Poma with a $3 million letter of credit that assures owners in the development that the gondola will be completed.

Leitner-Poma also is building the ski area’s new Christy Peak Express chairlift. The company has a manufacturing plant in Grand Junction.

Construction on the Wildhorse gondola will begin next summer, but it will not be ready to carry passengers until the beginning of the 2009-10 ski season. Completion of the gondola must be timed with the construction of another project under separate ownership because its upper terminal will be located in a public plaza that will be part of the One Steamboat Place resort-style development.

“Initially, we’ll do the bottom terminal and the towers in Wildhorse Meadows and perhaps the towers on the knoll,” across Mount Werner Circle, Hill said. “The upper terminal can’t be built until the parking structure for One Steamboat Place is built. The city has to sign off on the plaza area for the gondola to be ready.”

Construction that takes place next summer will help to ensure completion of the gondola in time for the winter of 2009-10, Hill said.

“If all we have to do (the second summer) is that upper terminal, that’s great,” he said.

When the complex process is complete, it will dramatically change the appearance of the lower ski base, with groups of enclosed gondola cars rising out of a new resort village and spanning a public street on their way to the lifts that take skiers to the slopes.

“It’s a public lift,” Hill said. “But it will not handle the (passengers generated by) the whole Meadows Parking Lot. It’s not designed for that.”

Hill said ski area surveys reflect that the skiing public enjoys the convenience of having its shuttles meet them at their car in the parking lot. Members of the general public on foot in the Wildhorse plaza, or pedestrians wishing to travel to the lower ski base, are welcome to ride the gondola.

The new Wildhorse gondola will be distinctly different from the ski area’s gondola, which features cabins that detach from the haul cable as they come through the terminals.

Wildhorse’s “fixed-grip pulse gondola” will have four groups of three cabins, each cabin accommodating six people. Each group of three cabins will leave the terminals in a pulse and then slow down upon arriving at the next terminal. The two groups of cabins at the midway point when others reach the terminal also will slow down because they are fixed to the haul cable.

The gondola will travel at 1,000 feet per minute and produce trip times of about 4 minutes, 30 seconds, Hill said. A detachable gondola might make the same trip in 2 minutes, 30 seconds, he added.

Sounds like Doppelmayr got the new Gondola deal at Keystone... they are buying back the Von Roll as well..or something to that effect.

LuvPow, on Oct 12 2007, 09:43 PM, said:

Weird, last I heard it was going to be rebuilt and mostly reused as a transportation lift at the base.

It will be interesting to see what is done with the capacity and what design the new one will be.
This post has been edited by poloxskier: 13 October 2007 - 06:54 PM

I predict that it will be like Beaver Creek's gondolas, a Uni-G from Europe. The only gondola that D-CTEC has built as a Uni-GS was in Texas.

The Outpost gondola is going to be used as the transportation lift.

My guess is that the bottom terminal will be designed to fit in with Keystone's current village theme (mining) and a new top terminal building will replace the current Lift Engineering one.

The theming of the base seems to fit but the area where the new gondola will start is still the original River Run theme so it will be interesting how they expand the theme to that area because it is starting to be redeveloped.

The original plan that was floating arround the mountain last year was to use the river run gondola rebuilt into one that would connect the bases as well as some parking and use Outpost to connect the Keystone lodge to the Mountain House base area. Which would probably leave alot of parts left over though.

I will be back at work next week and will ask arround and see what I am able to find out about the new instalation.
This post has been edited by poloxskier: 13 October 2007 - 11:08 PM

poloxskier, on Oct 14 2007, 12:07 AM, said:

I heard that the Outpost is staying put right were its at... this summer from a LM there.

Hmmm. Anybody have an update about the possible HSQ at arapahoe basin?

Has that plan been shelved?

Schweitzer plans to install two new chairlifts, although no time frame has been given.

Schweitzer has decided to relocate its current day use parking lot further down the mountain and develop the lot for ski in ski out homes. To shuttle people to the mountain, two new chairlifts will be installed. One chairlift will lead to the village while the other will take skiers to the top of the mountain.

http://www.bonnercountydailybee.com/articl...news/news02.txt

I think the proposed lift that will take skiers to the top of the mountain is a bad idea. The cost for this project far exceed the benefit and this lift will only experience peak periods during the morning. The idea of having a chairlift link the parking lot with the village is also another bad idea. A better solution is to install a gondola since it's far more convenient to transport people this way, especially when people have to take a lot of items to the lodge with them and have young children to watch after.

coloradoskier, on Oct 14 2007, 11:53 AM, said:

Last I heard is the Exhibition lift was due to be replaced with a HSQ and the base terminal moved over to create more parking. Doesn't seem like there would be room for many more spaces but I'm not sure exactly what they had in mind. I'm fairly sure the new HSQ would terminate in the same location as the current triple. Extending it to the top of Norway with a midpoint at mid mountain was just an idea I thought would be nice but it has never been proposed by those in Charge as far as I know. Not sure what the timing is on the new Exhibition, however, does anyone else know??

I wonder if they'll try and have it done for the October race when they replace it.

boardski, on Oct 14 2007, 05:32 PM, said:

I had heard that aproval was granted but according to the Summit Daily News it is still at least 2 years off. I havent heard any thing directly from the Basin though.

boardski, on Oct 14 2007, 07:32 PM, said:

From Arapahoe Basin's development plan submitted to the forest service.

"Replace the existing Exhibition lift (fixed-grip triple) with a high speed detachable quad chair accommodating 2,60 people per
hour in a slightly modified alignment. Create an additional 231 parking spaces by widening and re-grading the Lower Overflow Lot and the High Noon Lot, bringing total parking capacity at A-Basin's five lots to 1,781 vehicles."

poloxskier, on Oct 14 2007, 10:56 PM, said:

Do you have a link to the article?

the cheyenne mtn zoo in colorado springs is getting some flavor of a chairlift for sightseeing. its scheduled to go in next summer

coloradoskier, on Oct 15 2007, 01:45 PM, said:

I'll look for it but I originaly read it in print.

it will be a fixed grip quad, according to their proposal to the tramway board

Durango Mountain Resort wants to start on its 10 year expansion plan with the installation of 12 new lifts. However, I'm not sure when this project is slated to begin. A few years ago, it mentioned that it would replace Chair 4 with a HSQ in two years, but that hasn't happened yet.

I wonder if Doppelmayr CTEC is buying the River Run Gondola for the Lift Odgen project to link the town with Snowbasin?