18 replies to this topic

[Eric]

What is the windiest lift that you ever rode ???

I think , for me, it 's the Green Mountain Flyer at Jay Peak :help: It's not fun to be blown by the wind espacially at -30 C and lower. You feel to jump of the chair

Question ? Is this lift @ Mt. Bachelor windy ?

Attached File(s)

•  topterminal2.jpg (52.04K)
  Number of downloads: 36

[SkiBachelor]

Yea that lift is so windy that it's hardly ever open. When it was a HST, they would always run it seemed like. That has to be the windiest lift I have ever road.

[Skidude]

Chair 23 at Mammoth can be very windy.

[floridaskier]

The top of DV's Wasatch lift on windy days can be pretty bad, even on a calm day.

[iceberg210]

NO doubt

Sugarloaf @Alta

i like no bars but this one goes high, fast and windy.

And without a bar most people hate it

[Dr Frankenstein]

The Lowell Thomas @ Tremblant is windy!

[KZ]

Well of course it is the Funitel at Squaw. We experienced over 100 MPH headwinds last april. The funitel is built for strong crosswinds, but it cant really take the headwinds. Once we were at the top. I had to "Duck and Cover" for about 5 minutes. My dad was taking his sweet time. In the 5 minutes i was pounded, a nice pile of snow had built up around me. Other windy lifts are Cornice Express at Kirkwood and Chair 4 at Kirkwood.

[Allan]

Motherlode at Red! When I used to be an operator - I had a chair get blown so far sideways (with a person on it!) when she came into the terminal, the chair bounced off the terminal structure.

[edmontonguy]

Paradise @ Marmot this lift bet some severe headwinds over the ridge it sits on. Many days the operators have to pull people out of their chairs at the top

[hyak.net]

The double chairs at White Pass. They would ocassionally shut the lifts down due to high wind and swinging chairs but the HSQ they installed a bit below the ridge to avoid much of the wind (smart idea). Those 2 lifts (now only 1) are the only ones I've ever rode with wind issues.

This post has been edited by hyak.net: 16 January 2004 - 09:21 AM

[Kicking Horse]

Timberline @ Winter Park
Outpost @ keystone
Pioneer Express @ Winter Park

Are the three most windest chairs that i ahve been on that i can remember

[liftmech]

Summit Express (Bachelor); Old C-1,2 (White Pass- agreed, Jack); S-lift and Storm King (Copper); Chair 9 (Loveland). For some reason Baker never really has wind problems; on the rare occasions when it does, it affects the whole mountain and not just one lift. I recall having to shut the entire mountain down save C-5 one year during the Legendary Banked Slalom- it was so windy that you couldn't even unload off the beginner chair. We had contestants walk into the base of C-5 in order to get their preliminary run in.

[zekt]

Okay, tales of woe time. There is an o-so-small resort in Australia called Charlotte Pass. They decided to run a lift in (back in the 50's) from the main road. The lift when up onto the range where it terminated. There was a second lift across the top of the plateau and down into the resort. Each chair was encased in a fibreglass shield as it was cold across the plateau and the total time on chair for the whole thing was close to
20 minutes.

The season they installed the lift, it ran about 20 days due to parts of it getting buried in drifts near the top of the range (there is another photo of another lift in the Chalet at Charlotte pass with the top station of the current lift there buried in a drift so deep that you see the haul rope going into the cornice 3 feet below the top of the cornice. The unload station is 6 feet of the ground). Anyway back to the main story.

I have seen photos of the lift which ran from the road to the resort with these chairs are 90 degrees to the ground (ie: they were blown sideways on the haul rope). I had a look at the line of the old chair lift when I was up there. Near the footings of where the last lift tower stood there is a broken chair with a grip that had been twisted and snapped and a frayed piece of haul rope (looks like the haul rope is still on the ground).

For the short time it ran, I reckon this lift would have qualified on the windy lift list. Having said that, there are plenty of other windy lifts down here as well... mainly cause most of our resorts sit in the top 400 vertical meters of the mountains - and are on the very highest hills so they get hit by bad weather from all directions.

[bramat]

Skyline Express at Stevens Pass. Being pelted at the upper third of the lift is a given even on calm days, and on windy days, pure misery. And Skyline was installed with a little more wind protection than its predecessor Barrier.

[ccslider]

What kind of mitigation measures work the best to lessen wind impacts to lift operations on windy days?

At Telluride, the Gold hill Dopplemayr HS quad was designed with slatted chair backrests to minimize the sail area - seems to work fairly well.

[Dawson]

Our summit quad fixed grip, not normally in a windy location had chairs doing laps of the cable going back a few years. The lift, needless to say was not spinning at the time, and damage was sustained!

[ccslider]

I've heard stories about a new lift somewhere where a chair was parked in the eddyline of the wind blowing past the top terminal operator bldg causing the chair to oscillate in an elliptical path - into the lee and then back out into the wind - and this continual action caused the haul rope wires to wear against each other eventually resulting in a rope failure!

[Allan]

That was in the Doppelmayr Conceptual Inputs book, I read it too! Very scary!

[Dr Frankenstein]

Me too.