10 replies to this topic

[SidBurn]

The most obvious and desirable option is for Jackson Hole to get a new tram. While it would please most people, it is the most expensive option and the new tram will never be the icon that the old one was.

Another option I thought of was for them to install a funitel like Squaw's in the tram's place, since an ordinary gondola wouldn't be able to handle the high winds and cliffs that it would have to go over. That would also be expensive, but probably cheaper than a new tram.

They could also replace the tram with a series of lifts, or nothing at all, which would be cheaper but would disappoint everyone.

Finally, JH could also install a funifor, which is to a tram what a funitel is to a gondola - a tram that runs on 2 cables. However, this would probably be the most expensive option of all, but hey, it's just an idea.

What do you think?

[Peter]

Funifors and Funitels are too expensive. Gondolas are too vulnerable for wind hold. I am sure that a new tram will be built within the next few years. JH has said this is the most likely possibility.

The latest from their site

"We are moving forward on our tram replacement plans. Discussions with two lift manufacturers will render us with a couple of complete scenarios for review. We are focused on either a tram or a bi-cable gondola, both on a similar alignment to the existing tram. The financing of either project is being discussed internally. We have decided at this time to not concentrate our efforts on outright appropriation but instead are researching other public and private financing mechanisms. "

This post has been edited by Skier: 07 March 2006 - 04:13 PM

[SidBurn]

Skier, on Mar 7 2006, 05:12 PM, said:

Funifors and Funitels are too expensive. Gondolas are too vulnerable for wind hold. I am sure that a new tram will be built within the next few years. JH has said this is the most likely possibility.

The latest from their site

"We are moving forward on our tram replacement plans. Discussions with two lift manufacturers will render us with a couple of complete scenarios for review. We are focused on either a tram or a bi-cable gondola, both on a similar alignment to the existing tram. The financing of either project is being discussed internally. We have decided at this time to not concentrate our efforts on outright appropriation but instead are researching other public and private financing mechanisms. "

"bicable gondola" aka funitel. So a funitel may be one of their options

[floridaskier]

Bicable gondolas are different from funitels. On a bicable gondola, there are two cables, one on top of the other, and one is a track rope, while the other one pulls the cabin. A funitel is different: it also has two cables, but they're spaced the width of the cabin apart, and the cabin is attached with four detachable grips. http://www.lift-world.info probably has more, since both types are more common in Europe

[Carl]

I believe JH has realized that any sort of high capacity lift access to the summit will totally ruin the "JH Experience". Moguls ain't welcome above 10,000 feet!
Temporary solution will be a double chair up Rendezvous Bowl, skier's left side.

Tram seems to be paramount on the list. I have strong faith the proper decision will be made and made soon.

Carl

[Peter]

Even a normal double chairlift is double the capacity of the current tram. Tram Capacity is 600, Double 1200

[poloxskier]

The double would be nice so theres still lift access to the summit but they should use spacing like silvertons so that they limit numbers on the summit. I am hoping that on my trek to Alaska this summer to make it by JH and get lots of pics and ride the old girl one last time.

[Carl]

Yup, your arithmetic is good. We had a Poma platter lift in the Bowl several years ago and it was referred to as "The Bump Machine". A few hours of operation and the Bowl was reduced to a trashed out mogul run. Yuck. Skiers could actually huck Corbetts and cut high and right and traverse back out of Ten Sleep and cut across the bottom of Rendezvous Bowl and get to the base of the lift and do it again! So, Corbetts was totally trashed all the time, too.

Completion of a new Tram installation will be accompanied by a relocation of the R-Bowl double chair to another place on the mountain, i.e. Headwall or Crags have both been mentioned.

All this info is what's been heard lately. No final decisions have come down the pike.

Carl

[vons]

I was in JH from sat through today and picked up a paper that provided more info on the tram and why it is being replaced. The article said it was an issue with the track ropes. In a tech article connected to the main article about the trams replacement it said that the saftey factor on the track ropes is 3.3. This seems kinda low I know in colorado the saftey factor for chairlifts and gondolas is mandated to be in the high 4s nearly 5. So I am gessing that JH discoverd that if they replaced the ropes they would have to use a stronger and thus hevier rope requiering them upgrad the lift to accomidate this.
The article stated that JH is looking into a bi-cable gondola or a tram and that they are persuing private financing for it. The old tram will be standing next winter and will be used by Ski Patrole and if a replacement is a go by next year it will be used by who ever gets to build the new tram for a supply lift and construction cableway.

[Carl]

Here's an article that appeared very recently in the local paper.

By Angus M. Thuermer Jr. JH News and Guide

For 40 years it has been the flagship of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, a mechanical wonder that whisks skiers, snowboarders and gapers over dizzying cliffs to the summit of 10,450-foot Rendezvous Mountain.

The Jackson Hole Aerial Tram has become an icon of Jackson Hole, a celebrated symbol for Wyoming, the Rockies and North American skiing itself. As it approaches its scheduled last public ride for skiers on Sunday, thousands of tram fans will recall a history as colorful as its cardinal red cars, painted in the hue of ski corporation co-founder Paul McCollister’s alma mater, Stanford.

In a wide-ranging interview this week, Mountain Resort President Jerry Blann said the company is committed to finding a replacement that will ferry skiers and snowboarders from base to summit in one trip, but can’t finance such a project with conventional bank loans. At the same time, he discounted the possibility the resort would seek a corporate sponsor to carry its logo on the new lift, and said the existing tram would never run as an exclusive ride for high-paying, guided clients.

At its scheduled public retirement at the end of this summer, the 52-passenger cars will have carried an estimated 9.1 million people and will have traveled the equivalent of 144 times around the globe – 3.6 million miles. That amounts to some 9,000 cycles a year along 12,675 feet of track and up a rise Canadian designer Robert McLellan wrote is “about 4,105 feet.”

Oh, glorious tram. A couple was married on it. A jester tried, unsuccessfully, to walk one of its cables circus style with a balancing pole.

Three times its passengers have been evacuated by ropes. The haul cable has flipped out of its track and hit the ground. It’s been struck by lightning and once ran into a backhoe.

Two men died in its construction. One mechanic fell to his death from its roof. And even though the doors of one packed car opened mid-ride over terrain that McLellan characterized as “fairly precipitous,” the tram has transported its cargo with a perfect safety record.

So memories of it will be largely sweet, though its users are mourning its passing. “People are passionate about that piece of machinery,” said Blann, who has endured criticism for announcing its decommissioning without a replacement plan. “At the end of the day you don’t get more than 40 years from a tram,” he said. Safety remains first and foremost for the resort, he said.

Now, a replacement is the resort’s number-one priority, he told a group of Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce members last week. Whether the new machine will be another tram, or a gondola with 15-passenger cars, will be decided no later than the middle of summer, Blann said. A temporary chairlift up Rendezvous Bowl will provide access for now.

One thing is certain, Blann said in an interview last week; the Mountain Resort won’t finance the new summit lift through conventional loans, such as the one that secured $18 million from Jackson State Bank & Trust recently for expansion by Grand Targhee Resort.

“We put a fair amount of debt on this resort,” Blann said. “The Kemmerer family has reached into their pockets to the tune of $18 million,” he said of investments made since they bought the company in 1992. Company investments bring that upgrade to $56 million, he said.

Conventional financing “would break the back of the company,” Blann said. “We’re going to have to find alternatives to that.”

Unseen circumstances

Blann dismissed the notion that the company, which like most others seeks to leverage its investments rather than salt away revenue for a rainy day, should have saved up for a new tram. “We didn’t know until June the ultimate decision would be to replace the tram,” he said.

The resort has a five-year rolling capital plan, which usually includes $100,000 a year for tram maintenance and upgrades. Handling a cable replacement or similar job was envisioned. Replacing the whole lift was not.

“This one came up relatively fast,” Blann said. “We didn’t know the long-term ramifications of the tram.”

Regarding money: “There was none to salt away,” he said.

Resort board members, owners and management are not enamored with the possibility of a Chevy Tram, Pepsi Tram, or one bearing the moniker of some other business, Blann said.

At Canada’s Whistler resort, owners are confident they can obtain 65 to 75 percent of the cost of a new gondola “through some sort of sponsorship where it looks like a Visa card or something like that,” Blann said. The Forest Service would likely not allow such outdoor advertising here, although some ads might be possible inside. In both instances, however, “too much commercial is just not in keeping with what we want to do,” Blann said.

Asked whether he has talked to potential corporate partners, Blann said: “We have not. At this point it’s not our preferred alternative.”

The resort is not necessarily interested in new investors, either, Blann has said. And as the prospect of public money being infused into the project recedes, Blann repeated statements about such a trade-off. “With public grants comes public ownership,” he said, another restraint the company would rather do without.

Today, Blann is uncertain whether the tram will run next winter for ski patrol, whose members joke that they’re going to paint a big white cross on the sides of the cars. The tram could be useful to ferry supplies to the summit of Rendezvous Mountain for the replacement construction. The new tram or gondola is expected to be open by the winter of 2008-09, Blann said, and would follow existing alignment and easements.

Meantime, the existing tram will not be rented out to the highest bidder or become the exclusive domain of high-paying ski school clients or guided parties, Blann said.

“I will rule that out right now,” he said. “That sends the wrong message. It is something this company should not be doing.”

It was routine inquiries into the health of the four, 1 3/4-inch-thick track cables, which span the 2 1/2 miles from the valley station to the summit, that led the Mountain Resort to decide to retire the tram. “We evaluate them every spring and fall,” Blann said. Most recent inspections reveal “there are potential [safety] code issues with that,” he said.

Replacing track cables would cost $1.5 million, Blann said. That prospect led to further inquiries and studies that spanned 18 months and probed “every element, component of the tram,” he said. Examinations followed on the haul rope, the gear box, safety systems, the towers.

Blann and mountain manager Tom Spangler denied that there are any problems, other than cosmetic, to foundations of any of the five towers. “There’s no report that there’s a foundation problem,” Blann said. Towers, too, are generally OK. “They really found they were in pretty good shape,” he said.

The annual $100,000 Blann said is routinely spent on tram maintenance and improvements would grow in coming years until it totaled about 70 percent of a new lift, the in-depth analysis revealed. The company has refused to release its engineering reports.

‘Prudent thing to do’

“There wasn’t one particular thing,” Blann said about the decision to retire the tram. “Our engineers are advising us that’s the prudent thing to do. Price was what made us look at alternatives of a new lift/gondola,” Blann told Chamber members last week.

The corporation also understands the symbolism of the tram and the desire for a non-stop ride to reach the summit of the mountain, he said. Consequently, most of the 20 alternatives for new lifts the company had considered were abandoned, many because they “didn’t serve the public and the icon.”

Justifying a new lift, particularly a replacement tram that would carry only 5 to 6 percent of the resort’s uphill capacity, is difficult financially, Blann said.

In 1974, McLellan characterized the machine – with a 63-passenger car – as “an aerial tramway of exceptional size.” He calculated a capacity of 375 skiers an hour if the tram traveled at 17 miles an hour, the top speed allowed by safety codes. That’s an 8 1/2-minute ride, one the engineer said could be cut to 6 minutes, 20 seconds if the Forest Service allowed the tram to reach its potential, which he envisioned to be about 23 mph.

Such fast cycles never happened, however, and the tram has actually run slower. Today, the tram makes the trip to the summit in 12 minutes, traveling about 12 mph.

More room for ‘cattle’

In 1989, the Ski Corp. opted to provide more room for its passengers, who would moo like cattle as they were compressed into the original tram cars. Workers hung new cabins, each with an additional 20 square feet of room, but the same passenger capacity. In 1995, with the comfort of customers in mind, cabin capacity was reduced to 55 people, in part to accommodate skiers carrying packs. Today, the cars carry 52 passengers, delivering 270 skiers and snowboarders an hour to the summit, a dinosaur’s pace compared to contemporary ski lifts.

Among considerations that are not lost on the company, Blann says, are how much traffic Rendezvous Bowl can take and the symbolism of an aerial tramway. There’s no grooming machine that can cover the length of Rendezvous Bowl today, Blann said, so dumping an unlimited number at its top would be misguided. Three-quarters of out-of-bounds skiers who ride the tram ski the bowl first, he said.

Considering such arguments, the utility of a tram as a ski lift is limited. “Arguably, it’s more important in the summer,” Blann said. A gondola might deliver twice the number of skiers an hour to the top, but would be handicapped in high winds. Even a bi-cable gondola being considered, which is more stable in wind than other designs, would be at a disadvantage simply because of the light weight of the cars.

Regarding a new tram, “We wouldn’t even be considering it if it weren’t the icon factor,” Blann said. What is the market value of such a machine? “The economic return is hard to calculate,” he said.

“Its a difficult one to deal with, given the financial commitment,” Blann said of a new tram. “The board looks at it [as] very important.” The looming question: “How do we make this work?”

Tram history

The tram was constructed under the direction of Paul McCollister, co-founder of the resort with Alex Morley and Gordon Graham. Strapped for financing, the group obtained a federal loan for development of depressed communities, and scraped their way through the bankruptcy of the first construction company to the tram’s completion.

McCollister, who died in 1999, had a well-known capacity to limit his costs. Blann said there’s no indication, however, of construction shortcuts, shoddy design or substandard work that has led to faster than normal deterioration.

“There’s nothing to indicate there was anything skimped on the construction side,” Blann said.

Asked if the Kemmerer family bought a pig in a poke, Blann said: “Not exactly, but there were a lot of things found post-acquistion. The Kemmerers, they did the due diligence. Did they find other things? Absolutely.”

Ground breaking for the tram occurred on April 2, 1964, although it took several days to reach dirt through the thick snowpack. Workers finished July 19, 1966, and opened on the 31st of that month, after McLellan, McCollister and other owners made the inaugural ride.

“I was on the first trip when the first car was pulled up with a winch,” McLellan said in an interview 15 years ago. “We were sitting up on the carriage. It’s exciting, mind you. It’s really a stimulating thing.”

Said Blann, “There’s a commitment on behalf of the board and the Kemmerers to find a solution here.”

[Peter]

"At Canada’s Whistler resort, owners are confident they can obtain 65 to 75 percent of the cost of a new gondola “through some sort of sponsorship where it looks like a Visa card or something like that,”