4 replies to this topic

[jkl]

Well, i'm on a committee to explore installing a community ski hill and am not sure where to start.
It's on a new site so we're thinking dealing with the US Forest Service will be the biggest challenge.
We'd like to have a preliminary meeting with them to see what their stomach is for it so we're hoping
to have a few more details. Our biggest question is number of towers per running length and height,
what ground disturbance activity is involved, installation methods, etc...

So any help would be appreciated on where to get started.

Our site:

1,120 meters running length

220 meters elevation gain

or

1,940 meters running length

400 meters elevation gain

[Lift Kid]

Hello and welcome to the forums!

First off, it's pretty difficult to tell you a precise formula to determine where a tower goes per unit of length. Tower placement is really based more on the slope shape and many other elements. You need to know what kind of a lift you want, what kind of support the live and dead loads need, and other things like that. I would contact an engineer, perhaps with some ski lift experience to help you out.

As for installation, lift towers have a concrete footing poured into the ground. The depth of the footing is determined by multiple factors such as tower load. Usually a back-hoe or spider-hoe is used to dig the footings. The towers, depending on their height and weight, can be installed by front end loaders, cranes, and if there is limited access for other machinery, helicopters are often used.

If you are looking for a ski lift manufacturer to install your lift, you could contact them to see if they have some input to offer.

Just curious, what kind of lift are you considering?

[jkl]

Thanks! I think right now we are open to anything. I think we want to start as simple as possible so if we look into a lift fixed grip double for sure. For the sites we are looking at a rope tow or t-bar would probably work. I would imagine these are much easier to install and have less of an environmental impact and an easier permitting process. Any ideas on where to start researching the installation of these?

[Peter]

Elko, NV put in a double chair in 1998. http://www.elkorose.com/snowbowl.html You might want to contact them and see who installed their used lift.

[iceberg210]

Depending where you're at there are many companies that do ski lift installations including...

Mad River Lifts
Outback
Superior Tramway (I'm not sure whether they still do relocations or not)

I've been in the same position of studying the possibility of starting a community resort. There were two big issues that especially made life difficult for our business plan.

1. If you are on public land you may have to do a NEPA study on the property. These can be incredibly expensive and time consuming. It got to the point for us that we ended up looking at an entirely different location just to get out of having to do one of these studies (this was about 4 years ago or so and the estimate we got on one section of land was about 1.2 million for the NEPA and environmental impact studies (now granted this was a fairly large bowl 4000 ft deep, 1200 ft high but still)).

2. Demand, demand demand. If you can't get enough demand you won't be able to fund your resort or keep the doors open. There's a long list of resorts that started, had good terrain, good lifts, good runs, good snow, good everything but the demand just wasn't there. The best and most important advice I can give is be very careful on how you are both calculating and modeling demand in any and all places in your business plan that it is relevant to. We found that although the price for starting a resort wasn't incredibly expensive, and we could run it for fairly cheap, there simply wasn't near enough demand for it to work out.

Glad you could join the site and you'll find tons of information from tons of different people here, just ask away and they will answer. Hope this information helps and I'd be happy to help out with any other questions you might have.