Today they've opened everything BUT:

The Drop, Easy Does it, Fire Road, and Upper Silver Streak.

They're making terrain features on Lower Dew Drop, so right now it's closed.

Major Snow in the forecast for Sunday. The new glades might skiable by then if our luck holds. I won't be there but I have a friend staying at my place this weekend who will be most happy. I hope he gets snowed in--he deserves it.

[This message has been edited by johnfmh (edited 01-23-2004).]

Your friend will be sking in 5" of new powder sat morn!

make that 8"!!!This is the amount timberline has just posted in thier snow report..the snowbunny from utah went to the shoe which recieved 4" & 7springs at 5" not bad

A resort I vistited in Slovakia (Vratna) just posted a notice about replacing one of its chairs. The cost is $5.45 million. This chair will cover a 2400 foot vertical--pretty impressive.

I'd imagine that a similar new, high-speed, detachable at T-line would cost less than $5.45 mill because of the smaller vertical--hence fewer towers, cables, and chairs. Still, it would be a costly upgrade.

The cost I've heard the most for high speed detachable quads is about 2-2.5 million. Most recent quote comes from Solitude Utah, where both new high speed quads that they are possibly thinking of installing would be in the 2 1/4 range.

Roger:

I wonder what the vertical is on the new Solitude lift? It occurred to me that more vertical requires more horsepower--hence a bigger, presumably more expensive engine.

Doppelmayer manufactures lifts in Slovakia, so there's no export duties involved. $5.45 million must be the going rate for a 2400 foot vertical, high-speed, detachable.

The old chair, built in 1930, was very interesting. It swept you up in a sideward position, looking away from the towers. I've never before taken such a lift. I road it in May of 2000 and there was still some snow on top of Mount Chleb. There was also one, lonely ski alpinist getting his last turns in for the season on the 300 meter snow slab.

The Vratna ski area, btw, was featured in the movie, BEHIND ENEMY LINES. The movie was horrible but the footage of Vratna was pretty cool.

[This message has been edited by johnfmh (edited 01-24-2004).]

One of the lifts would be 1800 feet vertical, the other would be about 700 feet. A third that I knew of installed back in the early nineties clocked in between one and two million and ran 1000 vert (prices are up since then). The length might have something to do with the price; I suppose we could shuffle over to a chairlift makers web page (Dopplemayer perhaps?) and ask them if we really wanted to know.

Behind Enemy Lines wasn't terrible if you watched it at the right time! I saw it in Seattle shortly after 9/11 and the theater erupted in applause. Seattlers aren't the most patriotic people I've ever met so BEL has a soft spot in my heart, even if that wasn't the main reason the crowd was cheering.

I saw "Behind Enemy Lines" on a plane ride out to Mount Hood several years ago. I didn't really notice how good/bad it was, because I was excited... I WAS GOING TO HOOD!

But I did love the part where the pair is strolling through the woods and one steps on the landmine, the other says, "Goodbye" and walks away. 5 seconds later you hear a distant explosion.

The press releases last year for the new fixed grip quad out of honeycomb listed the total project cost at $1.2M. It is 1350 feet long with a 725 ft vertical rise. However, they did almost all of the work by helicopter so as to minimize impacts in the canyon. Here is one of the press releases:

http://www.skisolitude.com/downloads/HC.pdf

I, for one, think a very similar lift (although it would be nice to have a safety bar - I was very surprised they didn't include one on the Solitude lift) is exactly what TL needs. But I also think you could do a similar project for a good deal less because a) you wouldn't need to cut a new path, and b) Ground equipment could easily for used for pouring the footing, moving in the towers, etc.... Some of this savings would be offset, of course, by the need to dismantle an old lift, and the need for probably 2 more towers.

So, if you had 2M to spend, you could do the lift for 1.2, put 600K into snowmaking equipment, and still have 200K left over to put a poma in for the new terrain park and expand and pave the parking lots! You'd need to do that to handle the additional revenue producing crowds.

SBA loans, economic development funds...there is normally money available for this type of project, but I guess if there are multiple bankruptcy cases in the past, all normal bets are off.

(I wish I had a few million to give it a go....)

Of course, I've seen some posts here that suggest that if there isn't at least 1000' vertical, the skiing **can't** be worth anything..... I like to take them down into Honeycomb from summit or Eagle a few times. If they even make it to the lift's base in less than, oh 30 minutes, they wouldn't be quite so quick to dismiss 7 or 8 hundred vertical feet. And if it took them longer than that, well, I don't think they'd want to tackle that little ol' 725ft drop again. It's a whole different ballgame when there's no "run", just lots of steep and deep with trees, boulders, cliffs, etc.... (hee hee hee )

To continue further off thread...what's with the no safety bar trend? We see them on most lifts in mid-Atlantic, but on my recent trip to Colorado it seemed like 50% of chairs we rode (at 3 different ski areas) didn't have them, including one memorable triple chair at Loveland that went about 100" off the ground. Could picture a little kid sitting in middle position of triple being dumped out if lift stopped suddenly and they weren't holding on. It's kind of hard to believe that most chairs (even 60s and 70s vintage) wouldn't come with them when new. Maybe over the years on older chairlifts ski areas remove them due to wear and damage? I would think the risk of a falling passenger from great heights and the attendant law suit would motivate areas to keep safety bars in place??

tommo: Here Be Dragons. 'Nuff said. Try Parachute too, for 1000 vert of steeps that will leave your legs gasping for breath.

Not sure 600K would get you very far with snowmaking. Most of the upgrades you see around here run in the millions of dollars. Though 800K would give you a very, very nice terrain park (new trail cut, lift, a little glade area in it to jig around) or perhaps a decent beginners area-- something else T-line doesn't really have that should be on their priority list.

JimK... skiing is an inheriantly risky sport.

Ski at your own risk.

Hey canaanman, didn't you write a few months ago that "if it weren't for the safety bar I wouldn't be typing this right now"?

You seemed to appreciate those safety bars when you needed them.

Oh yes, they're wonderful.

I was out on Mt. Hood several years ago. There are 2 lifts on that mountain that still are basically T-Bars with a seat. No side rails, no safety bar, tiny seats, just one bar in the middle. The wind on Hood gets pretty bad... and to date they've had no accidents.

The Continental Divide - Loveland and A-Basin. To paraphrase the line in The Perfect Storm, plenty of snow and plenty of weather.

Rode one of the top lifts at A-Basin a few years back; no safety bar on the lift. It was pretty calm at the bottom of the lift but we hit 80 mph winds on the way up. (The wind speed was quoted by ski patrol.) The wind caught my skis like a catamaran sail and nearly flipped me forward off the lift. Thank God I was hanging on to the side of the lift for dear life. The lift was barely moving; I think the lift ops were debating whether it was riskier for the lift to keep moving and possibly hit a pole or for the riders to get frostbite.

Maybe a seat belt is needed for that lift.

Got a call from my friend who is up in Timberline.

His 12 year old son had this to say about yesterday's skiing:

"It was the best day of my life."

That's not just his skiing life but his life in general. This is why skiing trumps school any day of the week.

JohnL, i was at A-Basin a few years back and it was so windy that the state closed down any lift over a certain altitude which included the top of A-Basin. The people in front of us in the ticket line had already bought tickets and were asking for their money back when they found out it was closed up top. Having been overwhelmed by Vail, Breck, and night time at Keystone the previous days, we decided to just walk a trail or 2 to save 40 bucks and still say we skiid A-Basin, yes we're posers. Anyway, we drove over the divide and yes, the wind up there was...well fast enough that i cant even estimate. Lets just say the rock overlooking the basin should have had a 3 point harness on it too. People were backcountry boarding down the opposite side too. These people are hardcore.