SAM Coverage
Lifts & Ropeways
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New Life for Old Lifts
Many ski areas have been upgrading the electrical drives on existing ski lifts. Most common among these upgrades is a complete replacement of an…
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World Ropeways
The Germans have always loved order; they like precision, lists of things, the systematic history of things—not, it seems to me, always for their…
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Economical and Civilized Lift Seating
Contour loading on high-speed lifts, while used in gondola loading for a long time, is gaining popularity for chairlifts. Though European ski areas began…
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2000 Lifts: An Average Year, but with Highlights
New lift totals for the shiny new millennium (yeah, in case you’ve forgotten, the true start of the millennium is 2001) show a truly…
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The Double Swivel Chair: A Trend to Nowhere
It was March of 1943 and a young German ski racer, Karl Ringer, was on a train from Munich to Nikolajew, a town on…
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ANSI B77 is 40: A BRief History
June 8 is the 40th anniversary of the approval of what was then called the USA Standard Safety Code for Aerial Passenger Tramways, B77.1-1960.…
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Turnaround: Pisten Bully versus Lift Tower
What happens to a ski lift tower when a 1,400-pound groomer hits it head on? Answer: Plenty. At Brodie Mountain Ski Resort, Mass., this…
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Rules of Thumb
The rigging of haul ropes on lifts has always been a major concern of ski area personnel. And it should be because doing it…
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1999 Lifts–A Modest Downturn
Millennial hopes and hypes notwithstanding, 1999 was no record-breaker. True, the statistic for total new lifts in North America was essentially unchanged from last…
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Innovation Returns to Breckenridge
After three years of monitoring user patterns and analyzing the growing demands skiers placed on the aging Quicksilver SuperChair at Breckenridge Ski Resort, Colo.,…