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Excitement in the Air

The Big Day After months of work by countless individuals, the time finally came to get the new towers out of the parking lot and stand them up on their foundations. We considered using a conventional crane to lift the towers into place, but the steep terrain would have made it very difficult to move the towers into position and extensive excavation and dozing would have been required to build a crane pad at each tower site. Being that Lutsen is building a lift this summer as well, we choose to partner to split the cost of mobilizing a helicopter from out west to make things a little more efficient for both of us. Saturday, July 22nd, after assisting our friends across the lake with pouring concrete for the new Raptor Express, Brian from Timberline Helicopters pointed his UH 60 Blackhawk across the lake and headed straight for Snowriver. He and his crew touched down here in the main parking lot just after the storm clouds cleared, making for a perfect dust-free landing.  The Timberline
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July Already?!

In the month since I last sat down to chronicle all the activity on the mountain, we have accomplished A LOT. The team from Ruotsalas has completed pouring concrete and backfilled the foundations for Towers 2-10. This leaves Tower 1 and all four terminal foundations to complete but is still a big milestone as it allows us to revegetate the access roads created to reach tower locations on the side of the hill.  The rest of the pours are much more easily accessible via pre-existing and solid roadways, meaning rainy weather is much less of a threat to our forward progress.  Tower 9 foundation is backfilled with grass already growing. -7/8/2023 With the Tower foundations substantially completed, the focus shifts to the top and bottom terminal locations. At the bottom, we are undertaking a massive regrading project to improve skier access to the lift from both the east and the west sides. The loading mound of the former triple lift has been completely removed and redistributed at the bottom
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Concrete Time

With all of the snow melted and the hill dried out, the team from Ruotsala has focused their efforts on getting each of the tower foundations poured. The new lift will have 10 total towers along the line. Tower 1 sits immediately outside the bottom terminal, and tower 10 is just downhill from the top terminal. Those two tower bases will be excavated and poured alongside their respective terminal foundations. For now, our work has begun at tower 9, near the summit, and is progressing downhill as the access road gets built.  The first step of each tower build is to excavate the tower location down to the precise elevation required according to the size and height of the footing. Once excavated and elevations are verified, soil bearing analysis must be completed to ensure the soil conditions are suitable for the new tower to be placed on. Our friends at Coleman Engineering out of Ironwood perform a series of tests in each excavation to evaluate the soil's ability to bear weight. Once
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Extreme Makeover - Ski Resort Edition

 As I walk around the mountains, it's starting to feel like I'm in the middle of one of those reality TV shows where a new home gets built in a week. In just over a month since our closing day, we've gotten started on too many projects to count in all areas of the resort. Without 100s of volunteers, we'll take a bit longer to get done. Still, I'm confident that Snowriver will feel like a totally different place when our guests return this fall. Here's a quick run-through of what we've been up to.  Voyageur Express Preparation The mountain crew had a monumental task on their hands to dismantle, remove and scrap three chairlifts made up of over 5 miles of steel cable, 65 steel towers, 6 terminal structures, and 3 concrete vaults. Once all the towers had been cut and hauled up to the overflow lot, work began on torching them apart to allow them to be loaded onto trailers for the trip to the scrap yard. To date, we've hauled 160,000 pounds of metal to the sc
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Into High Gear

Wrap it up In the few days since we've closed for the season a ton of work has already gone into disassembling and removing the Quad, Triple, and Double to make way for construction to begin on the Voyageur Express Six.  First, crews gently lowered the Original Double's haul rope (wire cable that holds the chairs) onto 4x4s. The wood will protect the rope as it is reeled up over the ground keeping it in perfect condition so that it can be used to replace the current haul rope on the Bear Creek Double later this summer.  The Original Double's haul rope awaiting the final trip around the bull wheel. - 04/07/2023 Spooling up fifteen thousand pounds of cable stretched out over six thousand feet is no small task, so we enlisted the help of JT and his son Jake from Mountain Wire Rope Service. They came all the way from Pennsylvania with their custom-made spooling machine in tow to help us out. Once the spooling machine was set up, the splice was cut right at the marriage, and one
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Out with the old...

  Sunday, April 2nd was a bittersweet day. Many longtime skiers of the resort, including myself, took their final rides on the main double lift. As I took one last slow ride up the mountain, I couldn't help but notice the quiet, calming nature of the lift. Having carried skiers for 62 years, the machine feels as much a part of the mountain as the trees that shape the runs.  The energy of the day felt more like a memorial tribute than a fun day on the slopes as people came to pay their respects to the lift that was integral to so many of their great memories. At 4:27pm the original 1961 double chairlift carried its last passengers for the final time. Rita, a patroller on the mountain for 40 years called the last chair and rode up in front of Lee, the longtime operator of the lift, and his daughter who learned to ski on these slopes. I was lucky enough to capture the moment in the video above.  The very next day, work began to remove chairs from the lift, starting the long road to co
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