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By Jack Affleck/Vail Resorts vail.snow.com/winter/
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December 12, 2007 — Only in a ski town can issues as seemingly mundane as simply upgrading an old chairlift take on such enormous gravity for the local snow-riding citizenry.
But depending on who you ask, Vail Resorts’ tentative plans – first floated several years ago – to tear down the creaky old triple lift in Sun Down Bowl and replace it with a high-speed lift of some sort is either the end of the world as we know it or the best idea since shaped skis.
Some of the opponents of such a move - which VR has presented to the U.S. Forest Service in the form of a revised master development plan for Vail Mountain covering the next 5-7 years – probably are still on straight skis and never really bought into the whole parabolic thing.
They feel a high-speed chairlift in Sun Down Bowl would cause it to be skied out even faster on powder days and change the whole retro feel of that section of Vail Mountain. Proponents of replacing Chair 5 (the High Noon lift) say it’s a relic that causes major bottlenecks on a mountain that on busy days can accommodate 20,000 snow riders.
For additional information on the project, contact: Don Dressler, Snow Ranger, Holy Cross Ranger District, 24747 U.S. Highway 24, P.O. Box 190, Minturn, Colorado 81645. Dressler can be reached by phone at (970) 827-5157 or by email at drdressler@fs.fed.us., or contact Roger Poirier, Winter Sports Program Manager, White River National Forest, P.O. Box 948, Glenwood Springs, Colorado 81602-0948. He can be reached by phone at (970) 945-3212 or by email at rpoirier@fs.fed.us.
Vail first broached the idea several years ago but was told by the Forest Service, which leases the land to Vail Resorts, that when Blue Sky Basin was approved, the ski company agreed that all future improvements would be part of a comprehensive master plan.
So Vail pulled the proposal and redid its master plan, an advisory document the Forest Service recently approved. Each of the components of the new master plan must now be separately approved pending public input.
If approved by the Forest Service, work on the new Chair 5 could begin as early as this summer, with the lift coming online for the 2008-09 ski season.
Huge lift lines in the Chair 5 maze will likely convince most people to support that aspect of the plan, but proving more controversial is a proposal to add another lift to Sun Down Bowl. It would start roughly in the same place as Chair 5 and head up the mountain between Straight Shot and Ricky’s trails, with a top terminal between Wildwood restaurant and the top of Chair 7. That lift is at least two or three years away.
In an email circulating in opposition to that aspect of the plan and urging people to comment to the Forest Service by the Dec. 17 deadline, a writer who asked to remain anonymous opined: “It's my belief that most of the attached improvements will be a good thing for Vail Mountain, however I am really against the additional lift capacity being asked for in the Back Bowl area.
“The Back Bowls have very unique characteristics, and additional lifts bringing additional skiers to that area will only bring more bumps. You can ski that type of terrain anywhere else on the mountain, or at any other ski area in the state for that matter.”
Also included in the new plan:
• A new restaurant at the top of the mountain where Chairs 4, 5 and 11 converge. Again, that proposal is several years out and subject to Forest Service approval. Size and design have not been determined.
• Extension up the mountain of the current race venues on Golden Peak to accommodate and International Ski Federation (FIS) women’s downhill or men’s super-G. With support from Ski Club Vail, Vail Resorts would build and maintain the facilities, which are not related to Vail’s bid for the 2013 World Alpine Ski Championships.
• Additional snowmaking, mostly on the west side of Vail’s Front Side in the upper Simba area, to provide early season top-to-bottom skiing off the Eagle Bahn Gondola.
Vail Resorts officials declined to comment on the new master plan because none of the proposals have been approved, but there are certainly a lot of other opinions floating around out there.
Don Dressler, snow ranger for the Holy Cross Ranger District, said the Forest Service has been seeking out all of those opinions during a 45-day scoping period that ends Dec. 17.
At least one local ski retailer thinks it’s high time to say goodbye to the High Noon lift.
“It’s an old lift, and I think that it would be a nice upgrade to put in a nice, comfortable, high-speed triple or high-speed quad, although it was always nice for us old guys to give our legs a rest,” said Billy Schoff, hard-goods manager for Gorsuch in Vail Village.
“I don’t think it will diminish the ski experience. People will get cleared out of there and it’ll move them over to China Bowl and Blue Sky that much quicker.”
Other snow riders agree with the need to replace Chair 5 but don’t like the idea of the new lift. Dressler says that proposal is also about improving the flow of skiers on the mountain.
“(The new lift) would alleviate some of the congestion with Chair 11 at Northwoods, where a lot of people use that at the end of the day to get back to Lionshead,” Dressler said. “The west-to-east (flow) in the morning works pretty well; it’s the east to west that kind of bottlenecks at the end of the day, as I’ve witnessed firsthand when I’ve been stuck in 40-minute lift lines at Northwoods.”
2 Comments on "Some say it's high time to ditch High Noon"
Ivan Schwartz — December 12, 2007
I say DO IT! It's nostalgic to keep the old lift and keep some people, scared about long lines, out of the back bowls. However, what a great idea to improve the flow of skiers and riders around the mountain while increasing everyone's experience with less congestion.
Steve L. Boyd — January 4, 2008
Does it really matter?
Like my daddy used to say, there’s nothing as constant as change, and that’s true for Chair 5 and Sundown Bowl as well.
Anyone who expects to have a quasi-backcountry/powder experience in the original Back Bowls is either extremely naive or hasn’t been here very long. They need a reality check.
At least 20-plus years ago bumps started appearing on lower Seldom, Never and O.S. areas above Sundown catwalk, as well as many other areas in Sun Up and Sundown Bowls.
Granted, in the good old days there were few that possessed the ability, and equipment, to ski the often near-baseless conditions in the backside.
Long, long, long gone are the days when one could take the beginning of the Minturn Mile, now called Windows Road, and traverse into Sundown Bowl to experience truly baseless powder conditions.
I remember specifically one occasion whereby fellow ski-patrolman J.C. Clarke and myself laid down a near-perfect set of figure 8s all the way down Ricky’s Ridge – and they sat there all week, visible from Chair 5. Those were the days when Chair 5 was a two-seater and chairs 1, 2, and 3 had not yet been installed.
There’s no comparison, as Vail Resorts likes to say, in skier numbers per skiable acres then-to-now. Dare I mention snowboarders, who seem to scrape down much of the snow on Vail Mountain?
The upshot of this diatribe is this: it’s the price we pay for success so I say, GO FOR IT! Why not put another chair in Sundown, and by the way how about south Game Creek or even the East Vail Chutes, all of which were within the original permit boundary, as Earl Eaton has told me.
In reality, everything will get tracked out just a little bit faster. But it’s been that way for a long time anyway. Also, if they groomed one run in Sundown, as they did several years ago, hopefully that would keep less-accomplished skiers on the groomers and leave the powder for the rest of us.
If you insist on having a truly backcountry experience, i.e. powder, then earn your turns, or divvy up for a snow cat or helicopter.
All this said, I’ve been skiing and living in Vail since 1963 and loving the hell out of it (except maybe Saturdays).
All this is my not-so-humble opinion,
Steve L. Boyd
