During winter, Park City Mountain runs and maintains up to 41 lifts, depending on conditions, accessing over 7,300 acres of skiable terrain with 349 trails across America’s largest lift-served ski resort.
This is what it takes to keep them running, and what happens when they don’t:
The day begins at 6 a.m., though lift operations often start earlier depending on when and where avalanche mitigation teams are needed on the mountain.
“We start with attacking our main people movers to get our guests up and out of the base, and also facilitate employees moving around the mountain to get to other lifts and spread out from there,” said Director of Mountain Operations Nick Dana, who has been working in lift operations and maintenance since 1998. He began as a lift operator at Park City Mountain following a dream of skiing every day on the job.
Once the lifts are started up, each has a list of maintenance checks they undergo, documenting stopping distances, hydraulic pressure and safety checks. These checks are performed by the lift maintenance teams before they are handed over to operators for the day. Each day, between eight and 24 maintenance people are present across both villages, along with a minimum of two operators per lift, just enough to confront challenges of the mountain’s size, winter weather and, inevitably, people.
“We do have a lot of logistical challenges just based on the size of our mountain,” said Dana. “Stoppages vary by how popular we are on any given day. The majority of short stops on a lift are due to misloads and misunloads, where we facilitate getting the guests back on their equipment and back on the snow.”
All lifts are run on three phase, 480 volt electric motors, the “prime mover” for lifts across Park City Mountain, which is then supported by at least one form of backup engine in the event of failures.
Based on how large the lift is, the lift may have a supplementary standby engine, a diesel engine that can carry the same capacity and speed as the majority of the lifts on the prime mover. Some lifts have just an EVAC engine, the majority of which are also diesel engines, with some running on gasoline. These engines are in place for when the lift needs to be cleared of people, though not sustained for a long time after that.
“With longer-term stops, it all depends on the situation. There’s a lot of moving parts and monitoring systems in the lifts. They all can fault and so then it just depends on each situation, independently, what’s involved for remedying the faults to get the lift back up and going, if that’s what has occurred,” said Dana.
In the event of a power outage or failure, the affected lift will be switched to either its standby or EVAC engine until the connection is returned or the lift is repaired.
“A challenge we have faced this season, similar to other years, is some of the wind holds. Depending on where and how the storms come in, some of the lifts will go on hold due to weather, but that is not something that’s always visible from the base areas. Along the ridgeline, where lifts like Crescent, Bonanza, Orange Bubble Express and the Red Pine Gondola go, winds can be significant at the top,” said Emily McDonald, communications director for Park City Mountain.
When winds begin coming in perpendicular to the lifts, where sideways chair swing is a possibility, safety becomes an issue and lifts are typically stopped until the wind has cleared. Temperature also plays an important role in the ability for lifts to run smoothly.
“Extreme temperature variations are a factor because, just like any other machine, if things get too hot, that can cause problems. So when temperatures are up, we’re trying to maintain cooler temperatures for all the machinery,” said Dana. “Likewise, when we hit extreme colds, it takes longer for our oils to warm up and electrical connections to fire correctly and things like that. Just like with any industry or machinery out in the weather, extreme colds can affect metal and the fatigue rate of metal.”
When it comes to upgrades and maintenance projects, teams typically need to focus most on electronic updates due to the rapidly changing and evolving nature of electrical technology. With mechanical systems, such as those of the stalwart chairs of Thayn es and Jupiter, both two-person, fixed-grip chairlifts constructed in 1975 and 1976, respectively, the evolution of their technology changes at a much slower pace and doesn’t necessitate such frequent upgrades.
“Lift stops and holds this season, to me, seems average,” said Dana. “It varies on which lift is having an issue at the time, and what the response is from us as the maintenance team is needed for the issue that arises.”