So Amber and I took Sunday morning off and went skiing up at Park City Moutain Resort. What an awesome day! I was thinking about my technique enough to keep myself from working too hard and thus I wasn’t working so hard to slow myself down. To top that off the snow was really damn fast so I was going really fast. It was great.
While we were there we were at the peak checking out the trail map trying to decide where the go next. Amber (I could just be remembering this wrong) said something along the lines of “Lets go down to Payday” (the major lift that’s in the middle of the resort and is the primary access for most of the resort) “and then on to this area”. I said something along the lines of “Ok, but I was thinking maybe we could go down to the town lift” (it starts on lower Main street in town and even has a bridge over another road to ski to it from the resort) “just because it seems like fun”. Amber to this says “ok, lets go”.
As we come down the mountain and get to the point where we would make the decision to go to the Town lift or Payday, there’s a ski patrol guy waving his arms and yelling towards us. “Payday is broken down, use Ski Team”. This was about 11:00 AM. When we left the resort at 1:00 they were still evacuating people from the lift, and today it was still down (along with another lift that they shut down to cannibalize for parts). I’m just glad we weren’t on the lift when it died 🙂
BTW there’s updates in the comments.
Sam,
I know what you mean about ski tech. It’s completely different than the straight skis I remember from good old Spirit Mountain back in Duluth. Skis today are so much more reactive, and almost respond to your thoughts. It’s great.
Well the gearbox in the lift was built for a quad chair lift but the lift is actually a “six pack”. From what it sounds like on the local public radio station, the manufacturer approved the configuration and is taking full responsibility for the problems and will be replacing gear boxes all over the place to handle the higher loads.
So yeah the lift was completely stopped no moving it. What they do is get a rope up to the lift (Some people say they throw the rope up to the passengers, others have said they get a patroller up there somehow) and on these newer chairs there’s an eye hook that the rope gets passed through and passed back down to the ground. They then attach a harness to the rope and each passenger is brought down that way, one by one, skis and all. Amber thinks it’d be fun… I think it would be scary as hell but that’s how they get 200+ people off a stopped lift.