A Day at Breckenridge, the Wacky Lift Laboratory at the Top of the Rockies
The nation’s most popular ski area is also somehow its most eccentric
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DAY 24 – BRECKENRIDGE
Have you ever played the How-Many-States/Countries-You’ve-Visited game and gotten hung up on The Airport Problem? Like are you allowed to count a place on your Tourist Checklist if the only thing you did was land in the airport and change planes? I have that problem with South Korea, which I either have or have not been to twice, and I’d had a similar problem since skiing like five runs at Breckenridge in November 1998. The only things I remember about that day are taking a bus to the lifts from the parking lot and “no jumping” signs positioned at all the places where I wanted to jump. So, this past February - even though I was staying the week in Vail Village a hundred yards from Gondola 1 - I figured it was time to make the drive over to Summit County for a Breckenridge refresh.
It helps to get on the ground at Breck, as the mountain’s naming conventions make skiing there as confusing as possible. The ski area’s terrain pod and base-area names correspond with the summit names above them, which are unimaginatively labeled Peak 6, Peak 7, Peak 8, Peak 9, and Peak 10 (I’m aware that this is not Vail’s fault, and that I probably just offended some vaunted American mountain pioneer named Silas or Harlan or Wyatt, who, after a 40-week overland journey in which he lost two covered wagons’ worth of beaver furs and his five trustiest mules in the Ambush of Dead Man’s Creek, gazed upon these Rocky Mountain wonders and declared, “These peaks shall forever honor of my Trustiest Mules: Mule 6, Mule 7, Mule 8, Mule 9, and Mule 10.” And one of the natives was like “We already have names for those mountains” and Pioneer Bro was like “Bro stop making everything so complicated, we’re only naming the mountains so that we can own them forever, chill Brah jeez”). This numbered convention should make things easier, but I have never been able to remember which peak is which. Complicating navigation is 10 lifts named [SOMETHING] Superchair (sorry Vail I am not going along with the mid-word uppercase “c”), an additional two “super” lifts, and a sprinkling of 900-year-old double chairs named after numbers and letters. This whole constellation bends and crisscrosses in a baffling sprawl that looks as though it was drawn by a 5-year-old (Calm down, Map Defender Bro; it is a good map drawn by a legend, but what it depicts is pure madness):
It’s a good thing I had a guide: Jon Copeland, a Tahoe transplant who’s been Breck’s VP and COO for the past two seasons. Before we arrived, I gave him two pieces of information: we’d be skiing with my 9-year-old son, and our goal was to ride as many of Breck’s 20 aerial lifts as possible.
Our weekday visit eliminated the option of riding weekend backups A-Chair and C-Chair. The mediocre winter eliminated waiting-for-better-conditions, high-altitude 6-Chair and Imperial Superchair. And my son’s not-quite-ready-for-Colorado-blacks ability level eliminated Falcon Superchair.
But we rode everything else. “Well, I’m not sure how much skiing we did,” Copeland said at the end of our tour, “but we moved around a lot.”
What is remarkable about a day at Breckenridge is the degree to which the resort defies its Mt. Generic, epitome-of-corporate-skiing, Epic Pass-tourist-corral rap. In lived experience, that massive, dense lift network, so baffling on a trailmap, crystalizes into something far more approachable. Breck, high-altitude, snow- and sun-blessed, laced with never-ending and tree-dotted blues, delivers the everyskier’s destination archetype - even the most vaguely competent skier will be pleased with themselves here. For skiers more attuned to the big-mountain American destination experience, Breck delivers something else: novelty to a degree normally stowed in backwater ski areas with hand-written cafeteria price boards.
This is especially true of the ski area’s unusual lift fleet. Skiing lift-to-lift at Breckenridge is a little like skiing around a Six Flags, or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, or a child’s imagination. Each machine is different. This is true at all ski areas, but Breck packs more wacky, what-the-hell-man lifts into one resort footprint than any other ski area on the continent. Breck’s lift fleet, as a whole, “is among the most unique anywhere,” Lift Blog’s Peter Landsman wrote in 2017. “Nowhere else can you find so many lifts with turns (5), lifts that cross other lifts (4), not to mention North America’s only double-loading detachable and its highest elevation chairlift.”
Here are five that stood out when I cruised around with my son in February:
Quicksilver Superchair - the double-loading six-pack
This thing is a bad idea come to life. I’m not even really sure how to explain how strange this double-loading queue is. Extra credit to the liftie for her reaction to my touristing (if it’s Vail protocol to tell skiers not to film while loading, I’ll reiterate that I was skiing with the head of the resort, and she was probably smart enough to file my behavior as an exemption, so don’t go all TPS Reports on her):
This lift probably seemed like a good idea in 1999. It wasn’t a good idea. The lift has the highest misload rate of any chair at the resort, resulting, according to the ski area’s 2022 U.S. Forest Service masterplan, in a “reduction in hourly capacity of approximately 20 percent. … This is a because of the QuickSilver SuperChair’s unusual double-loading design. The bottom station of the QuickSilver SuperChair alternates between sending chairs on two different tracks, both of which have guest loading areas. While this design allows a shorter spacing of carriers, it is also difficult to manage and confusing for guests, leading to an increased misload rate.”