Five Classic Chairlifts to Ride While You Still Can
America’s chairlift renaissance is rapidly chewing up its past - don't get mad, get moving
Sit around waiting and you miss them. Gone in just the past five years: Big Sky’s tin-can tram, original Pali at A-Basin, Saddleback’s Rangeley double, Bonanza at 49 North, Argentine at Keystone, Chair 5 and Rip’s Ride at Breck, Sundance’s wild up-and-over Ray’s quad, the Attitash Summit Triple, Caberfae’s Shelter double, Canyon triple at Heavenly, Palisades’ insanely high Red Dog triple, Stowe’s stupidly uphill Mountain triple, the Barker high-speed jalopy at Sunday River, Plunge triple at Telluride, half the Riblets at Snowriver, McCauley’s summit double, Wilbere at Snowbird. Among many others. This offseason, original lifts are coming down at Big Sky, Alpental, Mt. Hood Meadows, and Sunlight. Also say adios to: Becker at Snowbasin, the original Skyline triple at Bluewood, Superstar at Killington, Park City’s Sunrise double, a pair of classic Halls at Spirit Mountain, the weird double-doubles at Whiteface, and the T-bar that dates to Woods Valley’s 1964 opening.
It sucks but we have to accept it. Skiing must modernize. Good-bye Weird Lone Peak Tram. Hello new glass box that could stunt double for Charlie’s Great Glass Elevator. You’ll last 50 years and maybe more and Big Sky deserves that glimmer. It’s OK to pine for the old machine and respect and admire the new one all at once. I dealt with all this a couple weeks ago.
Don’t feel bad if you missed riding any of these old glories. I didn’t get to them all either. Instead, consider that hundreds of chairlifts remain from skiing’s simpler, fixed-grip, improvisational days. Even big resorts such as Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, and Park City still house a few in their tangled acreage. But these machines won’t spin forever. Last week, Mt. Ashland announced the 2026 replacement of its original chairlift, the gorgeous 1964 Lithia Riblet double, along with the parallel Windsor Yan two-seater installed in 1978.
I’m already planning an Ashland run next winter to ride both lifts before they come down. You can too. Take lots of pictures. Instapost. Say, “Look I’m riding a lift that predates the invention of the horse.” Stand at the top and watch it go down and stand at the bottom and watch it go up. Ski Lithia’s liftline and just sort of think about it. The symmetry and the spareness of design. The beauty of it. Imagine fellows riding up in suit-and-tophat or sporty sweater and slacks or whatever the hell people wore skiing in 1964. Picture them wondering what in the world is going on in ‘Nam or whether America would ever land on the moon. Squeak-squeak go the machine parts. Bounce-bounce go the chairs through the sheave trains. Speaking to you like something alive. Hi my name is Chair. Chair carry people. Chair like people. Do people like Chair? Why people wrap tow-chain around Chair and attach to winchcat that driving away? Do Chair do bad? Chair hurt now. Goodbye.
Well now that I’ve drafted the synopsis for Sausage Party 2: Machine Massacre, I’ll move right into the not-weird part of this newsletter: a list of five old-time, certainly doomed chairlifts worthy of a pilgrimage. None are scheduled to spin their last winter in 2025-26, but three date to the 1960s, and things could go sideways quickly. The longest stretch for more than a mile, the shortest rises just 400 vertical feet. All are memorable, will feed an adventurer’s appetite for quest and novelty. This is not a top five, or an inventory of antique lifts serving the most badass terrain (though some of them are that), but a list of singular machines whose quirk and character are unlikely to be matched by whatever inevitably replaces them.
1) Madonna at Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont
The lift
1963 Hall double | 2,150 vertical feet | 6,719 feet long | safety bars: yes | pass affiliations: none
The experience
How astonishing that, in 2025, you can still ride a 2,150-vertical-foot fixed-grip double chair in New England. That’s taller (and 1,500 feet longer) than Mad River Glen’s vaunted single. Thirty-seven towers, 174 carriers, a midstation. Madonna is quaint and boxy, quintessential Hall, the Opposite World mirror of the serpentine western Riblet. A time machine that chugs not backward but straight up. Madonna Mountain tilts and then leans, angling back like a cast fishing rod, until running nearly vertical toward the summit.
And here, the time machine ends, at a retrofit-circa-2002 Doppelmayr CTEC top terminal. Madonna, like many vintage machines, is a modern-antique hybrid masquerading as an original.
Click out of your skis, climb a small rise, and, on a clear day, Jay Peak, 25 miles northeast, holds its muscled post along the international frontier. Also visible: other ski areas, landmarks, several states and Canada. If you’re with a point-and-talk sort of tour guide, they’ll show you.
But the real thrill of Madonna is on the down. Endless gladed glory. Western in its possibilities, the East Coast’s most reliable all-winter snowpack, buried, deep along the Green Mountain Spine that gives us June turns at Killington and the Jay Cloud and the best skiing east of Colorado. Don’t be too en thrall to (but respect) The Black Hole’s triple-black diamond rating – though the only such trail in New England, it’s the rough-and-tumble equivalent to single-black Paradise at MRG or Face Chutes at Jay or the double-blacks off Castlerock at Sugarbush. And if the snow seems better here, well, thank that slowpoke Madonna, which runs about a third the number of skiers per hour up the hill as a quad, fixed or detach, would.
While Madonna offers Smuggs’ most challenging terrain, voyaging skiers should also check out the Hall doubles on neighboring, intermediate-oriented Sterling (1964), and Morse (the 1967 Village lift).
What’s next?
Well wouldn’t you like to know? We all would. Longtime owner Bill Stritzler is in no hurry to tell us, though he’s implied for years that a sale is inevitable. He’s in his eighties and the family seems disinclined to inherit this snowy empire. While such a scenario would inspire local anxiety around any beloved indie outpost, the fact that Smuggs backs up to Vail-owned Stowe has heightened interest around the mountain’s long-term trajectory.
Vail, as Smuggs’ owner, would almost certainly bulldoze this chairlift museum immediately, stringing high-speed quads up each of the three mountains and blazing some sort of interconnect between Smuggs’ Sterling Mountain and the Spruce pod at Stowe. With any other owner – who knows? Stowe is awful busy, and a fast lift or two could be very tempting for strung-out locals willing to drive around the mountain (the pass between the two ski areas closes in winter, putting them about 45 minutes apart by car, even though their ski boundaries nearly touch).
2) Chair 4 at Silver Mountain, Idaho
The lift
1967 Riblet double | 1,894 vertical feet | 5,338 feet long | safety bars: no | pass affiliations: Indy, Powder Alliance
The experience
Consider the miners of the tin-roof past, dispatched up the Cottonwoods or the Roaring Fork or this remote Idaho panhandle, pipe-puffing or tobacco-chawing good ole’ boys from the hinterlands, gap-jawed, wide-eyed, confounded, because what in the world would a body do with all this Goddamned snow.