RIP: Last Original Chairlifts Demolished at Alpental, Big Sky, Sunlight, Meadows

Why is it so hard to let old things die?

It’s some kind of topographic miracle, this sprawling ski complex an hour east of Seattle: 2,000 acres, 428 inches, 25 lifts, soaring views, door-to-door interstate connection. Michigan-based Boyne Resorts has run The Summit at Snoqualmie since 2007 and itemizes the center as one of the company’s 10 ski areas, its second largest after Big Sky. The on-the-ground ski experience is more complicated. Sprawling over nearly five miles, this listed-as-a-single-ski-area-on-your-Ikon-menu resort is actually four legacy ski areas hammered together over nine decades. Hyak and Ski Acres and Snoqualmie Summit and Alpental. Even today they are not one true ski area. Summit East, Central, and West are chained together by connector trails in a three-and-a-quarter mile top-to-bottom maze that dead-ends where I-90 hinges enormously through the pass. The skiing across this monster zone is quirky and interesting and moderately confusing and occasionally steep, a museum of strange ideas, abandoned buildings and partly demolished lifts slowly transmogrifying into a modern ski resort. Families go there. School buses. Racers and seasonlongs and cruisers who relish an outdoor gym. But for seekers of the ungroomed and the oh-shit steep, The Summit at Snoqualmie is all about separate, across-the-interstate Alpental. And Alpental is all about Chair 2.

Chair 2, officially “Edelweiss,” a centerpole Riblet double, opened in 1967, the same year as Alpental. The lift rises 1,104 vertical feet in just 2,280 linear feet, a 41.1 percent pitch that is among the steepest of any chairlift in the country. To a modern skier accustomed to Boyne’s ski-in Octopus barns and chugalong detachables, Chair 2 looks improvised, primitive, like something a backyard tinkerer welded together for his kids. With pizza-box seats and no restraint bars and Erector Set towers and terminals, the lift looks fundamentally unsafe. It crosses over a freefall of natural halfpipes and glades and cliffs, terrain impossible to imagine skiers navigating on 1960s technology, even while riding above it on machinery of exactly that vintage.

Locals love Chair 2. They love its simplicity and they love its shabbiness and they love how it frightens the uninitiated. They love its character, the way it seems to speak to them in its bouncing, swinging journey. They love the machine-as-artwork patina absent in our chain-store present. They love that there’s no easy way down. They love the community and camaraderie of the often-snaking-downhill liftline. Most of all, they love that this machine is 58 years old and still works.

But Chair 2 – at least that Chair 2 – spins no more. Crews began dismantling Edelweiss last month, clearing the way for a new Doppelmayr triple chair.

Chair 2 at Alpental. All photos by Stuart Winchester.

Edelweiss is not the only original chairlift hacked from the surface of an iconic resort this offseason. A 10-hour drive east, Boyne is demolishing Big Sky’s Heron-Poma Explorer double chair, the last survivor from the ski area’s 1973 opening, to make way for a 10-passenger, two-stage gondola. Sunlight, Colorado is replacing a pair of Riblet doubles, one dating to the mountain’s 1966 opening, with a new fixed-grip quad and a used triple from A-Basin. And two years after dropping their first six-pack on a parallel line, Mt. Hood Meadows will remove the Blue double, a 1968 Riblet that is the last lift standing from the ski area’s first winter.

After lagging Europe for decades, North America is five years into an aerial ski lift renaissance, erecting approximately 250 new machines since 2020, according to Lift Blog’s annual summaries. Another 48 lifts will rise this summer. Some will serve expansions, but the majority will replace legacy machines, many of them beloved chairlifts from defunct manufacturers Hall and Borvig and Yan, endangered species being hunted toward extinction. These enormous investments indicate that North American lift-served skiing is a healthy, growing industry positioning itself to compete for the modern attention span.

But skiers, particularly locals, are often reflexively hostile to the loss of beloved antique chairlifts. A quick scroll down Alpental’s Facebook page reveals scattered but persistent pushback to Chair 2’s replacement.

Such complaints are not specific to Alpental. Four days after publishing a 2023 podcast in which Mt. Spokane GM Jim van Löben Sels outlined plans to replace the circa 1956 Vista Cruiser Riblet double with a modern triple chair, I received a series of direct messages from user Redeyeworkshop to The Storm’s Instagram account:

A post with similar sentiments appeared on an Instagram account called mtspokaneskiboardpark two months later:

The crazy part is not the messages. The crazy part is that some small piece of me, however irrationally, agrees with them.

What happens when building stops

Chairlifts feel like strange leftovers in a constantly re-inventing America. Nearly every 1960s stocking cap and sporty sweater and wooden ski and rear-wheel-drive gashog is deteriorating in a landfill. In photos hung along baselodge walls, the trim and trappings of that era look foreign, exotic, distant, ridiculous. But then we step outside and ride their chairlifts. Where else in life but skiing do we regularly use anything manufactured before the year 2000?

There’s one obvious analogy: buildings. Much of America is new, but buildings dating back a century or more are common here in New York City. I’ve lived in several. They are ragtag and charming, teaming with ghosts, each brick and nail placed or pounded by some long-dead craftsman. A 2009 version of me would sit drinking tallboys on an Edgecombe Avenue fire escape and imagine some Irish father of 12 smoking there after his shift at the tuna-can factory in 1937, views east to Yankee Stadium and south to the Empire State Building uniting us across the decades.

Charming. But our buildings, like our lifts, are expensive to build and hard to remove, even as the world blows past them. And these prewars were proportioned and wired for a world without internet, televisions, computers, appliances, or air-conditioning. Modern life doesn’t always fit. Closets, elevators, washers, driers, dishwashers, garbage disposals, and window screens are luxuries. I once sawed a couch in half to move it upstairs to my third-floor apartment. No need to improvise. I called a guy. In New York, Couch Doctor is a gig like Uber driver.

I considered these trade-offs worthwhile to live in one of the few American spaces not en thrall to the automobile. But today’s Manhattan is actually something of a historic anomaly, a city constrained by sentimentalists who strangled its future in the name of preservation. Estimates vary, but 75 to 80 percent of Manhattan’s residential buildings pre-date World War II. This never struck me as unusual, but in the context of New York City’s 400-plus-year history, it is. A recent Atlantic story on America’s housing crisis laid out a contrarian case against Jane Jacobs, urbanist hero who (thankfully) blocked car-obsessed city planner Robert Moses from obliterating Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood to install a cross-borough freeway:

But in halting the ravages of clearance, Jacobs advanced a different problem: stasis. For centuries, the built form of the West Village had continually evolved. Old buildings were torn down and larger structures were erected in their place. … Jacobs’s activism blocked efforts to add any more buildings like the one next to her house. Other three-story houses could no longer be consolidated and built up into six-story apartment blocks; the existing six-story walk-ups couldn’t be turned into 12-story elevator buildings. Such development would change the physical appearance of the neighborhood, and also risk displacing current residents or small businesses—eventualities to which Jacobs was fundamentally hostile. Before, the neighborhood had always grown to accommodate demand, to make room for new arrivals. Now it froze. …

In Manhattan … 27 percent of all lots are now in historic districts or are otherwise landmarked, predominantly in the borough’s most affluent areas. And once a neighborhood in these areas is designated historic, new construction within it drops dramatically below the city’s already grossly inadequate rate.

Nice story, Bro. But what the hell does Manhattan housing have to do with skiing?

49 Degrees North, Mt. Spokane, and Bridger Bowl

Metro Spokane’s population has grown roughly 40 percent since 2000, from 336,000 to 470,000. While the number of local ski areas (five) has remained stable, most have added terrain and chairlifts to accommodate increased volume:

These investments often translate demonstrably into skier visits. Since 1,851-vertical-foot 49 Degrees North cut top-to-bottom ride time in half by replacing a 50-year-old double chair with a high-speed quad in 2021, skier visits have roughly doubled, resort officials tell me. As recently as the 2002-03 winter, Lookout Pass was stuck at 22,750 skier visits. A decade later, following the ski area’s 2007 expansion, that number had nearly tripled, to 66,000 by the 2013-14 ski season.

Where evolution stalls, skier visits do as well. Mt. Spokane, the closest ski area to the city, averaged 80,000 to 95,000 skier visits from 2005 to ’09, a number that crept as high as 122,000 after the Northwood expansion. But the ski area’s 1,700-acre footprint could likely accommodate far more skier visits with modern infrastructure.

Consider similarly sized (2,000-acre) Bridger Bowl, which tallied more than three times more skier visits than Mt. Spokane (377,663 to 109,000) during the 2022-23 winter, despite serving a population around a quarter of the size (metro Bozeman is home to 118,960), and competing directly with Big Sky.

Ski area comparisons are never simple, and Bridger holds several advantages over Mt. Spokane: a gentler access road, more parking, and (some) snowmaking. But Bridger Bowl has installed seven of its eight chairlifts since 2000, mostly triple chairs. Mt. Spokane spins five pizza-box Riblet doubles installed between 1956 and 1977, and one 2018 Skytrac triple. Maintaining these junkers, which cover a combined 17,208 linear feet, is a constant effort, GM van Löben Sels told me on the pod:

Riblet chairs are almost obsolete. Parts are difficult to get. … Ultimately, we realized that these are dinosaurs and they need to be swapped out. … Swapping parts is important when you're as remote as most ski areas are and having spare parts on the shelf, not only for our lifts ... We had to wait a week for a [part] to come in this last Christmas break because of the snowstorm. I'm like, why don't we have one on the shelf?

Mt. Spokane is unlikely to undergo a Schweitzer-esque transformation, swapping these Riblets for detachables. The ski area operates as a nonprofit, and the triple chair serving Spokane’s Northwood expansion is a suitable model for upgrading the entire fleet, van Löben Sels said. The chief obstacle is money.

But Mt. Spokane, seated on state land, has proven particularly vulnerable to meddling from the angry fringe. The ski area proposed the modest Northwood expansion in 2005, then spent a dozen years fighting lawsuits before building the scaled-down version that opened in 2018.

This is why we can’t ignore outlier Angry Facebook Bros. America’s bureaucratic megaplex has evolved in such a way that a single crank can easily halt even the largest projects. The Atlantic:

[Jane Jacobs and her fellows] were justifiably concerned that unrestrained growth was degrading the environment, displacing residents, and leveling historic structures. More than that, they were revolting against the power of Big Government and Big Business, and trying to restore a focus on the public interest. They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.

But in practice, the new processes turned out to be profoundly antidemocratic, allowing affluent communities to exclude new residents. More permitting requirements meant more opportunities for legal action. Even individual opponents of new projects had only to win their lawsuits, or at least spend long enough losing them, to deter development.

The preservation of the West Village itself, long celebrated as a triumph of local democracy, was in fact an early case study in this new form of vetocracy.

Again: I’ll admit that this vintage version of Mt. Spokane is compelling. Like, wow: a literal time machine to 1956. I enjoy riding the single chair at Mad River Glen, relished living in prewar buildings, like going to Europe and walking around 1,000-year-old castles.

But I also know this: Mt. Spokane’s lift fleet, as presently constructed, is a time bomb. It looks cool. But the ski area is a business, not a museum. A failure to modernize will continue to push skiers elsewhere. That’s a huge penalty to sate a small group of people enamored of a version of skiing that no longer exists.

Fortunately, modernizing a ski area lionized by generations of skiers for its anachronistic infrastructure is not a new problem, nor is it unsolvable.

No longer “slow and creaky” but still “everyone’s favorite”

In 1994, Skiing magazine described Alta as “The ski area for traditionalists, ascetics, and cheapskates. The lifts are slow and creaky, the accommodations are spartan, but the lift tickets are the best deal in skiing.” Skiers arriving at Alta before 1999 would encounter a maze of eight chairlifts – six doubles and two triples – and a cluster of ropetows:

Alta circa 1994. Sourced from skimap.org.

Alta began a slow-but-deliberate modernization in 1999, replacing the Sunnyside double with a high-speed triple. High-speed lifts then displaced antique Yans one or two at a time: Sugarloaf in 2001, Collins in 2004, Supreme in 2017, the Sunnyside six in 2022. Today, Alta occupies the same ski footprint it did 31 years ago, served by a far more efficient and intuitive lift network:

Alta’s only remaining pre-modern lift is Wildcat, a 1980 Yan double with no safety bars.

And you know what? Everyone still loves Alta. Z Rankings description is apt:

Alta is almost everybody’s favorite. Many skiers who are new to Alta almost expect a transformative experience on their first trip because of the praise and lore that stalk this resort wherever its name is muttered.

Fast lifts haven’t ruined Alta, just as the Ikon Pass and canyon traffic and a Snowbird interconnect haven’t ruined Alta. It is a singular place, beloved and widely considered one of the most successful and well-run ski areas in America.

We can only guess what would have happened had Alta not modernized. Perhaps the ski area would have been fine, limiting skier visits by matching slowpoke lift capacity with ticket sales, and would stand as a proud and rugged outlier in buzzing, modern Utah. Mad River Glen, with its creaky-looking 1948 American Steel & Wire single chair, thrives right beside modern, Alterra-owned Sugarbush, selling vintage charm as its primary virtue (the guts of that single chairlift, meanwhile, were modernized in 2007).

But we do know this: if a ski area so vaunted as Alta can orchestrate a lift-fleet overhaul without sacrificing its essential character, then any ski area can.

The last good machines

Alta, however, also acts as a cautionary tale. Last year, the ski area revealed that its then-seven-year-old Supreme high-speed quad was suffering “accelerated metal fatigue” caused by an eight-degree bend in the liftline (an intentional design feature that minimized the lift’s environmental disturbance). This offseason, Alta is dismantling and completely rebuilding the 5,134-foot-long, 1,224-vertical-foot chairlift on a new, straight line. The two Yan lifts that Supreme replaced were a combined 61 years old.

This what-the-actual-fuck circumstance is a powerful exhibit of a complaint often sounded by vintage chairlift partisans: they don’t build them like they used to. The fancy new lifts, the leave-it-alone crowd says, are a little too fancy, their matrix of circuitry creating needless complexity that leads to frequent breakdowns and stops.

Underscoring their point, hundreds of fixed-grip chairlifts built by now-defunct manufacturers in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s remain in service, while detachables built in the 1980s and, increasingly, the ‘90s are obsolete. Examples abound. Waterville Valley still spins five Stadeli lifts manufactured between 1966 and 1985, but replaced its 34-year-old White Peaks Express quad (itself an engineering nightmare that the ski area had to shorten by 1,585 feet in 1996), with a $12 million high-speed six-pack in 2022. The new machine is gorgeous, but one of Waterville’s 2025 summer projects is replacing inexplicably damaged bubbles on the sixer’s 83 chairs. Mammoth retired its Canyon high-speed quad in 2023 after just 29 years, one of two high-speed quads already cycled out on a mountain that still runs 10 Yan fixed-grip lifts built between 1969 and ’85.

Beyond perceptions of mechanical reliability, these pre-computer machines seem to tap something transcendent in the human psyche, a mechanical essence that’s easier to relate to than a circuit board. In Hunting Warbirds – The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II, Carl Hoffman follows a cast of bootleg adventurers who scour the planet to recover crashed World War II fighter planes. Powering this particular and peculiar obsession, Hoffman writes, is a shared sense that “these warbirds were the last good machines.”

In the technological race of postwar years, machines changed fundamentally – and so did our relationship to them. They became more powerful, but more opaque, mechanical linkages replaced by mysterious microprocessors, the mighty crankshafts replaced by digital codes, elaborate strings of ones and zeros. … Anybody could take apart a piston engine*; few people can work on a jet, or even fathom the inner workings of a computer chip.

A similar sentiment, I suspect, is at work when skiers mourn vintage chairlifts, simple machines that you could take apart with your hands and fix with a wrench.

*Speak for yourself, Hoffman.

Idealizing machines

Stylistically, it is true that they don’t build them like they used to. While Boyne’s showboat D-Lines dazzle with their trim and speed and comfort, many new lifts today present with a galvanized sameness. Part of the resistance to Alpental’s new Chair 2 is that it will, in essence, be the fourth clone of the Doppelmayr triple chair that has propagated across The Summit at Snoqualmie since 2022. These lifts are quite beautiful, in my opinion, but they don’t stroke the soul in the same way as the spindly, insectile Riblets.

Alpental's new Internationale triple, installed in 2024. All photos by Stuart Winchester.

Again, we find echoes in our broader culture. Cars, once distinct and ostentatious machines, have in recent decades assumed a sameness across makes and models that feels bland beside America’s 1950s and ‘60s auto design heyday. Big Roads, The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, by Earl Swift, reflects on this golden era:

Behold the [‘57] Chevy. … Every variation was a stylish machine. Most memorably, the Chevy had fins – gargantuan, chrome-edged things that jutted a foot aft of the trunk or hatch, so Jet Age and out of scale that they’d have been dismissed as ridiculous, as whimsy run amok, had they not looked so damn great. They weren’t the car’s only Buck Rogers touches. The taillights resembled fighter plane exhausts. Chrome gun sights were fitted into the curving hood. The bumper guards bore crosshairs, unless covered with optional rubber warheads.

No one will ever write such an encomium to, say, a 2025 Chevy Malibu. But the modern micromachine is a superior vehicle. Swift:

By today’s standards, the cars were primitive – unreliable, quick to wear, blundering, dangerous. … it wasn’t uncommon to see a ’57 pulled to the roadside on a hot summer day, hood up and radiator steaming: thermostats of the period were notoriously untrustworthy, radiators too, and even new cars boiled over. It was no rare event to find the car stranded in an icy driveway, either, immobilized by a frozen fuel line or balky mechanical fuel pump. Tires had tubes prone to catastrophic blowouts. Nylon-ply models were leaky, quick to bald, weak at the sidewalls.

… Generating the spark necessary to begin the [carburetion] process relied on points, gaps, and a battery that had to be watered like a fern. The Chevy bounced along on heavy springs and relied on Stone Age brakes that quit working when wet. Rust set in at the faintest hint of sea air or road salt. The car was middle-aged at thirty thousand miles; flipping the odometer into six figures was a rarity.

The Chevy was unforgiving, too. In a collision, the ’57 didn’t absorb energy; it was a battering ram a foot longer than a Hummer H3, nearly two tons of dumb metal strapped to a big-assed engine, its steering column a spear aimed at the driver’s breastbone, its beltless passengers free to carom about an all-metal cabin softened only by a thin layer of paint.

Swift contrasts these beauty pageant clunkers with today’s more milquetoast cars:

Consider that today’s new cars routinely cover a hundred thousand miles without a spark-plug change and are expected to achieve double that mileage over their useful lives; engines are computer-timed to the thousandth of a second, the better to ensure clean ignition, maximum compression, optimal power; bodies are crash-worthy, aerodynamically clean, rustproof.

Not to mention: airbags, seatbelts, unleaded gasoline (or no gas at all). And Swift published his book in 2011, before regulations added backup cameras, sensors became ubiquitous, and Bluetooth merged our ride with our Pet Rectangle.

Modern chairlifts, while often buggy at the outset due in part to their size and complexity, tend to be more reliable long term than their predecessors, operators tell me. If they lack the visual flair and novelty of the Riblets and Borvigs and Yans of the past, it is likely because those lifts were the products of great eras of experimentation, when engineers had not yet optimized designs by tapping decades of data about what works and what does not. New chairlifts are more comfortable, less bouncy, and equipped with safety features. They all have restraint bars.

A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again

It feels dumb to be ambivalent about such change. But I’m sentimental and nostalgic by nature. I take so many photos that my friends call me “The Paparazzi.” That I can still ride the Snow Snake triple chair that hypnotized my ski soul in 1994 is a wonder to me. To stand there and think, “this is the same machine.” To ride, perhaps, the same carrier I rode as a ski-dumb novice 31 years ago. To think, somehow, however absurdly, that perhaps some part of the machine recognizes this too and appreciates my return.

And yet. Who gives a shit about 1994? Look around. Try finding: a tube TV, a cassette player, a VCR, a manual transmission, a payphone, a printed concert or game ticket, anyone under 30 who carries cash, or someone who doesn’t own a cell phone. All ubiquitous in 1994, all functionally extinct. We live in the future now, where every American holsters a supercomputer that is also their best friend and our cars are a software update and an act of Congress from driving themselves. For skiing to have a place in this world, it needs to give prospective skiers something more approachable and appealing than claptrap machines that are hard to load, scary to ride, and look as though they may topple if someone pulls the wrong Jenga block.

I flew to Washington this year in part to ensure I rode Alpental’s Chair 2 before the wrecking ball arrived. It was a joy to experience, to bounce up that steep and gorgeous line on those worn seats. But I also hated riding it, my pole jammed in the frame as an improvised safety bar, relieved at the unload. Boyne is right to replace this machine. I’m glad I rode it. I’m also glad I’ll never have to ride it again. Like David Foster Wallace, I’m happy to let that cruise ship sink.