I thought this might be of interest to some (all?) of you. What was the final tally of YAN lifts in Vermont? ***** From: [log in to unmask] (Carmen T. Bradley) Newsgroups: rec.skiing.alpine Subject: Sun Valley to replace Yan--long Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 10:24:11 -0600 SUN VALLEY CO. TO REPLACE LIFT GRIPS ---------------------------------------- BY C.J. KARAMARGIN Wood River Journal Sun Valley Co., the ski resort that invented the chairlift, announced a sweeping, multi-million dollar program Monday to rebuild its seven detachable quad chairlifts. Prompted by defects discovered in the chairlift grips the company has used since 1988, Sun Valley will replace much of its American-made lift machinery with equipment engineered and manufactured by the Austrian firm Doppelmayr, the largest lift manufacturer in the world. Work is already under way and is expected to continue through the summer and autumn. Four lifts should be operational by Thanksgiving and the remaining three by Christmas, said company General Manager Wally Huffman. Speaking at a press conference in the second floor Sun Room of the Sun Valley Lodge, Huffman called the program an "almost devastating financial blow" for the company. He declined to disclose exactly how much Sun Valley will pay for the rebuilding program but said the cost of each rebuilt lift is about half the price of a completely new lift, which he estimated to be between $2.2 million and $3 million. "This is an extensive retrofit," Huffman said. "It's more than several million dollars." Sun Valley Co. was fortunate that owner Earl Holding is "able to make that call," he said. Huffman intimated, however, that Sun Valley did not have much choice in its decision. Without reliable lifts, he noted, "we can not operate our mountain." In addition to 652 grips, chair hangers, lift tower machinery and terminal equipment will be replaced by Doppelmayr. Most of the new equipment will be shipped to Sun Valley from Wolfurt, the small town in the Austrian Alps where the firm is based. Existing towers, crossarms, terminal pedestals, electric motors and gear boxes will be retained but new terminal enclosures that will be built by Doppelmayr are expected to give the lifts a more prominent profile, Huffman said. An additional benefit of the Doppelmayr lifts is greater operating speed and a subsequent increase in carrying capacity of up to 10 percent, he said. Current capacity is about 3,200 skiers per hour. The focus on the lift rebuilding will, however, will cause a delay in the construction of the new Bald Mountain Bike Trail, Huffman said. He called the delay a disappointment but said he hoped to have lifts running next summer. Negotiations to rebuild the lift have been on-going for the past two months, Huffman said. The agreement with Dopplemayr was concluded Friday. "It's been trying," he said. "We don't make decisions quickly. We study them till we're comfortable." Announcement of the rebuilding program won immediate praise from Wendy Jaquet, executive director of the Ketchum-Sun Valley Chamber of Commerce. "This is great news," said Jaquet, who attended the press conference. She thanked Huffman on behalf of business owners for moving swiftly to solve the lift problem. Ian Ferguson, an official with The Skiing Co., the publisher of "Ski," "Skiing" and other magazines, also praised the announcement. He predicted Sun Valley's decision to rebuild with Doppelmayr equipment would be greeted warmly throughout the industry. "It's a proactive step," said Ferguson, who also attended the announcement. "It's the right move. It's the only move." Hans Geier, president of Doppelmayer operations in North America, said his firm was "obviously pleased" with Sun Valley's decision. "It's a major project," Geier said, speaking from the firm's American headquarters in Golden, Colo. "We'll do our very best to have those lifts up and running." Between 65-percent and 70-percent of the equipment Sun Valley will purchase from Doppelmayr will come from Austria, he said. It will be brought from Wolfurt to Hamburg, Germany by train, where it will then be shipped to Houston. From there it will be trucked to Sun Valley. The rest of the equipment will come from a Doppelmayr factory in Quebec. Doppelmayr, Geier explained, is a family-owned business that started making agricultural equipment more than 100 years ago. Based in the western Austrian region of Vorarlberg near the German border, the firm manufactured its first ski lift in 1937, a year after Averell Harriman and Union Pacific Railroad opened Sun Valley as the first destination ski resort in the United States. Doppelmayr now has more than 6,300 lifts of various types in 45 countries, Geier said. It has more than 250 lifts in the United States, including 58 detachable lifts. In December 1981, the firm dedicated the world's first quad detachable grip chairlift at the Breckenridge Ski Area in Colorado. The company also manufactures elevators. According to Tony Emsenhuber, deputy trade commissioner with the Austrian Trade Commission in Los Angeles, Doppelmayr is one of the larger privately held firms in Austria. Last year it ranked number 275 on the Austrian equivalent of a Fortune 500 list, he said. Artur Doppelmayr, the now-retired company president, told the Harvard Business Review in 1992 that, in addition to innovative equipment design, the firm's competitive advantage comes from the speed with which it can respond to customers. This, in fact, was a key reason the firm was chosen by Sun Valley. Huffman praised Doppelmayr as the manufacturer of the best-rated lift equipment in the world and said hiring them was the fastest way to meet the safety concerns that have arisen recently over the YAN grips Sun Valley has been using eight for years. Last December at Whistler Mountain in British Colombia, a lift accident believed to have been caused by a failure of a YAN grip left one skier dead and another crippled. While the accident is still under investigation, Huffman said "we (at Sun Valley) drew our own conclusions." When performance related stress cracks were discovered in the grips in February, it created "almost a panic in the industry," he said. Since then, various state government agencies have issued stricter lift standards. The U.S. Forest Service, which leases Bald Mountain to Sun Valley, issued new standards last month. YAN grips, manufactured in Nevada, could not meet those standards. Sun Valley initially thought it would replace the defective grips with a grip redesigned by YAN, but it became apparent the company could not complete the work in time, Huffman said. Doppelmayr design specifications meet Forest Service standards, said Kurt Nelson, Ketchum district ranger. Nelson said the Forest Service has been working closely with Sun Valley and is comfortable with the retrofit proposal. Doug Abromeit, the forest service winter recreation specialist, called Doppelmayr the Cadillac of lifts. YAN chairlifts were constructed at Sun Valley between 1988 and 1994, part of a costly, wide-ranging resort upgrade conducted by Holding, who also owns Sinclair Oil Co., the Little America Hotel chain and the Snow Basin ski area in Utah. The cost was between $1.2 million and $1.8 million per lift and, since their installation, have been used without problem, Huffman said. The main advantage to YAN was the smooth ride. Sixty years ago, however, the concern was just getting skiers to the top of what a Sun Valley publicist at the time called "the slides." The world's first chairlifts, at Sun Valley's Dollar and Proctor Mountains, were developed by a Union Pacific engineer in Omaha who was inspired by a type of conveyor system that loaded bananas on fruit boats in South America. The idea was considered revolutionary at the time. -- _ __ __ ___ ___ (_` | | | | | ._) |__ |__| | | Scott T. Clark [log in to unmask]