Detachable vs Fixed Grip Lifts

[snoloco]

The videos are helpful, thank you for posting them.

The ride time for the Express is around 4 minutes and the Summit is 7. That’s quite a difference.

It seems if the goal is to move more people out of the base area the Summit is the winner. If you want quicker laps the win goes to the Express.

Diminishing returns for a shorter lift, but the difference is always significant. For longer lifts, you're looking at a 5-8 minute difference in ride time, depending on the speeds they are running.

If you pulled scan data from both lifts on a busy day, with them running at the same speeds as in the videos, you would likely find that the fixed grip has higher ridership. This may come as surprising, as the detachable would be the far more popular lift. However, a lift's ridership is very much determined by its capacity, and how well it is operated. Note that the capacities could just as easily be the other way around.

When we stopped there this year on the way home from our Jay Indy trip it was a very busy day with 5-6" pow overnight and races going on. There were significant lines for the Express and the Summit was only a few chairs deep and and net time much faster. I found it very interesting that people would rather wait in line for the high speed than do a little hoofing around to the shorter lines...

The problem is that the detachable doesn't have enough capacity for the demand. With the low capacity, the line for the detachable will move very slowly. What might be a 2-3 minute wait at a lift with tighter chair spacing, would likely be a 5-6 minute wait in this case, and thus over the threshold to where the fixed grip with no line saves you time. While the detachable is significantly faster, if it doesn't have enough capacity to keep the line below 3 minutes, which is the difference in ride time, then it doesn't save you any time over the fixed grip.

Although I'd love every lift to be full speed all the time, I find that the close chair spacing / slower speed model is ultimately better. This is because many lifts designed with wider chair spacing still aren't running at full speed, and at abysmal throughput. With tighter chair spacing, a decent capacity can still be maintained at a slower speed.

 

[x10003q]

“High speed” has some kind of magic effect on casual skiers’ brains. I heard Jim Schafer once reference a statistic that adding a high speed quad to your lift fleet increases pass sales by about 20%. This was when BE and Cat still didn’t have any detachables. I’m still mostly against them

Maybe you never spent much time on a 6000ft (or longer) fixed grip chairs - think Killington Peak double, Stowe Mt Mansfield double/single, Mt Snow main double, Gore East double @ 7300ft long to the Saddle. The shortest lift times were 15 minutes but they were almost always longer due to stops. Some would calculate out to 20 minutes plus stops for an even longer ride. These rides on the weekends would be after working your way through a permanent split rail and post fence corral for 20 plus minutes. Imagine spending 40 minutes to get to the Saddle at Gore. Because these lifts were so absurdly cold the ski areas would hand out wool ponchos to put over your ski clothes.

It was a nightmare but we did not know any better. Today high speed lifts allow Harvey to have some weird nostalgia about fixed grip lifts.

High speed lifts are a gift that we should all be thankful for. The more we have the better.

 

[Harvey]

weird nostalgia about fixed grip

The fixed grip chairs I truly love are in places where they make sense. Plattekill, McCauley etc.

Many of my the ski areas I frequent don't have high speed chairs because they don't need them.

Don't confuse what is the cause, and what is the effect.

 

[x10003q]

The fixed grip chairs I truly love are in places where they make sense. Plattekill, McCauley etc.

High speed chairs can make sense at any ski area. HS chairs are found all across the northeast, southeast and midwest at ski areas the size of Plattekill and McCauley.

Many of my the ski areas I frequent don't have high speed chairs because they don't need them.

Well, using this logic, why did Plattekill replace the T-bar with a double chair? I rode that T-bar for years and it did everything the double does.

Don't confuse what is the cause, and what is the effect.

and don't confuse nostalgia and financial viability. As we have discussed in this thread with Berkshire East (HSQ) and Timberline (HS6), if ski area owners think a HS chair will make the area more profitable they will install the HS chair. The Berkshire East and Timberline high speed lifts are almost identical in length and vertical to the double at Plattekill.

 

[jasonwx]

I would love a high speed at platt
Get there at early done by 1130
Home at a reasonable time

 

[Harvey]

High speed chairs can make sense at any ski area.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Mt Peter, every chair a HSQ?

Well, using this logic, why did Plattekill replace the T-bar with a double chair? I rode that T-bar for years and it did everything the double does.

I assume you are kidding about this. Chairlifts allow people to sit and rest. They open the ski area to a lot more people. Back when my wife skied, I can guarantee she'd never buy a pass at a ski area that was Tbar only.

I guess you could say that HS lifts open the area to people who won't ride anything else, but I'd say that that is not the same.

 

[Harvey]

Get there early done by 1130

Would probably make sense.

 

[x10003q]

I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Mt Peter, every chair a HSQ?

Mt Holly Resort, Holly, Mi., has 2 high speed quads serving 350 vertical feet and 100 acres - about the same size as Mt Peter.

https://skimtholly.com/

I assume you are kidding about this. Chairlifts allow people to sit and rest. They open the ski area to a lot more people. Back when my wife skied, I can guarantee she'd never buy a pass at a ski area that was Tbar only.

So resting on a chair meets your approval for upgrading from tbar to chair, but getting in more skiing by upgrading to a high speed lift does not meet your approval. Fixed grip lifts are intimidating to a lot of people. HS lifts open the ski area to more people.

I guess you could say that HS lifts open the area to people who won't ride anything else, but I'd say that that is not the same.

At Stratton there are 3 major lifts out of the main base area - the Gondola, the AMEX HS6, and the South American fixed grip quad. When it is crowded (or the gondola is closed, very common due to wind) they run the South American. The top terminal is visible from inside the midmountain lodge. There are times when we are sitting in the lodge and watching the South American stop every 5 chairs because people fall coming down the ramp. If that was a high speed lift it would rarely stop.

High speed lifts give me the opportunity to ski more than fixed grip lifts. Since we know that fixed grip lifts can be designed to deliver just as many skier to the top of the lift (and in some cases more) as high speed lifts, the so called crowding issue during busy time is nonsense. I am all for less time on the lift and more time on the snow.

 

[Harvey]

Looks like they have 2 HS of 12 lifts total. Sorry I thought you meant every lift. You also said "can make sense" vs do make sense.

I think HSQs out of the base for mega areas often make sense. On a crowded morning it spreads people out faster.

I also agree that HS lifts are likely attract people through marketing. Most accept the idea that they get "more time skiing."

Jason doesn't (seem to) want more time skiing but to spend less time at the ski area, getting his laps in quicker, so he can go home and.... what? This is surely true on weekdays. He's after a number of runs, not maximizing his time spent skiing.

Not everyone thinks this way. Backcountry skiers don't get nearly as much skiing as lift served skiers. They choose to earn turns because of the experience and potential for untracked snow, not the total vert. Having coming from a nordic background gaining 1000 or 1500 feet of elevation in 10 or 20 minutes seems like plenty to me.

Like I said agree to disagree. I am clear that I am in the minority on this.

 

[Brownski]

The crowding on the trails is what I like to avoid. It comes from too much overall lift capacity. That’s actually a whole different issue- skier density. Snoloco did the math on that years ago- acreage divided by uphill capacity or something like that. The winners were the hills you would expect. One thing I remember clearly is that the last thing Mount Peter needs is more uphill capacity. I guess the issues are related because nobody builds fixed grip sixes or eights or gondolas but if you’re comparing 2 quads with equivalent uphill capacity the difference is in where the lift stores the skiers- either in a line at the bottom or in the chairs. If it’s not crowded and both lifts are ski- on, you will obviously get more runs in on the detachable.