The lead engineer affectionately calls the Wild Blue Gondola “the Monster.”
The lift maintenance director calls the inner workings of the new gondola “a spaceship.”
On track to become the longest, fastest 10-passenger gondola in North America, Wild Blue will open this season at Steamboat Resort as a 3.16-mile-long modern engineering marvel.
During an on-site tour last week, Director of Lift Maintenance Kurt Castor was obviously excited, calling the overall gondola project “mind-blowing” and “jaw-dropping.”
A 30-year resort employee, Castor stood at the mid-load gondola station with a big smile and pointed to the adjacent Bashor lift, the oldest operating lift at the resort. Castor said that the simple 1974 Bashor lift was installed for $125,000. By comparison, the cost for the Wild Blue Gondola is in the double-digit millions as part of the overall $200 million Full Steam Ahead improvement project at the resort.
Wild Blue “is the latest and greatest technology that is in ski lifts; it’s ground-breaking, incredible,” Castor said.
On Sept. 27, workers from the resort and Doppelmayr USA, based in Salt Lake City, sent the first Wild Blue Gondola car up the top section for a test run. Engineer Peter Wiedemann, who has worked for Doppelmayr for 38 years, calls the new gondola “the Monster, in a good way, because it runs so fast and needs a lot of attention.”
“There is no other lift in the U.S. that has this kind of capacity and payload,” Wiedemann said, noting the only other comparable lift could be the three-section, 10-passenger gondola at Disney World in Florida.
The project construction numbers are impressive. The upper leg haul “rope” weighs 250,000 pounds. The 64-millimeter cabling is the largest made for single-cable lifts. Two huge spools of cable weighing 150,000 pounds each were shipped from Europe by boat to the port at Houston, Castor said, and ordered about two years in advance.
The tallest gondola tower is approximately 98 feet, Wiedemann said, and the longest span between towers reaches almost 1,200 feet. The lower section of the gondola that opened in December 2022 can run at six meters per second. The upper section can run at 7 meters per second, or about 15.7 mph maximum. That creates a total 13-minute ride from the resort base at about 6,900 feet to 10,384 feet in elevation atop Sunshine Peak.
The 68,000-pound Doppelmayr Direct Drive electric motor at about 15 feet in diameter currently is the largest gondola motor in the world, said Travis Iveson, job site supervisor for Doppelmayr, noting a similar unit is planned for installation in China in 2024.
The gondola system includes three massive backup generators made by Rolls-Royce at 2,800 horsepower each that can start in one minute if grid electric service goes down. Each of the generators has a 2,400-gallon diesel tank. That combined horsepower could be enough to power a small town, Wiedemann said with a smile.
Next to the mid-load station is a new two-story, modern lift maintenance complex including a computerized control room that can alert operators through a high-tech rope position detector if the gondola line has shifted as little as one millimeter due to high winds. If crosswinds become too strong near the Sunshine Peak summit, the two legs of the gondola that normally run as one can be separated in five minutes in the transition zone at mid-load station. Then the two sections, each with independent cables and drives, can run at different speeds as necessary.
Castor said gondola riders will be able to load at the mid-station when the upper leg of the lift opens some time in December.
In early September, some 50 resort employees were on hand for hours to help hold the gondola cable during the “marriage” process, or splicing of the two ends of the heavy cable. A team of six specialists from Fatzer, based in Switzerland, led the manual process of twisting the strands of the gondola cable together for a 300-foot splice.
Since the six-strand haul cable weighs 10.3 pounds per foot, many employees from various departments were needed to help with the job. To create the marriage of the cable ends, three strands were unweaved and then weaved together again by manual labor for 150 feet in each direction from the center of the splice.
Jeff Kelley, one of two Wild Blue master mechanics along with Lee LaPine, said after successfully operating the lower section of the gondola last ski season, “the nerves are down a little bit” for the launch of the upper leg.
“There’s a huge learning curve because this technology is a step above, so we kind of look at it more like public transportation,” Castor said. “It’s a massive machine.”
Kelley said the labor of stringing the cabling across the wide tower spans was initially done manually using about five sizes of incrementally larger cables in a weeks-long process completed by Doppelmayr workers.
“They start with a small, small cable, and they had a spool at the very top,” Kelley explained. “The mechanics literally have to walk it down, and then someone has to climb up the tower and put it into a pulley system. They run it through the pulley. They bring it back down, and they walk down to the next one.
“Once they get it stretched all the way down, then they can splice it to a slightly bigger cable. And they can pull it up using a winch that is on the ground. Incrementally they will step up the size of each cable until they get to a big enough cable that can pull this (final) cable.”
