Whitefish Mountain Resort moving Chair 5 to East Rim
Whitefish Mountain Resort’s Chair 5, which has sat idle atop the mountain’s south face for years, will be relocated and repurposed to the east side, the resort announced Friday.
Crews will move the triple-seat chair from Ptarmigan Bowl to East Rim before the resort opens for the 2017/2018 season, spokeswoman Riley Polumbus said, with work beginning in April, or possibly earlier.
“It just depends on the conditions,” she said. “It’s easier to move things over snow than it is to do it in the summer.”
Next season also marks the resort’s 70th anniversary, as well as the 10-year mark since Big Mountain became Whitefish Mountain Resort.
The bottom terminal of Chair 5 will be set at the intersection of Russ’ Street and Moe-Mentum runs, while the top will be located along the “knob” west of Don’s Descent on East Rim.
Polumbus said there are a number of reasons to relocate the lift, but ultimately the resort hopes the switch will draw more skiers into underused terrain in the black-diamond area along East Rim, while providing another route to access chairs 7 and 11 on the mountain’s back side.
“It’s just a better service for our guests,” Polumbus said. “It’s going to give another option and bring something that’s been out of use back into use. We’re utilizing our infrastructure better and it’s going to improve flow.”
The move also puts Chair 5 back to work after standing still since the 2014/2015 season. The chair made its debut in 1981, with installation costs at the time around $500,000. The addition brought more access to the summit, but as the resort added more lifts, ridership dwindled into the 1990s, when operators stopped running the lift full time.
Adding a lift to the mountain’s east side also is expected to alleviate skier traffic at Chair 1, as well as a bottlenecked area at the summit, commonly referred to as the Ant Hill, due to skier congestion.
“The Ant Hill can get pretty crowded,” Polumbus said. “This will help alleviate that.”
Whitefish Mountain Resort Chief Executive Officer Dan Graves said in a press release the addition to the east side will allow skiers to take advantage of early- and late-season ski conditions found on the upper mountain.
Upgrades will be made to the chair prior to bringing it back to full operation. Those will include a new electric motor, drive, braking system, hydraulic tension system, rebuilding the gear box and adding a restraining bar for each chair. Skytrac will handle the relocation process.
The chair has an 814-foot vertical rise, stretches 2,540 feet in length and has a capacity of handling 1,600 users per hour. The project is expected to be complete by December.
Reporter Seaborn Larson may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at slarson@dailyinterlake.com.