It was just about this time last year that I received a phone call from my daughter, Aimee, who lives and works in Idaho’s Sun Valley.
“Hey, Pops,” said the voice over the wireless that all young people seem to be using these days. “Stop whatever you are doing and get out here – the powder is up to my waist, the backcountry slopes have stabilized and the sun has been shining forever!”
Three days later, I found myself lathered in SP 45 and dressed only in windpants and a T-shirt, standing on the loading platform at Sun Valley’s Baldy Mountain, a wonderful, hardcore skier’s paradise, waiting to be whisked straight up one mile to the 10,000-ft. level for a gain of 3,200 vertical feet. (Note: Averell Harriman, who founded Sun Valley, later became governor of New York state in 1954. His influence and driving support resulted in the construction of Whiteface Mountain Ski Area, which has gradually become a first-class ski area and successful destination resort.)
The ski lift was a new one of a type skiers call a “quad,” so named because it carries four skiers at one time in padded seat comfort up the mountain at a speed not thought possible only a few years ago. There is also a lift called a “six pack,” which allows six skiers to be carried up the mountain at one time for even greater efficiency and cost effectiveness in transporting skiers and reducing lift lines.
Corrals with narrow wands, not unlike subway turnstiles, keep skiers four or six abreast, depending on the lift. The wands automatically lift, allowing each skier to move forward as the chair in front departs, and your chair bolts around the turntable only by some technological magic from remarkably slow to a creep as it gently touches you at the back of your knees – a signal to sit back as the chair regains acceleration at a dizzying speed to take you, tout de suite, up the mountain.
The chairlift design has improved greatly since a single chair (hence the name) was hung from a moving cable, and it was here at Sun Valley that the very first device was installed. If you are a long-time skier who grew up skiing down a hill and having to laboriously walk or ski back up, or have experienced the primitive arm-tugging, muscle-straining rope tows, such as the early one at Manning’s Hill here, you can appreciate how innovative, how amazing and how important the chairlift was to skiing, and how it propelled the sport into the modern age.
Sometimes we forget the pioneering efforts of those before us, or perhaps tend to ignore the historical and chronological events involved, or simply are not aware if we happen to be new to the sport.
What follows is an excerpt from an article, Going Up, which appeared in the February 2004 issue of Ski Magazine, and which best illustrates how skiing was transformed by the brilliant development of the chairlift. It was written by long-time ski racer, photographer and one of the world’s best-known ski movie producers, Warren Miller – a legend in the world of skiing. The excerpt follows:
A pickup truck, a clever railroad engineer and a pair of roller skates transformed skiing one dusty day in Omaha. Skiing forever changed in 1936 when a Union Pacific Railroad engineer invented the chairlift to move skiers uphill at Sun Valley, Idaho. Not coincidentally, Averell Harriman, owner of the Union Pacific, also founded Sun Valley to help fill his passenger trains.
Finally, you could ski downhill all day long and never have to climb back up. You could just sit down in a moving chair and be hauled back for as many rides as your strength, skill and money allowed. And all of this for only a couple of dollars a day.
When it was decided to build Sun Valley, one of Harriman’s first memos called for mechanical devices to take people to the tops of the slides. Engineers in Omaha, Neb., home base of the railroad, immediately went to work on variations of the ropetow and J-bar, invented in 1934 and 1935 respectively.
A young railroad engineer named Jim Curran, who had helped build equipment for loading bananas onto fruit boats in the tropics, was a member of the railroad team assigned to the task. To him, transporting skiers or bunches of bananas without bruising them presented the same problem. All Curran did was replace the banana hooks that hung from a moving cable with chairs for people to sit on.
By July, a mock-up of the chair was built in the bed of a pickup truck in a railroad yard in Omaha. Timbers were hung out over the side of the truck. Attached to the boards was a free-swinging pipe. The chair seat was welded to the pipe and was the same distance off the ground as a normal chair with legs. Curran’s team thought they could drive the pickup with the chair facing forward and scoop up a waiting skier. Driving the truck at various speeds, they could eventually decide which speed was the best to collect skiers without injuring them.
They had less than five months to design, build and test the chair before Christmas, when they were to begin hauling paying passengers. A decision on the design had to be made quickly, so expert skier John Morgan was summoned. He arrived with skis, boots, poles and woolen ski clothes. He had to feel silly sweating amid the steam engines and a handful of railroad engineers. At first, Morgan stood on a pile of straw as the truck drove up slowly and tried to scoop him up. Straw proved not to be slippery enough, and Morgan picked himself up a few dozen times. At lunch, someone suggested, “Why not add some oil to the straw?”
They did, and now John had oily straw stuck to the bottom of his skis. Then a junior engineer suggested, “Let’s try roller skates. There’s concrete out by the roundhouse that we can drive on.”
A couple of hours later the maximum speed for loading live bodies on a chairlift was decided – a speed that is still used in chairlift designs today. In the railroad machine shop, fabrication of the various parts began as soon as they were designed.
While this new device was under construction, Sun Valley’s publicity genius, Steve Hannigan, gave the remote Idaho tramway a name that is as famous today as the sport it serves. Looking to project a favorable image, Hannigan called the new people-mover a “chairlift.”
Not bad for a new revolutionary means of winter transportation invented in Omaha by railroad engineers who had never skied a day in their lives.