Email
PrintAerial Acrobats
Replacing the iconic tram at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort required an epic team effort
Chris Onufer, left, and Hans Peter hold a line attached to a new tram car at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in late October 2008 as a crane lifts it onto its cables. Other workers balance along the cables as they guide the new tram into place.
(page 1 of 3)
Tom Winkler clambers up the ninety-foot ladder to the top of the new Tower 4, an airy perch that seems to waver in the gusty winds of this August afternoon. With a backdrop of Jackson Hole and the Teton Range, the steelworker for the Garaventa ski lift company hops along a catwalk overseeing a critical moment in the construction of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s new aerial tram.
Winkler and his ten-man team built all the towers and now are lacing them together with track cables more than two miles long, fatter than two inches across, and weighing thirteen pounds per linear foot. They will be pulled up the mountain, one by one, from spools in the parking lot, passing over the five superstructures along the way.
Today, a motor at the top of 10,450-foot Rendezvous Mountain is winching one of the long strands up the hill. For the first time, the new towers bear their burden.
With Winkler aboard, Tower 4 creaks and moans like an old sailing ship that gives a bit rather than standing rigid against the elements. Winkler can see the object of his interest coming up—a splice. Each new cable strung along the towers is pulled up by a discarded wire rope from the old tram. Where the new and old join there’s a football-sized bulge, a solid metal splice connection, that’s hankering to get hung up.
If this obstacle doesn’t run smoothly over Tower 4, it could ruin tomorrow morning’s coffee—and maybe the rest of the day—for a dozen European engineers.
Winkler watches with intense interest.
Creak, creak, chug chug chug, groan. The old wire rope runs by; the splice approaches.
Winkler radios to his crew.
A few meters.
Here it comes.
It looks good.
The splice rolls onto the Tower 4 wheels. The leading edge of this joint represents millions of dollars of Alpine engineering. I see ... duct tape. Frayed duct tape. Beat up duct tape. The type of duct tape you’d see on a ski bum’s wind pants.
“Duct tape,” Jackson Hole Mountain Resort mountain manager Tim Mason had warned me as we bounced in a pickup truck up the dusty road to Tower 4. That would be the first thing I would see, he said. It wouldn’t be holding anything together, he assured; it just made the football-sized bulge ride easier over the bumps as the cables laced the towers together.
The tower-climbing tour with Mason and Winkler revealed a project that’s anything but a duct-tape job. Looping up almost a vertical mile, it is a nifty blend of engineering, construction, and simplicity. It resembles its predecessor, which made Jackson Hole famous the world over, while stepping things up a few notches.
The new aerial tram cars are larger than the originals, carrying a hundred passengers versus fifty-two; they run up the hill in nine minutes, instead of ten and a half. The net result: the new tram transports 650 skiers an hour compared to 300 for the original.
The new tram’s physical imprint is not significantly larger, but its impact on the future of Jackson Hole will be.
The original tram lasted forty years in the face of Alpine elements and the odd piece of shrapnel from rock blasting being done to smooth out ski runs below. The new tram was erected in the same line as the original, has the same number of towers, and starts and stops at about the same locations; the new top, or mountain station, is just off the summit of Rendezvous Mountain at a point a bit below the old terminus. Known as a double jig-back tram, its cabins each dangle from a carriage that runs on a pair of track cables two and a third feet apart—much like railroad tracks, only flexible. Between each set of track cables, the haul cable runs parallel to link the two cabins in a continuous loop. When one cabin runs up, the other comes down. The cars are of a sleek, new design, with windows bigger than those of the old cabins, offering more expansive views of the southern Tetons. To conserve space and construction material, a moveable loading dock at the valley station shifts from side to side depending on which cabin is approaching, reducing the footprint needed for the building.
