Sun Peaks residents and visitors can look forward to a new chairlift for the 2024/25 winter season, reaching the highest elevation of any current lift on the mountain.
“It’s a very desirable spot of terrain in the upper Alpine that hasn’t really been too accessible in the last couple of years,” said director of communications for Sun Peaks Resort LLP (SPR), Christina Antoniak about the expanse of skiable land the chair will open up.
This area had a T-bar built in 1993 that stopped running in winter 2020/21 and this new addition will hopefully spread skier traffic a bit wider on the days when people want to ski at high elevation, Antoniak said.
An update on the progress
After three years of putting in access roads, clearing the lift line, putting cables in the ground and pouring concrete foundations for the 16 towers connecting the lift line, the final stage of construction is upon us.
Every new lift has taken a similar amount of time to develop and is never rushed, senior director of mountain operations Erik Meertens said.
“We try to do the trail construction and road building a year or two in advance,” he explained. “It’s got time to dry up, it’s got time to be used, packed in and it’s all well planned.”
Part of the process of building a new chairlift includes going through necessary planning stage steps. This includes consultations with First Nations, the mountain resorts branch and the Ministry of Forests, as well as completing environmental, archeological and wildlife assessments if necessary.
Equipment for the chair has been arriving weekly according to Meertens, ahead of schedule.
“Ninety per cent of the station parts are here. All the carriers, also known as the chairs, are arriving on June 5.”
The construction crew will be putting components together from the P5 parking lot where parts are currently being stored. On June 10, they’ll be trucking it all up the mountain and putting it into place.
“There’ll be some temporary closures through the hiking trails in that zone, just based on whatever phase in the project and what the construction needs are at the time,” Antoniak said about this summer.
The time frame for this stage of the project is June 15 to Sept. 15, the most effective window for construction given the dryer weather.
A peek into the final product
Even when there was a T-bar, Antoniak said there was a zone of terrain that was still not accessible by lift. This lift will be double the length of the old T-bar increasing the skiable acreage in the West Bowl.
Hiking over to the West Bowl from the top of the Crystal or Burfield chair lifts was previously how skiers explored, she explained. Now with a six-minute ride up, the new lift will make this area much more accessible.
In the fall, Antoniak said the resort will be releasing information on the trail development in that zone.
The lift itself will have carrier parking, Meertens said.
“The chairs at night come off the line and they get parked at the bottom, underneath a covered parking rail,” Meertens said. “What this is designed to do is avoid any delays for starting that lift up in the mornings.”
The resort’s master plan included this lift and many others when mapped out first in 1993.
“A number of different factors lead into which lifts will be developed at one time,” Antoniak said. “There’s real estate considerations, skier traffic flow considerations, economic considerations….”
Going off of these considerations , the timing was right to get things moving on the West Bowl chairlift.
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