Sugar Mountain to Celebrate Grand Opening of the New Summit Express Lift Saturday
So you want some uplifting news?
I drove over to Sugar Mountain around lunch to snap these first photos of Sugar’s New “Summit Express” lift. In case you’ve been under a rock or just not yet visited us this pre-season – Sugar installed a new lift. You can read more about it here -> Sugar Mountain’s Summit Express. (You can click to enlarge…)
The bottom line is the new 6-person lift will zoom visitors from the bottom to the top in around 5 minutes. A recent Instagram post shared that the trip was done in 5 minutes and 30 seconds to be exact. (I’d love to share that with you, but wasn’t able to get permission.)
You’ll note the gondola in the above image. The new lift system, installed by Doppelmayr, allows for the use of chairs and gondolas at the same time – creating the name “Chondola”.
Word has it that Sugar will open the lift THIS SEASON with high speed 6 pack chairs in place and then they hope to add some gondolas to the lift for the 2017 season. Rumor has it that Sugar might offer some VIP-type usage for the gondolas…but you know how rumors go. Regardless, Sugar is (AGAIN) way ahead of the curve in terms of offering the best product possible.
<Click to enlarge
Sugar plans to celebrate the grand opening of their new lift at 10am Saturday, November 14th with some Festivities. Not sure what is planned at this time…
By the way, they are almost finished refurbishing and relocating the former Summit #1 lift (which will now be called the “Gunther’s Way” lift. All of this will increase the top to bottom skier capacity by 2,000 skiers/hour making the uphill capacity 10,000 skiers/hour, highest in the state.