Barbara Lawlor, Boulder County. Every three minutes the UH60 Black Hawk helicopter made a circle from the cement mixer trucks in the parking lot to the holes on the hill and back again. Their rotors stirred up gravel and dust as they lowered the bucket to be filled in the Eldora Mountain Resort parking lot.
On Monday morning, the Eldo Express chair lift began its life on the EMR face of the mountain. Excavation piles denoted where the new lifthouse will be, changing the footprint of the parking lot, giving the lift a straight shop up to where it meets the old lift path.
The lower parking lot is filled with 18 towers which will be lowered into the holes on the hill in a few weeks. Right now, the concrete will hold the stanchions in place. A line of cement trucks moved slowly forward as the first truck funneled the concrete into the buckets lowered by the chopper. When the helicopter headed up the hill, another bucket was filled, keeping the process moving forward.
Eldo Express will be a high-speed detachable six-person chairlift that will replace the Cannonball and Challenge lifts, the fixed double and triple chairlifts at the base of the mountain, which have been in place since 1973 and 1977, respectively.
"This new high-speed lift is another significant improvement that will greatly enhance the Eldora experience for our snowsports community," says Brent Tregaskis, general manager at Eldora.
The new lift will have a ride time of approximately four and a half minutes with more than a 1,000-foot vertical rise covering 3,829 feet in length and a capacity of 3,600 people per hour.
Summer is the time when the resort gets things done, prepares for the winter season, and this summer will see one of the most significant updates in its history.
(Originally published in the July 13, 2017 print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
