MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2020

89 words :: Nelson Phillips We all know that Blue Mountain is the third-busiest ski resort area in Canada behind Tremblant and Whistler Blackcomb. We all know it’s the biggest ski resort in Ontario, and we all know it’s one of the fastest lapping resorts in Canada. That last one has always been its claim to fame for me. Meeting riders from all over North America always yields questions about where and how you ride in Ontario with no stereotypical mountains and our lack of geographic vert, making us one of the bigger proverbial underdogs of the ski community. But I always have an answer to fend off the vert wolves. Head to Whistler, Sunshine, Revelstoke, or Big White and you’ll no doubt get a handful of killer runs in. The snow is epic, the trails long, the stoke inevitable. Ride at Blue and what you get is upwards of 60 runs per night on varying terrain. Glades, jib parks, cruisers—you name it. You can hit ‘em all in one night. That’s not so easy to say about some of the bigger resorts out west. To transport skiers to all of her 365 acres of rideable terrain, Blue Mountain Resort uses seven chairlifts and four carpet lifts to shuttle an uphill capacity of riders of 26,750 per hour. By comparison, Whistler boasts an uphill capacity of 36,148 riders per hour using 19 lifts (not including the Peak to Peak Gondola). What Blue lacks in vert, it more than makes up for in logistics-heavy, high-intensity shredding. Back in 1959, Blue installed the first chairlift in Ontario, the South Double, manufactured by France-based Poma. Blue followed relentlessly with its install of chairs for the next two decades. Between 1965 and 1985, they added the North Double, Tranquility and Apple Bowl Doubles, the O-Hill double, Inn Triple Chair, L-Hill Triple, Big Baby Triple, Easy Street, Voyageur, and Sugar Shack Doubles. In 1989, the resort installed its first detachable lift, the Silver Bullet Quad, which replaced the outgoing Tranquility Double. Apart from the legendary status of the Silver Bullet name at Blue, the new quad was also Blue’s first non-Poma chairlift. It was manufactured by Doppelmayr, headquartered in Austria and Saint-Jérôme, Quebec. “This was a new era in lift industry,” says Rob Sheridan, Sr. Director Mountain Maintenance, Operations. “[These were] faster lifts, easier to load and unload.” TECH COURTESY BLUE MOUNTAIN RESORT