Peter Landsman is a lift supervisor at Jackson Hole and in his free time runs a website called Lift Blog, where he documents aerial transportation across the world.
Landsman recently finished his goal of visiting every chairlift, gondola, and aerial tramway in North America. It involved visiting every ski area on the continent as well as other locations.
“Lagoon [Amusement Park] there in Utah... has a chair lift,” Landsman said. “It just goes completely flat across the park. Increasingly, gondolas are being used for public transportation. In Portland, Oregon there’s an aerial tram that goes from a kind of waterfront neighborhood up to a hospital, and that’s used for public transportation. So there are a lot of different uses for chairlifts and gondolas other than just skiing.”
In total, Landsman has visited nearly 3,000 lifts. He wasn’t able to ride all of them.
“There are a few lifts that sometimes don’t operate very often,” Landsman said. “For example, on Park City Mountain… Eaglet, which is a little chairlift used for the Olympics in 2002, that very rarely operates. So occasionally, there’s a lift that I just have to kind of ski under or hike up to visit and count that as riding.”
Landsman says his favorite thing about lifts is they are all unique.
“Every single lift is designed for a specific place on a specific mountain,” he said. “One that stands out technologically is called the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, which is up at Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia. And it’s the only “3S” gondola in North America currently. So it’s got three different cables and it goes between two mountains and the highest point, it’s 1,400 feet in the air. So it’s a very unique lift particularly for North America and probably my personal favorite.”
Landsman says he’s excited to return to Utah soon. Many of the state’s ski areas, including Park City Mountain and Deer Valley Resort, have new lifts under construction that he will have add to his list.
