When it comes to our off-season improvements, one important piece of our operational puzzle tends to get lost among the buzz of more ‘exciting’ projects: Lift Maintenance. Our lift maintenance crew tackles a relentless annual to-do list in order to keep our five chairlifts safe and reliable.

This year-round maintenance regimen includes work on towers, grips, sheaves, gear boxes, brakes and motors, among many others.

But one of the coolest pieces of the lift maintenance puzzle is unravelling (literally) at Brundage Mountain this week. We are in the process of splicing the cables on the Bear Chair and the BlueBird Quad. Cables stretch over time, and to keep the lifts running properly, we need to cut out the slack and then re-splice the lines.

This intricate process requires a lot of prep work.

Our crews had to release the tension on the haul rope, lower it to the ground, and set up rigging to pull slack in the rope. Quite an undertaking.

But the actual splice is the coolest part, and that took place today on the BlueBird, where we removed 13 feet of cable. I can’t even come close to explaining all the ins and outs of this process, but here are the basics:

The cable is carefully pried apart so the experts can find the buried ‘tails’. They pull the end of the wire strand out of the rope and untwist it until it reaches the ‘marriage’ or center point of the original splice. Once all of the tails are unraveled, the marriage can be un-done (divorced?). At this point, the rope has two ends and the desired slack is pulled from the rope. The process is reversed and all the tails are re-wound and tucked back in. It’s an all-hands-on-deck operation. I thought is was really cool to watch and wanted to share part of the process in this photo gallery.

You can click on any image for a larger view.

Later this week, we’ll do the same thing to the haul rope on the Bear Chair. These splices are just a sliver of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ to get us ready for ski season. To check out more of our off-season work, follow this link to www.brundage.com/lodgeproject.

Until next time…

– April