We decided to build the SkyTrack Quad because we're moving to year-round operations and
we needed a lift that would be a good main lift for the next 30 years.
The new SkyTrack Quad is an economically viable lift for Berkshire East that's not a high
speed detachable, but is a higher speed fixed grip, which is a perfect lift for us.
One of the things that SkyTrack brought to the table was a simplicity of design that
was elegant. So this lift features nothing but off-the-shelf available products. That
is invaluable in a business that operates over holidays, over weekends, where if you
have a problem and you need a part shipped in from Europe, you could be down for a week
waiting for some specialty piece that stopped being manufactured years ago.
The Sky Crane is something we normally wouldn't have done. They just happened to be a Sky Crane
nearby and so that helicopter was available and they could do the work in a matter of
hours versus a matter of weeks. So it's what we needed to do to get the job done.
I think total time on site was somewhere around three or four hours. Maintaining a painted
surface that's high in the sky, in the sun, and flexing a little bit here and there. It's
tough to paint a tower that's 50 feet tall and the best way is by far galvanizing it.
It's an incredible talent that these rope splicers have and I know there's a science
behind it but it sort of seems like voodoo when you splice a cable. The way it works
here is it's basically all hands on deck to help this guy out because it is organized
chaos. You have cables going one way and cables going another and as he works he's controlling
it like a conductor working with a symphony. It's an amazing day of work. It's a long
day of work. You're spinning an unraveling rope the entire time but when it's done you
can't even find where the splice is on them. The rope as it goes around the lift and it's
an amazing thing to watch and they do a phenomenal job. The rope ray engineers are an independent
lift installation crew and I know they've done hundreds of lifts around the country
and here they've just had the contract for the full build on the lift so they've been
handling every aspect of the build. They've done an excellent job with it. The sky track
itself is owned and operated by some of the leading lift experts in the country and it's
those folks who are responsible for designing and signing off on all the work that's been
done. The carpet is a loading mechanism that conveys the skier to the loading zone of the
lift under the carpet's power versus under the skier's power so it's a much easier way
for a customer to load the lift, a particular beginning customer. So the lift gains efficiency
in two points. One is that it's moving faster and the second one the carpet allows beginners
and experts to ride relatively stop-free. Its total capacity is about 2,400 people per
hour. It should be even more than that because the loading carpet will eliminate a lot of
stops so we see it as a huge upgrade in terms of efficiency in delivering folks up the mountain.
It's hard to say whether or not any electron that's coming out of that turbine is making
its way into the sky track quad. We're putting electricity into the grid. Whether or not
we draw out that electron we're still contributing to the net levels and we meter that through
an outgoing meter and an incoming meter. Base and annual net bases we produce as much
or more than we consume. I really think that this lift is going to be a foundation for
a business over the next 30 years. It's already opening up new activities for the ski area.
The mountain biking for one, lift ride, summer operation, it's going to be a much more of
a reliable foundation for Berkshire East for the next 30 years. This is a really high
quality product and I hope our customers are excited about it. It's going to be a workhorse
for the next foreseeable future of Berkshire East.
