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Snow Report

6"
Overnight
18"
24HR
18"
Storm Total

Depth

36"
Base
46"
Peak
131"
Season Total
View Full Report
Crystal Express chairlift on a stormy day

When will Crystal open?

What it takes to get the Crystal Express chairlift open after a storm

Diamond Peak powder hounds probably know the feeling well… The mountain has just gotten dumped on overnight. There’s 16” of fresh snow out there on the slopes and the weather is clearing. You wake up early, grab your fattest powder skis or the swallowtail snowboard and a quick bite and you’re out the door. You pull into the parking lot at Diamond Peak early because you never know when the Lakeview Quad will open to the public – sometimes they go early when the lower mountain is ready.

You take a warm-up lap or two on the lower mountain, cruising through freshies on Show Off, F.I.S., O God, etc., and then head over to the Crystal Express chair before 9 a.m. hoping to score one of the first chairs up to the top of the mountain… Only to find yourself waiting – sometimes for hours – while the lift operations and maintenance team gets the chairlift ready for safe operations after the storm.

It can be a frustrating situation, just knowing all of that untracked pow is waiting on the upper mountain. But given the complexity of modern detachable-quad chairlifts, there’s a lot that goes into opening the Crystal Express chair after a storm.

In this post and the video that accompanies it, we hope to give our skiers and riders a little more insight into everything that needs to line up to get Crystal open, and why it can sometimes take multiple hours to open on storm days.

(Watch a quick video that illustrates some of the steps needed to get Crystal open after a storm.)

It’s time to talk about rime

Tahoe storms typically come in with a lot of moisture, which is good for the snowpack and is why we often get snow totals measured in feet rather than inches. But all that moisture combined with high winds often leads to quite a bit of rime ice buildup on everything exposed to the storm – especially the chairlift infrastructure.

With detachable chairlifts, the carrier grips open as they come into the lift terminals and then clamp back down on the haul rope as they are leaving. Any ice buildup on the grips or the haul rope itself can interrupt this process, leading to chair spacing errors which need to be fixed before resuming operations.

So, to operate the chairlift safely, all of that rime ice needs to be removed from the chairlift carriers, the grips, the haul rope and the lift tower components that help convey the chairs up and down the mountain. On storm days the team touches 103 chairlift grips and almost 3,000 meters of haul rope.

This is a manual process. (Check out the video to get a sense of what’s involved.) Lift maintenance staff will knock the ice off the haul rope and chairlift grips with special hammers, will spray deicer on components within the lift terminals to prevent buildup, and monitor the computer systems that run the chairlift for any faults due to ice buildup anywhere in the system.

Depending on the amount of wind and the amount of rime ice buildup, this process can sometimes take hours. Especially if the storm is still raging and the rime ice is still building up as the team is working on de-icing.

Rime ice buildup on the Crystal Express chairlift tower

Rime buildup on one of the Crystal Express chairlift towers.

What else can go wrong?

Sensors, computers and power fluctuations, oh my! Modern chairlifts have hundreds, if not thousands, of sensors strung along them and in the terminals monitoring all aspects of the chairlift’s performance and feeding that information into the computer controllers that run the lift. These are critical safety components that will alert the lift operators if anything goes awry so our team can stop the chair and fix any issues before resuming operations.

But as you can imagine, snow and ice buildup can play havoc with these sensors and computer components as well.

Throw in the likelihood of power fluctuations due to the storm’s effect on the local power grid, and you’ve got a thousand combinations of faults that could get tripped.

OK, but exactly how long will it take today?

That’s the million-dollar question! And the best answer is: It depends.

Generally, the best-case scenario is about 1.5 hours when the ice is easy to knock off, the winds are mellow, and the weather is clear.

Worst-case is 3+ hours – sometimes even longer – if we’ve got clear ice buildup that’s hard as a rock and difficult to break off the chairlift components. Or if the storm is still raging and ice is continually building up as the team works to break it off.

What kind of day will it be? Until the team gets to Crystal and starts the de-icing process, it’s almost impossible to tell. Which is why you typically don’t see predictions on when Crystal will open on our Mountain Report page first thing in the morning.

Finally, after all of the ice is clear and the sensors and computers are all operating properly, the lift maintenance team will run a low-speed chairlift spacing lap to ensure that all of the carriers are properly spaced out on the line. This will take approximately 20 minutes if all goes smoothly, or longer if faults are found.

Other storm-day work on the upper mountain

Generally, on powder days when we know we’ll have a delayed opening for Crystal, we will try to get our Patrollers up to the top of the mountain to start the upper mountain prep work prior to the lift being ready. Sometimes this is doable via snowmobile; however, when it’s really deep we might need to drive a snowcat up there to groom a track for the Patrol snowmobiles.

The work that Patrol does to get the upper mountain open on a powder day could easily take up a (future) blog post in and of itself, but in a nutshell: Patrol needs to dig out the toboggan and summit “Eagle’s Nest” Patrol shack with medical equipment, conduct a hazard assessment of each run, dig out and raise 19 tower pads, assess and possibly dig out over a mile worth of boundary ropes, and set up signage and hill safety on the upper mountain.

Once this work is complete, they need to work their way back to the top before opening the terrain to the public. Which is often why you see a few Patrollers that need to jump on the Crystal Express chair before it opens to the public.

And then it’s go time! Patrol gives the all clear. Lift Maintenance says the chair is ready for the public. The lift operators drop the closed sign. And those waiting in line are rewarded with first tracks on the upper mountain.

Meanwhile, the Marketing & Communications team will update the status of the Crystal Express chairlift on our Mountain Report page of the website and send out a text update to all of those who’ve subscribed to receive text alerts about the status of the Crystal chair (please text the keyword “CRYSTAL” to 855-997-2089 to subscribe).

So there you have it. Regular powder skiers/riders have come to know that we are often the first ski resort in the Tahoe Basin to get its upper mountain open after a storm cycle. So the next time you’re waiting in that line for Crystal to open, show a little love to the crew that’s working super hard to get the upper mountain open as quickly as possible after a storm, because now you’ll understand why they can’t give you a precise answer to the question, “When is Crystal going to open?”

Snowy conditions on the Crystal Express chairlift

When the storm clears, ghost trees on the upper mountain.

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