Snow Valley Ski Hill is a small little ski area near Edmonton, Alberta. It offers day and night skiing throughout the winter, with 4 lifts and 8 runs for skiers and snowboarders to cruise. While it might be a fairly unassuming area, it’s home to one of the weirdest and most unique chairlifts you’ll see in North America, the Wish Bone Quad pulse chairlift.
Pulse Chairlift
There’s two main categories you’ll find when looking at chairlifts (just chairlifts, we’re not talking surface lifts, gondolas, or trams). Fixed-grip chairlifts feature chairs that are permanently attached to the cable. This offers comfort with little maintenance required, but they often need to be run at a slower pace to allow for easy loading and unloading (loading carpets allow these lifts to run a bit faster).
With detachable chairlifts, on the other hand, the chairs detach from the cable at the bottom and top terminals. This function allows the chairs to crawl through the terminals, creating a comfortable loading and unloading experience before reaching breakneck speeds on the way up and down. With this setup, detachable chairlifts can run up to and around 6 meters per second.
The Pulse Chairlift creates and interesting and happy medium between the two. Snow Valley Ski Hill doesn’t have the capacity to require a high-speed detachable, but those higher speeds are still attractive to visitors. So the Wish Bone Quad features 2 groupings of chairs on opposite ends of the cable. While unloading/loading, the lift spins at around .8m/s. Once the last chair has left the terminal, it speeds up to around 5m/s for about
17.5 seconds. Then it slows down again, allowing guests to once again load and unload with ease and comfort.
With this setup, Snow Valley can offer a high speed experience without the need for the costly and time-consuming maintenance that’s often required to run a detachable. It truly is a perfect and unique medium.
