WA ski hill to retire its loveseat-sized chairlift after final season

SNOQUALMIE PASS, Wash. – Successfully loading the two-person Edelweiss Chair at Alpental ski area is an exercise in hand-eye-butt coordination.

Skiers and snowboarders have to look over their shoulders, crouch and extend an arm backward. As the chair swings around, the lift operator “bumps” the chair by grabbing onto the back to stabilize and guide it into place. Then in one fell swoop, riders grip the chair’s center post and sit down while rocking their ski tips or board nose upward as they’re hoisted abruptly into the sky. If they misjudge their positioning or don’t hold on tightly enough, they’ll take a tumble instead.

Even seasoned skiers and boarders can get tripped up by Edelweiss, also known as Chair 2, which rises 1,100 vertical feet to reach the Summit at Snoqualmie’s most challenging terrain, where steep chutes, bowls and cliffs unfurl across the north face of Denny Mountain. For the Alpental faithful, Chair 2 is a sacred conveyance – it’s the only way to the top.

But this winter is the last run for loveseat-sized Chair 2. Next summer, Summit management will replace the Riblet double with a more modern triple chairlift. While the new three-seater will ease Chair 2’s long lift lines, the demise of Summit’s Spokane-built Riblet will mark another lost piece of Washington’s industrial mark on international skiing.

Washington’s Riblets are coming down at a rapid pace, with six removed in the past seven years. There are just 23 Riblets left across the state’s ski resorts. With seven Riblets, the Summit at Snoqualmie has the second-largest concentration of the lifts at any ski area in the world, behind Michigan’s Big Powderhorn.

“We have a lot of affection for our Riblet doubles,” Summit general manager Guy Lawrence said. “But modern chairs are going to run more efficiently and dependably.”

Washington’s remaining Riblets, especially double chairs like Edelweiss, are a tangible link to a wilder and simpler time in skiing – one with looser safety rules and smaller crowds. Even if shiny new lifts with user-friendly features like loading conveyor belts are welcome investments, Riblet double-seaters prompt enough nostalgia from local skiers and snowboarders that they will shell out to acquire a decommissioned chair at auctions.

Seattle-raised Peter Landsman, editor of chairlift encyclopedia Lift Blog, is one of them, having spent the first 10 years of his skiing life riding Riblets at the Summit. Landsman, who works in lift operations at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, bought a Riblet double from Mt. Baker in 2002. It’s the only lift chair he owns, a considerable endorsement from someone who has ridden every chairlift in the U.S.

Why the attachment?

“The center posts are an iconic design,” he said. “And there’s no safety bar. It’s just you and the mountains.”

Spokane’s “forgotten genius,” the Henry Ford of chairlifts

Edelweiss, like some 500 other chairlifts around the world, was built by the Spokane-based Riblet Tramway Company. The century-old company went out of business in 2003, which means new chairlifts will not bear the once-proud Evergreen State brand’s name. Today the global inventory of this made-in-Washington hardware has dwindled to 237, according to Landsman.

Before skiers, Riblet catered to miners. In the 1890s, Spokane engineer Byron Riblet designed and installed aerial tramways to ferry ore down mountains in interior British Columbia. A journalist’s 1903 account of soaring through the air in an empty ore bucket may be the world’s first documented chairlift ride.

In 1908, Riblet and his two brothers consolidated their eponymous tramway company in Spokane and made a fortune selling trams to the mining industry. While Royal Riblet, who commissioned the imposing Riblet Mansion, is now the better-known brother, local Spokane historian Chuck King considers Byron a “forgotten genius” who he spotlights in a 2023 episode of “The King’s Guide.”

The business cratered during the Great Depression, until eureka struck again. Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood enlisted Riblet to build a conveyance for skiers. The Magic Mile chairlift that debuted in 1939 positioned Riblet for a renaissance during the postwar ski boom. Under president Tony Sowder’s leadership, Riblet Tramway Company dominated the market for chairlifts. (Sowder’s son, Douglas, served as the company’s last executive.) As the Ski Journal put Riblet’s aspirations in a 2014 article, Riblet’s assembly line aspirations made him the “Henry Ford of Skiing.”

“Riblet’s philosophy was that farmers and loggers were the ones working on the chairlift,” said Bellingham resident Angelo “Zop” Zopolos, 74, a retired lift operations specialist who has installed and maintained Riblets across the West Coast. “If they made them too technical, nobody would buy them.”

In practice, that meant the loggers and farmers moonlighting at ski areas during the winter could find spare parts at hardware stores and auto body shops. Riblet’s ease of repair in its heyday contrasts with today’s vertically integrated market leaders, Leitner-Poma, a French company with a North American factory in Colorado, and Doppelmayr, an Austrian firm whose U.S. headquarters are in Salt Lake City. Much like John Deere’s proprietary repair policies, if a new lift breaks down, ski areas with modern technology must buy replacement parts from the manufacturer.

Zopolos grew up in Chehalis, Washington, and learned to ski at White Pass, inspired by “Ski Nanny,” a weekly KING 5 show by cartoonist Bob Cram. Having picked up mechanical skills from his father, a refrigerator technician, he hung around the Highway 12 ski area and worked on his first Riblet in 1968 under the tutelage of David Mahre, father of Washington’s famed Olympic twins.

Over the course of his career, Zopolos installed or maintained Riblets from Alyeska and Arctic Valley, Alaska, to Keystone and Breckenridge, Colorado, in addition to a stint at Mission Ridge. He spent 43 years as a Riblet whisperer at Mt. Baker Ski Area, which has retired five Riblets since 2001 (Chairs 2 and 8 are still standing).

Zopolos had a front-row seat to Riblet’s rise and fall. Where Riblet was once the innovator, Doppelmayr picked up the mantle in 1981 with the world’s first detachable quad chairlift. Riblet chairs are fixed grip, meaning the chairlift’s grip is woven into the haul rope. (Other styles of fixed grip chairs are clamped onto the rope.)

Detachable chairlifts have a spring grip that can attach and detach from the haul rope quickly. They can run at high speeds as they ascend or descend, then slow down when going through the top or bottom boarding stations. This feature makes them faster and more efficient at moving large crowds than fixed-grip chairs, which must stop every chair when, say, someone misjudges loading Alpental’s Edelweiss Chair.

Riblet had a balsa wood model of a detachable grip in its Spokane headquarters, Zopolos claims, but decided not to pursue an alternative to its tried and true model. As detachable chairlifts took off in popularity, demand for fixed grips waned.

“Slowly it became an undesirable commodity,” Zopolos said. “It wasn’t comfortable, the wind moved the lightweight chair, and the center post made it hard to get in and out.”

Ski areas have also prioritized upgrading chairs at base areas to move crowds more swiftly onto the upper mountain. While Riblet’s largest chairlift seated four, its most popular model was the double. Leitner-Poma and Doppelmayr invented the six- and eight-seater chairlifts in the late 1990s.

As bigger and faster detachable chairlifts became more popular, Washington’s homegrown manufacturer closed its doors in May 2003.

“The limited market for fixed-grip chairlifts simply does not allow Riblet to retain the specialized personnel and facilities required to build new lifts,” then-President Douglas Sowder wrote in a news release.

Highest bidder

Doppelmayr’s name now adorns the new Wildside chair at Summit West as well as the recently installed Sessel triple at Alpental and Hidden Valley triple at Summit East. All three were once Riblets.

So where does a Riblet go when it ascends to ski area heaven? These days, to the auction block.

Lift Blog editor Landsman bought his Baker memento for a mere $35 back in 2002, but today’s vintage chairlifts are a hot commodity for the public, if not for ski area operators.

Stevens Pass auctioned off the old Brooks (a Riblet double) for $300 a pop in 2019, selling out in less than a minute. Bids for White Pass’s Pigtail 2 chairlift last year started at $1,000. First installed in 1958, it was the second-oldest Riblet operating in the state (the oldest is Chair 1 at Mt. Spokane Ski & Snowboard Park, installed in 1956).

What do you do with an old Riblet double? Some hang it as a decorative object, many turn it into furniture. Stevens Pass Ski Patrol Director Angela Seidling was offered a spare from the old Kehr’s Chair, a Riblet double that came down two years ago to make way for a new fixed-grip four-seater. She welded it into a bench at her Index home with the help of a neighbor, a retired Stevens Pass lift mechanic.

As a skier, she has a fondness for the Riblet.

“Some of the most delightful chair rides I’ve had with folks are on the two-seater, whether with another patroller or a random member of the public that I’ve never seen again,” she said. “There’s something special about being cozied up on a Riblet with just one other person and that center bar in between you.”

As a snow safety professional, she’s thankful to see Stevens Pass swap out old chair lifts that lack safety bars for guests and tower platforms for ski patrol to stand on in the event of a lift evacuation – like the one she led in February 2020 on the 7th Heaven chair. That Riblet double is by some measurements North America’s steepest chairlift. Getting guests off safely required a technical belay down from the broken chair, sometimes negotiating 50-degree slopes.

Seidling’s attitude is common among Washington’s ski-area managers.

“There will always be lingering nostalgia, but we are happy to move on to modern equipment to increase efficiency and guest experience,” Crystal Mountain’s operations director Peter Dale wrote via email.

Once Summit’s Edelweiss comes down next summer, 7th Heaven will reign as the last Riblet double to provide lift-accessed skiing to Washington’s most advanced inbound terrain.

“7th Heaven is a cherished lift at Stevens Pass,” Stevens Pass general manager Ellen Galbraith wrote via email. “The lift received a significant upgrade in 1996 and Stevens Pass does not currently have plans to replace the lift.”

To that end, 7th Heaven may remain a vintage chairlift enthusiast pilgrimage site for years to come.

“A Riblet is kind of like a classic car,” Landsman said. “It may become obsolete from a capacity and rider comfort perspective, and you have to put a lot of care and maintenance into it, but you could keep it running forever.”

Back atop Alpental, the Edelweiss chair’s days are numbered.

Ride it while you can, then get your checkbook ready in the offseason. A planned auction, likely next fall, is sure to garner strong interest. For many skiers and snowboarders, nostalgia is almost priceless.