Vail Valley Real Estate Blog

Chair 10 or the Highline lift is known for its moguls and up until now, for the really long ride on the two seater chair lift.  The lift had been in place since around 1973 and took roughly 14 minutes to get to the top.  As of Friday, you can make it to the top in 7 minutes. On those cold days like yesterday when it was 6 degrees quicker is better.
Some skiers were upset when Vail Resorts announced that they were going to replace the chair lift.  Many felt that if the reward of sitting on that really cold, really long lift was that the runs are fairly empty as most people didn’t want to deal with a 14 minute long cold chair lift.  The average number of people the old lift could service was around 1150 in an hour and the new lift will double that number to 2400.

Despite initial complaints, on Friday, it seemed that most people were very happy; talking about how fast it was and that now you could do more runs than before. Today there is another foot snow due and no one is complaining about anything.
Of course, one of the wonderful things about the old chair 10 was that in 14 minutes your legs actually got to take a rest.

So it seems that Vail’s decision to upgrade the lift ended up being the right one to most of its fans.  Speaking personally, this skier loved to go where most people didn’t want to bother to go, so I must say, I’m a little sad to see the old girl go.

By the way, Vail Resorts wants to do the same to Chair 5 which serves the popular Sun Up and Sun Down bowls and they are awaiting approval from the Forest service.  This chairlift is already extremely crowded and would benefit greatly from this improvement.  If it goes through, the chair should be in place by winter of 2009-2010.