Sometime in the next month, Peter Landsman will travel for nearly 24 hours to reach Moose Mountain, a single-lift ski area outside Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
The Jackson, Wyoming, resident will snap photos of the dangling T-bar chairlift and then pretty quickly begin his trip back home. Tiny Moose Mountain, which is typically staffed by volunteers and closes when temperatures dip to around 20 below, will mark the end of Landsman’s quarter-century quest to visit every chairlift in North America.
“Every single lift is custom made and unique,” he says. “They each represent their own place and they have different sounds and different looks and each is just so cool in their own right.”
Landsman’s Liftblog.com database, which started as a journal when he was a kid and driven to the slopes by his parents, now includes photos and detailed histories of all the chairlifts, T-bars, platter and surface lifts at 750 resorts in the U.S. and Canada. This season he scoured the most remote corners of Canada and visited 61 of the 62 new chairlifts installed in the U.S. in the last year.
In 2022 the 34-year-old lift supervisor at Jackson Hole ski area in Wyoming concluded visits to all 500 U.S. resorts and turned his attention to about 250 ski hills in Canada.
The Colorado Sun: So North America is done. Are you off to Europe next winter?
Peter Landsman: I think going to every lift in Europe would be a multi-lifetime endeavor. I think I’m going to stick with North America for the Lift Blog database. There are a lot of new lifts being built and that will keep me busy. There were 62 last year and maybe 55 this year. It’s a decline but still a lot compared to pre-COVID. And there are new lifts being built for things other than skiing. There’s a new gondola going in this summer at Legoland in New York. It’s going to be nice to visit a chairlift without my winter gear. Then, I think I might take a breather. I have been traveling non-stop for five years and I could use a little bit of a break. I was on an airplane this winter for 22 weeks in a row while working full-time at Jackson Hole.
Sun: Talk a bit about all that travel to Canada. You have a unique perspective in the resort industry having visited so many ski hills. Most of the veterans of this industry develop expertise from one region or even one ski area. What are some differences you see between the U.S. and the Canadian resort industries?
Landsman: Canada is a vast country, I have learned through this endeavor, and there is skiing everywhere. Unlike the U.S. where skiing is only in about one third of the country. In Canada and some parts of the U.S., ski resorts are looked at as community assets, more like a public park than a business, even if they are businesses. Talk with people in some of these rural places and they say things like “my ski area” and “my home hill.” These really small areas in Canada, they get some help from the local and regional governments. The ski areas are not necessarily supporting large commercial crowds but even so, skiing and snowmobiling in rural Canada are really sustaining the winter economy. You know a lot of the smaller mountains in Canada are purely seasonal operations where maybe they do a bit of maintenance a couple weeks before the season starts but mostly they hibernate in the summer and fall.
Sun: How has your perspective of skiing changed as you moved from touring U.S. resorts to ski areas in places like eastern Canada?
Landsman: There are a lot of different ways to have a ski area work. There are so many different models in Canada, from nonprofits to the municipal ski hills to private companies either leasing public land or using their own land. But they all have lifts and snow. The small Canadian operations are a whole lot cheaper and they are much more accessible to everyone in rural areas. You see a lot more people skiing in Carhartt jackets and jeans and not necessarily the latest and greatest stuff that we see in our Western ski towns. You can ski in a lot of Canada for around $30 to $50 a day, which is quite different from the Rocky Mountain West. And it is absolutely true that Canadians are very friendly and welcoming. There are airports I flew into in Canada when the rental car place would call me and tell me they would be closed when I landed and they would leave the keys in the car for me. Every hotelier and restaurateur was so incredibly friendly.
Sun: Do people travel to ski some of these hard-to-reach areas in Canada, like they do out here?
Landsman: Europeans and Australians do. But in some of the mining and logging towns, they are not used to seeing American skiers, that’s for sure. Particularly in Quebec and New Brunswick, where English is not spoken very much. Do you know that Quebec has more ski areas than any other province or state in North America? There are 75 ski areas in Quebec. Every part of that province has at least one ski area. There are lots of places there with ski areas right next to each other.
Sun: Are they competitive like they are here?
Landsman: It’s a different dynamic. The mega-pass companies are not out there really. In general there is a lot more cooperation among ski areas in Canada. They have regional associations, like the Quebec ski area association, which has all sorts of joint incentives across all its 75 resorts. Joint lift tickets and lesson deals. All the things you don’t really have happen here anymore.
Sun: It was a pretty brutal winter for Canada, right? The British Columbia heli and cat outfits were hammered this winter with prolonged bouts of rain.
Landsman: Such a tough winter. Probably one of the worst ever for all of Canada. There were good-sized ski areas with multiple chairlifts that did not open at all. Mount Timothy in the middle of British Columbia in January only had a couple inches and they said they were pulling the plug and not going to open for the season. It was a good call because they got a few more storms but not enough snow to ski on.
Sun: You think it was bad enough for ski hills to start consolidating? Rough seasons in the West can open doors for deep-pocketed resort operators who can weather downturns.
In Canada and some parts of the U.S., ski resorts are looked at as community assets, more like a public park than a business, even if they are businesses.
— Peter Landsman, who runs the Liftblog.com database
Landsman: We’ll see. You are seeing more Canadian ski areas diversifying into summer operations with mountain biking and hiking and events and camping, doing whatever they can to get revenue without snow.
Sun: Resorts out West really went big on summer but I don’t think traffic is what they hoped. In the summer there is so much more to do outside the resort where in the winter, the chairlifts are quite a powerful draw.
Landsman: Yeah we joke at Jackson Hole that people are at the resort for about an hour of their vacation. They do a tram ride, grab a bite and then they are onto the national park or the next thing.
Sun: Are you surprised to see your database so widely embraced by the ski areas? It’s been so cool to see you establish yourself as an important resource — and really a vital voice — in the resort industry.
Landsman: I’m going to the National Ski Areas Association national convention in Texas at the end of May. I’m excited to meet a lot of the people who I have occasionally seen in the field but never really had time to visit with them. It will be fun to see both resort people and suppliers.
Sun: How many chairlifts are in your database now?
Landsman: Let’s see. (Clicking his keyboard.) There are 2,976 lifts. I have it all in Excel.
Sun: What do you hear from Lift Blog fans who use your database?
Landsman: It is kind of amazing how many resorts have lifts that are so old and they have been modified over the years so they don’t really have the full story of where it all started. I get a lot of emails from resorts asking questions about their own lifts.
Sun: I did a story last summer about a test training program at Steamboat where aspiring lift mechanics were ripping out a 1972 chairlift that had been installed by one company and upgraded by another. Yan and Poma, I think.
Landsman: Yeah I call them Frankenlifts and there are a lot of them out there. There is a lot of partial information out there. Manufacturers have information about lifts they have built and maybe from companies they have acquired but ski areas have incomplete records as those companies merged. I’m always learning new things. Readers will often comment on the site and correct the record.
Sun: Oh yeah? Give an example.
Landsman: That little ski area near Durango called Hesperus. I was writing about that lift — which unfortunately broke down and caused the ski area to close for the winter — and I knew it was reclaimed but I did not know from where. A reader commented that it was the former Black Chair at Mount Bachelor in Oregon. I did not know that history.
Sun: Hesperus is owned by Mountain Capital Partners — James Coleman — out of Durango.They had a lift breakdown at their Nordic Valley ski area in Utah this season too.
Landsman: Yeah but I bet he still had a good year. There was a lot of snow in the southwest this winter. I flew down to MCP’s Lee Canyon in Las Vegas and they had a 30-inch powder day. The lift operators were stuck in their cars on the road to the resort and I was pretty much the first person to get to the resort that morning. It was March 16. They had never seen that much snow. They got it open and a few people showed up but it was a bluebird powder day in Las Vegas. It’s so wild. You never know with skiing. You can have a good day anywhere.