By Jack Reaney SENIOR EDITOR
Just 11 months after Big Sky Resort’s construction team began planning the replacement of the Six Shooter chairlift, the longest eight-seat chairlift in the world is nearing completion.
The Madison 8 chairlift will nearly double Six Shooter’s uphill capacity and will reduce ride time by 30% from 12 minutes to eight. Especially on cold, windy days on Lone Mountain’s shady north side, heated seats and a bubble will marry comfort and speed.
Madison 8 is the 12th chairlift—counting five carpets—that Big Sky Resort has installed since announcing its Big Sky 2025 vision nine years ago. The two-stage Explorer Gondola will mark the final lift infrastructure upgrade in the 10-year strategic vision, and it remains on schedule to open for the 2025-26 winter season.
Caleb Teigen has spent three years as a construction manager for Big Sky Resort. Madison 8 is his first chairlift, and he said it’s been unique to see the collaboration from different entities around the world, especially Doppelmayr in Austria.
Teigen praised the Austrian experts for their work ethic, which has helped the project stay roughly on schedule: the resort’s original goal was to open Madison 8 for the 2024-25 ski season. Recent snowfall may put pressure on that deadline, with adequate coverage on the slopes potentially arriving before Madison 8 is ready to open.
“Right now we’re targeting December, and it’s looking towards the end of December as an opening date,” Teigen told EBS during a site tour Nov. 14.
Although it’s Teigen’s first chairlift project, he said lifts are relatively simple compared to the high-end finishes needed for commercial building. The parts are standard and available from Doppelmayr in Austria, and it’s a matter of ordering it and shipping it to Montana, he explained.
“Being a one-summer build, especially on the cold side of the mountain, definitely created challenges… Getting our geo-tech report in January allowed us to start design early,” Teigen said. On June 20, the construction team at Big Sky Resort still had not poured any concrete.
The resort began having conversations and drawing up designs in December 2023, and the resort’s north side closed two weeks early in April 2024 to allow crews to clear snow and decommission Six Shooter—the lift has been shipped to Boyne Resorts’ Sunday River Ski Resort in Maine.
Even after a rigging failure caused a cross-arm assembly to crash to the ground in early October, Teigen said Doppelmayr stepped up to prevent extensive delays, shipping a new part five weeks later. It was quickly installed, allowing crews to splice and install the haul rope.
The haul rope itself is two-of-a-kind—Vail Mountain in Colorado has the only other chairlift in North America with a Fatzer Performa-DT rope, after it was installed this summer on an existing gondola.
The cable is intertwined with plastic, which reduces vibration and can potentially double the life expectancy of maintenance equipment, Teigen explained. “Which makes the cable more uniform, makes it a lot smoother, keeps vibration down… and it just makes for a smoother, quieter, ride.”
Compared to Six Shooter built in the early 2000s, Teigen said there’s been “considerable” innovation to enhance safety on new lifts like Madison 8. Advanced computers allow maintenance to troubleshoot problems instantaneously as they are diagnosed along the line.
Madison 8 will also feature Big Sky’s first automatic safety bar, which will lower and lock as riders leave the bottom terminal.
When maintenance is needed, chairs won’t need to travel far. The new lift’s bottom terminal features a maintenance bay in the area behind Uncle Dan’s Cookies. Teigen said due to the remoteness of Madison 8 from the resort’s base area, it’s an advantage to be able to perform maintenance on site.
All 80 chairs will be stored indoors, split between the top and bottom terminals, with slightly more at the bottom terminal. In contrast to Ramcharger 8 and Swift Current 6 where chairs are stored in buildings beside the top terminals, Madison 8 has noticeably larger top and bottom terminals to store its chairs at the end of every ski day, but no separate structure for storage.
With roughly six weeks left, crews will focus on finishing electrical instrumentation and putting the finishing touches, before installing dozens of eight-seat chairs.
Before long, Madison 8 will add comfort and cut down wait time on busy days, giving Big Sky Resort’s “dark side” a new feel.
