Solitude Replacing Eagle Lift with High-Speed Six-Pack
Updated:
October 11, 2024
Solitude’s Eagle Express lift, built in 1989, is due for a six-pack replacement next winter.
As part of a press release re-confirming a number of already-announced projects, Alterra announced an upgrade toSolitude, Utah’sEagle Express lift. The outgoing Eagle high-speed quad, which is now nearly 35 years old and reaching the end of its natural lifecycle, will be replaced by a high-speed six-pack in the same alignment. No other details about the lift have been released at this time.
Our Take
Solitude’s Eagle upgrade will likely bring reliability improvements over the outgoing lift, and the available six-place seating means that larger groups will now be able to sit together. In addition, when paired withthe Brighton Crest 6 lift going in at the same time,Cottonwoods visitors will now be able to enjoy six-pack chairlifts at three out of the four resorts in the region, after having none as recently as 2022 (Alta installed their Sunnyside six-pack earlier this year).
However, we don’t expect the Eagle upgrade to exactly be revolutionary. The new six-pack comes off as more of a maintenance play than an experience change—the current Eagle lift is one of the oldest detachable lifts in North America, and is ready to be replaced. There is no mention of a capacity upgrade, so it’s unclear whether the new lift will be able to shuffle more guests up the slopes (although if the capacity hasn’t increased, the new chair will likely also come with wider spacing that should reduce mis-loads). In addition, a handful of Solitude’s other lifts, including the intermediate-centric Sunrise chair and the mid-mountain Powderhorn chair, are still slow, fixed-grip triples or quads; while these chairs are in better shape than Eagle today, we’d argue a high-speed replacement for one of these should be next on Solitude’s priority list, and would go a longer way towards a palpable mountain experience upgrade.
Ultimately, Solitude guests probably won’t notice much of an overall mountain experience difference with the new Eagle six-pack next winter. But this is really by design, and this important upkeep project should keep Solitude’s overall lift fleet in good, reliable shape. It’s unclear whether this lift upgrade will be finished by the beginning of next season—several projects this yearfaced significant holdups—but in the event that it gets delayed, there are at least redundancies across the resort that can still service much of Solitude’s important terrain.
Considering a ski trip to Utah this year? Check out ourSolitude review, as well as our fullUtah rankings.
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