Why Chairlift Towers Are 'Perfect Park Features' For Mammoth

Mammoth Mountain is upgrading Chair 1, also known as Broadway Express, over the summer to be ready for skiing and riding this winter season.

For most people, this means a faster chair, but for the Unbound terrain park crew, it means steel to meld into features to slide on. This story is a follow up to last week's coverage . See Unbound's work in progress below.

Gabe Taylor, Marketing Manager of Mammoth Mountain, said, "99% of people are thinking how awesome it is to get back up the hill faster or whatever the chair is going to do for them. We just want to slide on some steel."

Taylor explained that Unbound began "using towers for terrain park features probably about 10 to 15 years ago, but it was so rare for the resort to swap out chairs that we just never had them."

"Now, when we hear that the mountain is going to replace a chair, we think, 'we need some.' It's really good steel, so there's a lot of people that want to use that material for other projects around the mountain. We're lucky if we can get maybe one tower we can cut up into two or three different features."

"It's ironic that a chairlift tower is the most perfect feature for sliding. It's a fun width. It's mellow without being too easy. You can lock into them really well. It's not always easy to get your hands on them, but when you do, like, we make sure that we make the most of it." This time around, the Unbound Crew was able to get two towers, or, in Taylor's words, "around one and a half."

Related: Mammoth Mountain to Use Old Chairlift Towers as Terrain Park Features

The most difficult part of the process, for the terrain park team, is just handling the towers themselves. Taylor said they can be cumbersome. "They're big, heavy cylinders, so they want to roll. You need to put footing on them and make sure that you get the blade holes in so that you can transport them with a forklift or snow cat."

Taylor explained, "as we get more creative with them putting bends and kinks in them, trying to turn them is hard because it's not just a square cut, two inch piece of steel where you can just cut it and weld it really quick."

"It's a cylinder, so you have to cut it, and then you have to make sure that that other side matches up. The welds are just a little bit more fine. We have a double kink right now that we're just finishing up. That was a lot of weld work to make it match up. There's math involved, for sure."

The "math involved" is important, because the Unbound Crew "can't just wing it." There isn't enough material to make a mistake and try again. Luckily, their team consists of over 30 people. Six were involved with this particular project.

During the summer, a lot of their crew goes on vacation, or works in the bike park. But Unbound still has three full time welders and three other team members.

Refurbishing steel objects is old hat to the Mammoth Unbound team. Taylor explained, "we just refurbished an old chunk of steel that was on the side of one of our outpost building." He stops himself, and says, "actually, I don't know exactly where it came from. But it's this big grate, and it is the most perfect feature. It's a four-inch-wide flat bar. I don't know why it came down, but it's going to be in the park next year, so win-win."

As for the pink paint job? Simple. Every feature was pink back in the day, but Taylor explained that "as different people came in wanted to put their stamp on the park, they went to get a cloud theme one year, and then some features were blue. A few of us got together and thought, 'why wouldn't we go back to pink? Everybody recognizes us because of pink rails. Let's own it.' That has come to fruition. People know when they see a pink rail, it's Mammoth. It's Unbound."

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