High-speed, 6-passenger chairlift is headed to Wachusett Mountain

A new high-speed six-passenger chairlift is coming to Wachusett Mountain, marking the biggest infrastructure investment in the busy Princeton ski area’s history.

Wachusett has signed a contract with Austrian lift manufacturer Doppelmayr to replace the Polar Express four-passenger summit chairlift that was built in 1994.

Timetable and price tag

Construction is scheduled to start in spring 2025, and the lift is expected to be ready for the 2025-26 ski and snowboard season, with a ribbon-cutting on Dec. 9, 2025. The four-passenger lift will operate until the end of the 2024-25 season.

The cost is $20 million, according to Wachusett president Jeff Crowley . Financing is being provided by Eastern Bank and Fitchburg-based Rollstone Bank & Trust. The summit lift's name — a nod to Wachusett’s sister company, Worcester-based Polar Beverages — will stay the same.

“We continue to reinvest in one of the best medium-sized ski areas in the country,” Crowley said.

The capital expenditure will “ensure that our next generation can take care of the next generation of Southern New England skiers and riders,” he said.

Safety

The new lift will be equipped with the latest safety technology, including auto-closure, self-locking restraining bars.

While ski lift riders are required under Massachusetts law to manually close restraining bars, it is common for some passengers to leave bars up out of site of lift workers at the base.

A replacement for the weathered summit quad chair has been anticipated for about a year. And the Crowley ownership family’s plan to potentially construct a higher-capacity summit lift has stirred debate among Wachusett’s large community of loyal and vocal customers.

While most regular skiers and riders welcome a dramatically more reliable replacement for the iconic quad, some fear the sixpack will overload the mountain, especially at peak times on weekends, weekday nights and holidays.

Capacity and lift lines

It is still unclear how much new capacity the sixpack will bring and what the new average ride time to the mountain’s 2,006-foot summit will be and what effect the ultra-modern new lift will have on Wachusett’s sometimes maddeningly long lift lines. It now takes about 4.9 minutes on the lift to reach the summit.

“With regard to lift lines, this lift will give us added flexibility on those bluebird days when the snow is perfect and skiers are descending quickly down to the base, to be able to crank up the speed and load every chair to reduce the wait time in the base area,” Crowley said.

Like the new sixpack, the existing lift is high-speed with detachable chairs allowing easy loading as the chairs come to a near halt at loading and unloading stations at the base and summit terminals — the modern ski industry standard.

But Wachusett’s plans to regulate the speed of the new lift and also the capacity include sometimes spacing out and varying the loading of individual chairs, Crowley said.

“We had a lot of productive internal discussion about whether to put in another quad or go with the sixpack,” he said. “There's definitely a balance between uphill capacity and skier density on the downhill side.

“We’ll work closely with the ski patrol especially on days with a reduced number of trails, frequently loading every other chair or every third chair,” Crowley added. “We didn't want to see the next generation having to scramble and make sure that every carrier is fully loaded. So with a sixpack, we won’t get bothered if two people wish to ride alone.”

Building it

As for the complex construction process, some 120 Doppelmayr and subcontractor specialists — including helicopter crews to drop new lift towers — are expected to participate in survey engineering, excavation, concrete foundation and cable rigging and splicing work. Some Wachusett employees also will take part in the construction.

No summit or trail work will be needed to accommodate the lift other than some vegetation trimming at the unloading area, said Wachusett spokesperson Alex Arcangeli . With its three high-speed chairlifts, Wachusett has the most high-speed lifts of any of the state’s 13 ski areas .

The sixpack will be the state’s second. The Berkshire Express at Jiminy Peak in Hancock was the first, built in 2000.

With about 350,000 annual skier and snowboarder visits and 1,000 vertical feet and 110 acres of skiable terrain, Wachusett is one of the highest-volume ski areas in the country for its size.

“The lift was very expensive, but we're going to do our best to control our lift ticket prices,” Crowley said.

—Contact Shaun Sutner by e-mail at s_sutner@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: High-speed, 6-passenger chairlift is headed to Wachusett Mountain