Letters: The Moose Mountain Bus: A lift that goes somewhere

SKIING HISTORY

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Thanks for the article on all of the innovative lifts across history (“Lifts That Went Nowhere,” May-June 2022). It seems few have caught on to one of the most economical and practical of all. I only lucked into it about 30 years ago. To sell enough lots to purchase the land for Moose Mountain near Fairbanks, Alaska, I had to design and build a spec road up and around the mountain. Once we’d cut a few runs, we started skiing by driving up in my Chevy Suburban. We were making a lot of runs, and it wasn’t long before we realized we could simply charter local buses and sell lift tickets.

From the first season, customers started saying “this is wonderful, don’t ever get a chairlift.” So we haven’t. And we’ve been enjoying our area now for 30 years, riding up in heated comfort. Capacity runs about 100 skiers/bus/hour. We run up to seven or eight buses on a “busy” weekend, and everyone seems to get plenty of vertical, even around the winter solstice, when we are reduced to just under five hours from first bus to last. We have no lift maintenance and have been operating well in the black now for decades. We’ve also discovered that when skiers arrive at the base cold, they don’t have to go in the lodge; they can just get back on the next bus and warm up for the next run.