Colorado’s oldest operating ski lift began service on Aspen Mountain seven decades ago when that resort was emerging as one of America’s most glamorous. For the past 50 years it has been hauling skiers slowly up the slopes of the modest Sunlight ski area near Glenwood Springs, running at half the speed of today’s advanced lifts.
Called Segundo, it is a relic of ski history engineered by pioneering Colorado lift designer Robert Heron, but the 69-year-old lift’s days are numbered.
Its modern replacement sits in pieces in Sunlight’s maintenance area, having been disassembled and removed from its former home at Arapahoe Basin last summer. Workers will begin pouring concrete foundations for the new lift towers this summer, and construction of the relocated lift will be finished the following summer. Segundo will cease operations in April of 2024, 70 years after it was first installed at Aspen.
“It’s a very safe machine, I just think it’s time that it gets retired,” said assistant general manager Ross Terry. “A lot of that is public perception. They get on this old stuff, some people don’t like it. They don’t feel as secure on it. And no matter how good you maintain a machine, it’s not going to run forever. I’d rather replace it before it retires itself.
“It’s the same age I am,” he added. “I was born in ’54, and so was this chairlift. It’s old enough to collect social security.”
The lift’s upper and lower terminals, and nearly all of its lift towers, bear Heron’s trademark lattice-work steel construction that reminds some of childhood erector-set projects. The two-person lift operated on Aspen Mountain from 1954 until 1969, when it was replaced.
According to a history of Sunlight Mountain Resort, written in 1978 by the late Paul Hauk, a longtime recreation official for the White River National Forest, Segundo served as Aspen’s Lift 3. It very likely was ridden by movie stars Gary Cooper, Lana Turner and John Wayne in the 1950s. “I’m sure there were some famous people who rode that lift,” said Tom Jankovsky, Sunlight’s general manager from 1985 to 2018.
Maybe not at Sunlight, though. Sunlight only has three lifts, making it one of Colorado’s smallest ski areas.
“Sunlight speaks to a different era,” said Jankovsky, now a Garfield County commissioner. “It’s not like our neighbors. Anywhere else in the nation, it’d be considered a good-sized ski area, but not in Colorado.”
Aspen sold the lift to Sunlight, where it went into service in 1973. The lift was christened Segundo because it was the mountain’s second lift; the area began operation in 1966 with one lift known as Primo.
Russ Brown, a Glenwood local who has been skiing Sunlight since 1971, remembers the excitement that came with a second lift.
“It was huge,” said Brown, 66. “We used to get some lift lines, and it broke the lift line in half. And, they cut some new runs to go with it. That gave us more mountain to ski.”
Mike Morgan was part of the crew that poured concrete foundations for the lift the summer of 1973. He was a teenager and he needed a summer job. His father, Lee, was Sunlight’s general manager. He remembers riding the lift for the first time that December.
“I didn’t know if I should trust it or not, where I helped build the concrete,” Morgan joked. “But it is still standing.”
Until the 1980s, lift chairs had “fixed grips,” meaning chairs remain attached to the haul rope and travel at the same speed for loading, unloading and uphill travel. In 1981, the world’s first “high-speed detachable quad” debuted at Breckenridge, an invention that revolutionized the industry. The chair’s “detachable” gripping mechanism opens and closes on the haul rope in lift terminals so chairs can move at a slower speed for loading and unloading than when they are traveling uphill. Uphill travel for detachable lifts is twice as fast as fixed-grip lifts. Plenty of fixed grips remain in Colorado but high-speed detachables represent the state of the art.
Segundo’s replacement is Arapahoe Basin’s old Lenawee, a fixed-grip triple installed there in 2001. This year Arapahoe Basin replaced it with a high-speed six-person chair called the Lenawee Express.
Segundo’s safety isn’t at issue. Colorado ski lifts are regulated by a state agency, the Passenger Tramway Safety Board. Like all other lifts, Segundo is inspected by tramway officials twice a year.
“They do an annual pre-operational inspection that is really geared toward the mechanical and maintenance aspects of the lifts,” Terry said, “They look at the machinery and your maintenance records. They go through it with a fine-toothed comb. Then they have an annual unannounced inspection that happens during the season, while you are open and the lifts are operating. They’re really looking at operator training, operation procedures, and they look at paperwork (documenting) the day-to-day operational aspects of the lifts.”
Terry says it’s remarkable how well Segundo has stood the test of time.
“Back in the day, they really overbuilt some of this stuff,” Terry said. “If you look at the drive equipment and the drive terminals, the machinery is big. It’s overbuilt, over-engineered, and that’s one of the reasons it lasts as long as it has. You look at the lattice-work structures on the towers, that’s trademark Bob Heron, that’s how he built stuff. It’s big and massive. If you look at the loadings on those towers, there’s no tower that’s loaded more than 4,000 pounds, and those towers would easily hold 10 times that. He really was a pioneer in the lift industry.”
Heron began his career designing tramways for mining operations in 1937. He designed portable tramways that were tested by 10th Mountain Division soldiers at Camp Hale during World War II before being used in the assault of Riva Ridge in Italy. After the war he established the Heron Engineering Company and was involved in the design of more than 120 chairlifts. He also served 14 years on the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety board, beginning in 1965.
“A conservative engineer despite his record of innovations, Heron’s lift designs were noted for their strength and high safety margins,” according to an obituary in the publication Ski Area Management, following his death in 1999.
Not every piece of Segundo dates back to 1954. The original chairs were replaced in the 1980s, Terry said, and the “haul rope” — the braided steel wire cable that carries chairs up and down the mountain — was replaced two years ago.
“It’s been a great lift,” Terry said. “You can keep it running indefinitely, but you reach a point where it costs you more in maintenance than it would to go to a new lift. The parts are all obsolete. You can’t buy parts, you have to fabricate them or have them made by an engineering firm.”
When it is removed, most of Segundo will be scrapped because it’s not worth selling. Structural steel will be recycled, and the 140 chairs that were hung in the 1980s likely be auctioned off. Perhaps the gearbox in the drive terminal will be worth buying for a small ski area in the Midwest, Terry said.
“If they do, great,” Terry said. “We’ll make them a hell of a deal.”
