Suicide Six, VT Closes Chairlift After Cracks Discovered in Lift Towers

According to the Valley News, cracks were discovered in 2 lift towers at the Suicide Six ski resort in Vermont this week.  State regulators discovered the cracks and immediately shut down the chairlift.  They found cracks in where the support arm meets the tower head.  Stress marks were also found in some lift towers that could lead to more cracks in the future.

The state of Vermont has requested all the lift towers at Suicide Six to be inspected thoroughly.  

The affected chairlift will be closed at least through Thursday.  A private company will be making repairs to the lift towers.

Just this past weekend, 2 people were taken to the hospital after a chairlift malfunctioned and dropped 24 skiers 30-feet at Timberline ski resort in West Virginia.

Only 12 deaths have been attributed to ski lift malfunction since 1973 according to the National Ski Areas Association.  There have been zero deaths since 1993.

SUICIDE SIX INFO:

Suicide Six is the name of a ski resort in South Pomfret, Vermont. It has some claim to historical fame as a very early ski resort. In January 1934, an improvised rope tow, said to be the first ski lift in the Eastern United States, was installed on a hill located on Clinton Gilbert’s farm. The rope tow was originally powered with a Ford Model T engine. By the following month, Wallace “Bunny” Bertram (a former ski coach at Dartmouth College who had helped build the original rope lift) took over the operation, and installed a more reliable electric motor. A few years later he moved his operation to a steeper hill nearby, shown on the map as “Hill 6”.  Bertram once joked that to ski down the nearby Hill No. 6 would be suicide. Two years later the resort was opened using this name and photos of Bertram can be seen in the resort museum in the base lodge. Devotees of ski mountaineering and backcountry skiing mark this as the beginning of the divergence of resort skiing and traditional backcountry skiing.^{[citation needed]}

Suicide Six was the location of the first National Snow Surfing Championships in 1982, considered an important event in the development of snowboarding as a sport.

Bunny Bertram sold Suicide Six to Laurance Rockefeller in 1961, and it became the ski resort for Rockefeller’s nearby Woodstock Inn.  In a 2004 article, the Boston Globe described Suicide Six as “steeped in history”, and now a “low key” location for “a taste of rural skiing”. As of late 2011, when Suicide Six marked its 75th anniversary, the facility included 23 runs and continued to operate as the ski area of the Woodstock Inn.

Suicide Six is host to the longest running ski race in North America, The Fisk Trophy Race. It was first held in 1937 and is a rite of passage for serious eastern ski racers. Notable past winners include Bode Miller, Chip Knight, Jimmy Cochran, and many other Olympians, US Ski Team members, and NCAA Champions. – Wikipedia