Grove Koger
I’ve adapted today’s post from an article I wrote about a famed Idaho skiing resort for the Winter 2012 issue of Boise.
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As the opening day for Sun Valley approached in late 1936, engineers for the resort’s developer, Union Pacific Railroad, were busy figuring out how to get prospective skiers to the tops of the slopes. The skiiers could, of course, work themselves up using what was called the “herringbone hump,” but there were various kinds of lifts already in existence that made the job easier—made it, in fact, into something other than a job.
The first ski tow seems to have been put into operation in Germany in 1908, and a similar device was used for the first time in this country in Woodstock, Vermont, in 1934. Sun Valley’s marketing director, Steve Hannagan, hoped to improve upon these basic models, envisioning what he referred to vaguely as “mechanical devices to take people to the top of the slides.” But structural engineer Jim Curran (whom you see below) had a more concrete idea, an idea for something completely new—a series of chairs hanging from moving cables.
Curran had once worked for an ironworks that built hoists for loading bunches of bananas onto fruit boats in Honduras. Why, he wondered, couldn’t chairs be mounted in place of the hooks that the bananas hung from? At first, Curran’s idea was rejected as being too dangerous, but Harvard ski coach Charlie Proctor, who had been recruited to help design the runs, saw the idea’s potential and gave the young engineer the go-ahead.
Under Curran’s direction, a mock-up of the lift using a pickup and an ordinary chair was put together in Omaha at UP’s locomotive and railcar repair shop. Considerable time was spent determining how fast the lift should move, with workers roller-skating slowly across the pavement as the pickup and its attached chair approached them from behind. As it turned out, a speed of four to five miles-per-hour was ideal.
A prototype was completed by July, after which the engineers decamped to Sun Valley to build a pair of what would initially be called “chair-type lifts” on Dollar and Proctor mountains. Curran’s wife would later recall that her husband “was gone several months at a time working on that assignment.” Eventually, she and their children were able to join him at the resort.
“When I saw that big thing hanging in the air,” she continued, “I thought, ‘I can’t say no.’” The contraption turned out to be a “real thrill to ride.”
The 1936-37 season at Sun Valley involved quite a few firsts. It was the resort’s first winter, and while initially there was precious little snow that December, the world’s first two chair lifts were ready to roll—or, rather, lift—when the white stuff started coming down. And when that finally happened, officials quickly realized that some improvements were called for.
First of all, the chairs had been hung so low from the cables that trenches had to be dug along their path to give the skiers legroom. Just as importantly, it became obvious that the lifts should be built not in the valleys—where people, naturally enough, liked to ski—but on the ridges. As a result, the lower parts of the Proctor Mountain lift were disassembled in 1938 and incorporated into a lift on Ruud Mountain. And it’s that “newer” structure that today stands a little forlornly near the end of Fairway Road in Sun Valley—and that you see in our photograph at the top of today’s post.
Ironically, Jim Curran himself didn’t get a chance to try out the slopes that season. It seems that he broke his arm ice-skating, prompting UP to forbid its employees from skating—or skiing—unless it was in their job description.
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