One of our employees wrecked our panel truck. The truck was totaled, but we were able to salvage the engine and transmission. We decided to mount them atop the lift house as auxiliary power for the new Snowshed #3 lift. We connected the engine to the main drive shaft with a chain link connector. A cam clutch allowed the electric motor to drive the lift under normal operation, but the auxiliary engine could be immediately engaged when the main electric drive failed. We shifted the transmission to higher gears to increase the speed and agreed this was a better solution than lowering skiers one at a time out of stalled chairs. We spent that following summer adding auxiliary power to all our chairlifts. This and Barry Leete’s new controls allowed for a much safer and fail-safe operation.
Martel Wilson Jr. arrives
It is said that the person who controls the money controls the company. In the spring of 1966, that person arrived at Killington. His name was Martel Wilson Jr., or Marty as he was known. Wilson was hired on as Killington’s first comptroller. Armed with a master’s degree in finance from Cornell University, Wilson quickly became a significant force in Killington’s history. Some of us measured time as BMW or AMW (Before Marty Wilson or After Marty Wilson). He was charged with moving Killington’s financial acumen to the next level—and he had as much of a job ahead of him as I did.
Spring, summer, and a nearly fatal fall – 1966
In addition to the lift renovations, building a new ski trail (Escapade) and Snowshed 3 lift, we tore down the Snowshed lodge for an expanded new lodge replete with a sun observation deck and upscale dining room. If you look up the Killington 1 lift line, the Cascade and Escapade trails form the letter “K.” I would tell my kids that I left my initials on the mountain. Lee Ward from Bethel and his boys cleared and logged off the new trail. Ward was an original Vermonter. He loved to reminisce about shooting trout in the steam behind his home (Shooting fish is legal in Vermont.)
Wilson asked me, “Where’s Lee’s contract?”
“There isn’t one,” I responded.
“How are we going to know how much this work is going to cost?” Wilson asked.
“Marty, Lee has always done trail clearing for us. Right now I’m just happy to get the work done. I’ll let you know when to cut him a check.”
Wilson’s assistant referred to me as God. “God said to pay this bill,” or “God said to hold off.”
After we had set all the towers for Snowshed 3, we began attaching the chairs. I had instructed the crew to load only the lift’s uphill side and stop when the first chair reached the top. Paul Bessette and I hiked up the slope to observe the first chair go around the top bull wheel. All went well, and after a few chairs had safely rounded the bull wheel, Bessette and I loaded ourselves onto a downward-bound chair for a ride to the bottom. Shortly after we began our ride downward, we heard and felt a loud rumble in the lift. Then, silence and another loud rumble. We quickly saw the problem. Because there were no chairs attached to the cable ahead of us, the cable had popped off the sheave train and was riding in the U-shaped cable catcher outside the sheave assembly. As the newly attached chairs approached the cable catcher, they were sheared off and plummeted 40 feet to the ground below. With every sheared chair, we got closer and closer. We were in trouble because we could not communicate with Fred Smith, who was operating the lift from the base station. As we rode steadily toward the problem tower, Bessette and I discussed our options, including jumping off before our chair got severed. Fortunately, Smith had figured out something was wrong and shut the lift down quickly. Henry Biathrow showed up in a snowcat and roped us off the lift. That was a close call, but other things would go wrong with the new lift.
The final step in getting the official tramway approval certificate necessary to run the lift was to load the chairs with concrete blocks and run the lift. With the tramway board present, we did just that and watched from the bottom terminal as the loaded chairs passed over the first break-over tower. But there was a problem: Once the chairs reached the first horizontal span, they sagged, almost scraping the ground below. Poma, the lift’s manufacturer, had miscalculated the size of the counterweight necessary to keep the cable taut. The counterweight was ½ the weight it should be. Luckily, the sagging occurred just out of sight of the tramway board, watching from the bottom of the lift. They seemed satisfied and certified the lift. After conferring with Poma, we operated the lift during the first Thanksgiving holiday by loading every other chair. But now what? It was December and freezing— far too cold to pour concrete to augment the counterweight, which sat at the top of the lift. Even if we could figure out how to make it warm enough for concrete to set, how would we get a concrete truck to the top of Snowshed in December?
Based in Woodstock, Bill Alsup was the head of Poma’s United States operation. Since all of Killington’s lifts were Poma’s, I was in constant contact with Alsup. We had a personal and business relationship. Unfortunately, Aksup recently passed away while operating his crane in a western ski area. He died with his boots on! Back to the problem: How were we going to fix this issue, and what were we going to tell the tramway board? We decided to explain to the board that we had received skiers’ complaints about an alarming vibration in the lift and that Poma had suggested we add weight to the counterweight. They bought it. I devised a plan to use the ski lift to transport bags of dry Sakrete cement to the top. We could pull water to mix the concrete from the snowmaking lines. We constructed a large tent and heated it with a portable heater, placed a cement mixer on top of the existing counterweight, and added the required concrete bag by bag.
The next problem we needed to address was more reliable communication from top to bottom of the lifts. Our electrician, Gardner Taylor, was the keeper of a book, and he had kept track of the assembly of communication wires that ran top to bottom of each lift. Some cables were attached to the lift, and some were strung through the adjacent woods. The book was Taylor’s job security as only he could decipher the patchwork of wires. The blue wire that started at the bottom might have been cobbled up and connected to a yellow wire when it finally reached the top. This could be chalked up to Yankee Ingenuity, making do with what was available at the time. Taylor and his book had to be located if a lift stopped working to sort out the control wiring.
My solution was negotiating a deal with one of the country’s last privately run telephone companies. The owners agreed to supply and install telephone communication cables up each lift and in each lift shack. We were to provide and weld brackets on top of each tower onto which a telephone terminal would be attached. This meant that a workman could climb any tower, attach his headset, and call anywhere in the world. Killington needed only to pay a fixed fee for each terminal, a great deal. Over the following summer, before the installation took place, the private telephone company was sold to Ma Bell. They tried to get out of the deal but eventually conceded that the contract to install the cables and terminals had to be honored.
Not long after we solved the counterweight problem, a chair fell off the Snowshed 2 lift. The connection where the chair was attached to the cable had failed. I immediately got a hold of Alsup. He said he could take 25 chairs at a time off the lift and weld a safety strap over the top of the connection to the grip. I analyzed the broken chair and found a deeper problem. When I met with Alsup, I told him what I’d learned: that the chair support system was constructed out of pipe. From an engineering perspective, the pipe is intended to transport water and is not designed to be used structurally. I suggested that Poma change their chair design to use structural tubing. If you look carefully at any chairlift today, you will see chairs are made out of rectangular structural tubing—another example of the type of cooperation that existed as the ski business matured.
The Snowshed lodge was scheduled to be rebuilt that same summer. Wilson had insisted we couldn’t spend any money until after July 1st, as that was the beginning of the fiscal year. I explained to him that this was a steel frame building and that Vermont Structural Steel said it would six to eight weeks to fabricate and deliver the steel beams and columns. 6 – 8 weeks! That meant they would be delivering the steel when we had to have the building completed and ready for occupancy. Wilson refused to budge, and now I had another problem to solve.
I called Dave Mac of Mac Equipment and Steel and remembered he was a Killington stockholder. I explained how many steel beams we needed and carefully wrote the proper designations. He said he could get raw steel beams to us in two weeks. We would still need to figure out how to cut them to size and drill the holes necessary to bolt the beams and columns together. The drilled holes had to be exact. The connections could fail over time if they were even a sixteenth of an inch off. I found a welder from Fairlee, VT, with a special drill magnetically attached to the steel. Sure enough, the steel started rolling in. Every night, I would come back to work after dinner to draw out the fabrication details the welder needed for the following day. The magnetic drill seemed to be doing the trick.
We hired Mac’s truck crane to set the trusses on the base lodge, but that was only one job on our list. We also needed to set the towers and sheaves for the Snowshed 3 chairlift. Seeing as we had a crane sitting on our property, we chained a bulldozer to the front bumper of Mac’s truck crane and figured we’d tow it up the mountain and use it to set the towers and sheave trains. The operator asked if Mac knew about this. I assured him that Mac knew, and we proceeded to drag the truck crane up the Snowshed 3 lift line. I remember the truck crane operator’s look of fear when the front wheels of his truck occasionally left the ground. With the help of that crane, we set all the towers and their sheave trains in one day. The next day, Mac visited us and looked around the base lodge for his crane.
“Jim, where’s my crane?” Mac asked.
“Oh, Dave, I forgot to tell you we used it to set the lift towers,” I replied.
“You dragged my crane up the ski slope?”
“Dave, it worked perfectly.”
“How am I going to get my crane back?”
“Don’t worry, there’s a work road we can use to haul it out to the access road.”
Dave was unhappy with me, but fortunately, it did not ruin our friendship.
By late August, the new lodge construction was far behind schedule. We put all of our secretaries to work calling any and all contractors in New England, offering them the high rate of $5 per hour and free lodging to come to Killington to help us complete the building. It worked. The lodge became a swarm of activity. I remember two finish carpenters from Connecticut pulling me aside and asking “What’s going on here? Are a bunch of kids running this place?” I guess that was true. It was all hands on deck. Preston Leete Smith, who had come from a carpet business background, laid the carpet for the building. It was a can-do attitude, and “we can’t” wasn’t included in the vocabulary.
We started the 1966-67 ski season with all our lifts running smoothly, new controls and communications, and a new Snowshed base lodge complete with an observation sun deck and upscale dining room. I had the lift operators keep a log of any downtime experienced during the operating season. It was less than 20 minutes for all lifts combined for the winter of 1966 – 1967, quite a change from when I first arrived in the fall of 1965. With a little bit of urging, I was given a substantial raise.
Killington is known as the “Beast of the East” for its challenging runs, but the real money maker was the Snowshed novice area, which featured a great ski school run by Karl Pfeiffer, a ski shop, a white tablecloth restaurant, constant, reliable groomed snow conditions, and other amenities.
Slippery Slopes is an ongoing series written by James Kachadorian about the early days of Killington. Look for future installments each week in the Mountain Times.
Dave Mac’s crane reached the top of Snowshed to place the Snowshed tower in 1966.
