After being down for roughly a week and a half, the gondola at Stratton Mountain is operational again.
Officials at Stratton Mountain in Vermont announced in a social media post that the gondola was running again as of 11:40 a.m. on Wednesday, March 4.
The gondola was shut down around February 19 after the resort’s lift maintenance team discovered an issue during routine maintenance checks and decided they would not run the lift until it was fixed.
Resort officials said the problem was in the top terminal and was key to allowing the cabins to circulate around the terminal and return to the line to go back downhill. They said if it were to fully fail, the cabins would not be able to cycle through the top and resort staff would need to perform a rope evacuation.
While the resort keeps many parts on hand for maintenance and wear and tear, officials said there’s no ski area that is able to keep all of the extra parts on hand for every lift part, for every scenario.
In fact, officials said the part needed to fix the problem had to be shipped from France to Vermont. That shipment was delayed due to last week’s massive winter storm that slammed into the Northeast.
Stratton staff didn’t receive the part until yesterday. But they said they were prepared to quickly install it Tuesday afternoon and had the Tramway inspector on standby ready to do an inspection.
