The Red Chair

The First Chairlift in Western Canada

A2024.000.052.057 Red Chair, Spring 1953

The Red Chair opened to the public on December 26, 1947. Spanning 1,158 metres (3,800 feet) in length and 427 metres (1,400 feet) in elevation, the chair was a remarkable feat of engineering by a crew of workers – many of them volunteers – who had never seen or ridden a chair lift. The iconic chair opened up terrain to make skiing accessible to a whole generation of Rosslanders — and launched the club that would expand and develop the Red Mountain ski area we know today.

So how did it happen?

As the Trail and Rossland Ski Clubs gained popularity through the 1930s and 40s, talk turned to expansion – and a chair lift. At a joint meeting in May 1947, the two clubs decided to amalgamate to form the Red Mountain Ski Club, whose aims would include building a chair lift, a ski lodge, and an access road. The hill was close to town, and the new lift could roughly follow the route of the Trail Ski Club’s existing rope tow, reducing some of the time required for clearing. As Jack Mitchell recalled in 1991, “the profile of the hill was such that the top one-third would challenge the experts, the middle third was ideal for intermediates, while the bottom third offered a wide, gently sloping area for beginners.” In short, the site was ideal.

A2022.012.008: Red Mountain viewed from Granite Chair, circa 1965

The new Red Mountain Ski Club (RMSC) got straight to work. By early June, a project committee was formed, headed by Chuck Sankey (in charge of planning), Ches Edwards (hill clearing), Paul Jones (chair lift), Vic Walker (lodge), Jimmy Douglas (roads), Jack Mitchell (electrical), Sam Baird (finance), and Bob Greene (publicity).

These were early days for a chair lift; the Red Chair was only the second to be built in Canada, after the 1939 “Flying Mile” chair at Mont Tremblant, Quebec. The undertaking was newsworthy – and with some help from Bob Greene on publicity, the activities of the ski club appeared in a series of newspaper articles. Maclean’s Magazine reported, “fanciest trimming of all will be a new ski lift. With a 3,600 foot carry and a 1,400 feet climb up Red Mountain, the lift will beat anything in Canada, including Quebec’s Mt. Tremblant lift – a mere 3,428 long and barely 730 feet high.” Later, a Revelstoke newspaper reported of the Red Mountain chair lift, “They’ve done it! ….While we have hopes, the people of Rossland have converted their ambitions into reality.”

As usual, local businesses and individuals stepped up to support the project. Cominco loaned several pieces of equipment to the RMSC indefinitely, including an automatic compensator and the 50-horsepower motor for the lift. The local rep for the Canadian Westinghouse Company was persuaded to offer a sizable discount on transformers for the electrical system. Meanwhile, the West Kootenay Power and Light Co. donated 200 glass insulators to the project, in addition to other sundries for installation. Construction engineer Paul Jones supervised the construction with Ernie Wyder as a full-time foreman, while the volunteer executive continued to lead the charge, and teams of volunteers supported where they could.

Much of the technology for the lift came from the aerial tramways that were often used on mine sites. Rossland’s mines had only closed a couple of decades earlier, so many of the engineers and workers involved with the Ski Club’s project were very familiar with the tramway design. Chairs – built of steel pipe and plywood – replaced the ore buckets. Otherwise, the design was almost identical.

The local mining legacy also contributed to sourcing equipment for the lift. The 10-foot bull wheel and 8-foot tail pulley systems used for the Red Chair were salvaged from a tramway at a Cominco tungsten mine in Northern BC. The lift’s original tail wheel would be destroyed during a derailment in January 1948, a few weeks after the chair was first opened, but members of the club located a replacement at a disused aerial tramline near Kootenay Lake. In short, it’s difficult to imagine the construction of a chairlift in 1940s Rossland without the town’s backdrop of mining history – and the community of engineers concentrated around Cominco who contributed to the project.

A2024.000.052.059 Red Chair, Spring 1953

The chair lift, stretching from the bottom structure across fourteen intermediate towers to the top, was designed with options for skiers to unload at towers 5, 10, or the top. Later, an option to unload at tower 12 was added – offering skiers one last chance to dismount before “the Cliff”! The original design had 70 single chairs, with a capacity of 180 per hour. Skiers and sightseers were permitted to ride the chair downhill as well as up, and the RMSC would later offer the lift for summer events and excursions, too.

By September 1947, the framework for eleven of the towers had been built, the new road was nearly drivable, the site for the new lodge had been cleared, and volunteer crews were turning out in droves to clear the new runs. This was hard, physical labour. Many of the trees were felled with hand tools – when the club first tried out an electric chainsaw near the end of September, the novel tool was noted in newspaper updates! Through the fall, the club continued to seek volunteer labour, especially for the task of clearing the ski area before snowfall. “Rossland skiers are particularly requested to turn out,” the RMSC wrote in a plea for yet more volunteers, “as many Rossland enthusiasts are mortified by the smallness of their numbers compared with Trail workers.”

A2022.033.027 Red Mountain Ski Club. Photo by C. Robert Taylor of Photoservice, Rossland, circa 1940s

On December 7th, the motor was started up for the first time, and on December 16th, their new chair lift carried Paul Jones and Ernie Wyder to the top of Red Mountain and down again. Excitement mounted in the lead-up to opening day, as ready volunteers tested the chair and the skiing access it provided. On Christmas Day, the Miner reported, “one rider said ‘The trip is so smooth I wouldn’t hesitate to take my mother up.’”

The Red Mountain Ski Club’s new chair lift opened to the public at 10 am on December 26th, 1947. Bob Greene remarked in a press release, “as the skiers ascend in ease and comfort perhaps they will think of the hundreds of struggling climbs on weary legs that made their effortless ascent possible.”

The original Red Chair was replaced by the current double chair in 1973.