Western Canada’s First Chair Lift - The Red Chair

The Nordic miners who came to work in Rossland brought with them a love of skiing that they shared with the community of Rossland. Before the chairlift was built, skiers used a small rope tow to pull them up the mountain. And before that, they had to hike up for every run!

In 1947, the Rossland-Trail Ski Club decided to build a chairlift on Red Mountain. To promote the project and fundraise for materials, volunteers built a working model of the chairlift as a parade float.

The chairlift would be the second in Canada, following the chairlift that opened in 1939 at Mont Tremblant, Quebec. Construction of the Red Chair began in the summer of 1947 with only one small obstacle: the volunteers constructing the lift had never even seen a chairlift in person - let alone built one from scratch! As such, some avid skiers that happened to also be engineers working at Cominco (now Teck Trail Operations) designed the lift in the style of the aerial mining trams they were familiar with; after all, the basic principles of both contraptions are the same. In fact, the 10-foot wheel and 8-foot pulley systems used for the lift were salvaged from the aerial tramway of a northern BC tungsten mine. On December 26th, 1947, the chairlift opened and was well used by skiers until its replacement in 1973. The Club continued to operate the ski area for 42 years.

For More Information:

• Red Mountain Resort - History

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