GRAND JUNCTION — As skiers and snowboarders are whisked up snow-fluffed mountains on high-speed lifts, welder Zack Swearingen is in a desert-valley factory bent with a torch over what looks like a huge rust-colored rib cage — the bones of a new lift terminal.
Hammers ring on metal in this cavernous space. Huge cranes clank. Torches sizzle, filling the air with the acrid smell of melting steel and throwing out showers of sparks that look like the burning version of skiers’ powder sprays.
Skiers and ‘boarders — or “end users,” as they are called here — will benefit from all this work taking place in a town generally not associated with skiing. Swearingen and his 75 co-workers at Leitner-Poma of America make the lifts that haul them up slopes. They have been churning out the behemoth lifts from Grand Junction for 28 years.
In that time, the company has strung enough cable to reach the moon and back. It has built about 100 lifts and gondolas in Colorado. It has a total of 380 lifts spread out in those states with ski resorts, as well as lifts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The lift taking shape now is headed to Mont Rond, France.
“Most people don’t have any idea what it is to put one of these together,” said shop foreman Lance Moses. “People just wonder why it costs them $100 a day to ski. I can tell them why.”
Leitner-Poma recently moved from a cramped space in an old vacuum-cleaner factory into a new $15 million, 90,000-square- foot building. Poma of America — the company’s original name — started in the old factory when France-based liftmaker Jean Pomagal ski decided to expand into the United States.
In 2000, Pomagalski merged with Italian lift and ski-groomer company Leitner. And in a business web nearly as complicated as a lift to piece together, Leitner acquired a number of lift-related companies.
All those business parts recently came together in Grand Junction when the company celebrated the grand opening of its new plant at a time when a growing business is very good news.
“You don’t know what it feels like for a governor to thank a company for expanding business,” said Gov. Bill Ritter, who visited the plant for the opening and was welcomed by company officials from Italy and France and a Tyrolean band flown in from Leitner’s headquarters in the Alps.
“A little anonymous”
“We prefer to stay a little anonymous,” joked Rick Spear, president of Leitner-Poma of America, the day after all the hoopla. “When the lift stops, people start looking around — every chair is marked with the manufacturer’s name and a number — and then they say, ‘Who the hell is Leitner-Poma?’ ”
Spear works behind a desk where he displays a black-and-white photo of the first Poma lift — a system that pulled individual skiers on cables with their skis on the snow. It was installed at Alp d’Huez in the 1930s.
During that same era, the lift business was beginning to gain traction in this country. Colorado’s first lift, installed north of Gunnison in 1939, was a converted mine tram borrowed from an abandoned mine near Tincup, according to Bill Fletcher. Fletcher chronicles the history and modern expansions of ski lifts on his website .
Nowadays, detachable chairs, high-speed six-seaters that can move 1,000 feet a minute, gondola cabs, open cabriolets, re-engineered grips, finely tuned brakes and remote lift diagnostics make for a wide variety of smoother, faster, more reliable rides.
“This is fantastic,” said Rob Thomas, who works lift maintenance for Winter Park Resort and recently toured Leitner-Poma to see where his ski area’s new cabriolet lift was built. “The advances in how they build and assemble these things is just light-years beyond what it was.”
He wasn’t the only one impressed. Representatives from ski areas across the country and Canada oohed and aahed around a bullwheel — the 6,000-pound metal circle that brings the lifts around and shoots them back up or down the mountain. They gaped at a million pounds of metal sheets that had been X-rayed and scanned with ultrasound to make sure they are flawless.
Puzzle-like pieces
They had appreciatively observed flame cutter Daryll Taylor using computerized torches to slice precise, puzzle-like pieces out of steel.
“The workmanship is second to none,” said Jarod Batty, an electrical supervisor for the ski area at Lake Louise, Alberta.
Nearly a dozen companies used to build and install lifts in the United States, but that is now down to two. The largest company is Doppelmayr CTEC Inc., based in Salt Lake City.
Business for these liftmakers is slowing as ski areas, like nearly every industry, cut back on expansion plans.
“It’s going to be a slow year for ski lifts, no doubt about it,” Spear said.
Last year, Leitner-Poma built 13 lifts. The most recent was a vertigo-inducing sweep of cable up Revelation Bowl in Telluride. This year, so far, the company has orders for only three.
But the company isn’t limited to ski lifts. Leitner-Poma built the tram for Glenwood Caverns and a has a contract this year to replace a tram between Roosevelt Island and Manhattan.
It is also seeking projects in South America and expanding into new products. The company has the capacity to make MiniMetro systems, which are cable-propelled cars designed to move people through small cities or busy locations such as shopping malls, universities and airports.
Plans for a DIA system
Spear said he is working with a hotel owner near Denver International Airport on a possible MiniMetro system to carry travelers between the hotel and the airport.
The company also is poised to make wind-turbine towers. One made at the parent company in France already powers a small ski area there. Another is being erected at Mont Gros, Canada. It will power a ski area and double as a sightseeing tower. The company is monitoring wind velocity on top of the Big Burn run at Snowmass to evaluate the possibility of putting a wind tower there.
For now, workers are still busy cutting, welding, sanding, assembling and painting a mechanism that will be welcomed by French snow enthusiasts next winter. And as the workers here note, those skiers probably will have no inkling about a factory in the Colorado flatlands of Grand Junction.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
