The Summit at Snoqualmie – Alpental Ski Area

Project Overview

The Summit at Snoqualmie planned to replace their existing Edelweiss chair at Alpental ski area. We helped with drilling and blasting the pads for this chair at the bottom of the lift with a Furukawa HCR 1100 top-hammer drill.

The International chair is a completely new Doppelmayr ski lift at Alpental. We spent eight days blasting for 14 new pads for this lift. They added 13 towers and two masts total and we blasted out nearly half the towers. Bedrock was removed for the tower pads with spider excavators at our supervision and then blasted by our crews. Spider excavators were used up on the slopes due to the rough terrain. Spider excavators are all-terrain machines with four independently moving legs that enable them to navigate rough terrain. They are much smaller and inefficient compared to conventional excavators but were necessary to access the territory. The lower pads were excavated with standard excavators.

Details

Challenges

Our main challenge for this project was access to the job site. Products were sent up with blast crew members on two different chairlifts, then had to be packed down by hand to the new pad locations. The ground is extremely steep and rough and no equipment besides spider excavators can traverse the areas. Spider excavators are all-terrain machines with four independently moving legs that enable them to navigate rough terrain. Drilling was done with spider excavators that were walked up from the bottom of the slope.

Outcome

We successfully finished blasting to add one chair lift to the Alpental ski area and replace another one. The Summit is continuously enhancing its ski area and may require more blasting in the future.

Work With Us

We currently operate throughout the Western United States. We perform all applications of drilling and blasting including large-scale commercial quarries, heavy construction, road and highway construction, residential and commercial development, and utility and trenchline work.