New lifts sprout up all around the West

Here's what's new at some major North American ski areas:

Colorado

Colorado, which set a record for skier visits last year with 12.53 million skier days, will offer two new gondolas this year.

• Breckenridge, one of the nation's busiest ski resorts, has built a gondola connecting the town's transportation center off Main Street to Peak 7 and Peak 8. The gondola, which can carry 3,000 passengers per hour, means fewer people riding buses to the mountain. The resort also has added the highest lift in the nation, the high-speed Imperial Express, which goes to 12,840 feet on the summit of Peak 8.

• Several resorts are getting new chairs: Crested Butte is replacing its East River lift with a high-speed quad and Steamboat is replacing its Sunshine triple chair with a high speed.

" • Snowmass has installed a new gondola to carry skiers from Fanny Hill to Elk Camp.

• The rustic Wolf Creek is adding its first detachable quad — a four-seat chairlift — and remote Silverton Mountain will be open all year for unguided skiing. It had been restricted to guiding skiing until last spring.

British Columbia

Whistler-Blackcomb in British Columbia has installed the high-speed quad chair Symphony Express to carry riders to the Symphony Amphitheater, 1,000 acres of intermediate and advance terrain with spectacular high-alpine views on Whistler Mountain. The resort also has purchased Whistler Heli-Skiing, which services extensive back-country terrain.

Utah

Utah, which set a record for the third straight year with slightly more than 4 million skier days, has added several high-speed lifts.

• The Canyons near Park City will grow to 3,700 acres with the addition of 200 acres of mostly intermediate to expert terrain that will be served by the DreamCatcher high-speed quad. The resort also is replacing the four-seat Tombstone Express high-speed with a six-pack that will increase uphill capacity 52 percent and reduce congestion.

Information

Finding ski areas: Go to www.goski.com and click on "U.S. Resorts." There are listings for resorts both large and small in 37 states.

• Snowbird is opening a ski tunnel, the first of its kind in North America. The tunnel's conveyor lift, at the top of the new high-speed Peruvian Express, will transport riders from Peruvian Gulch into Mineral Basin.

• Deer Valley is replacing the Sterling triple-chair on Bald Mountain with a high-speed quad. Fourteen new snowguns will allow Park City to open more terrain in the early season. Powder Mountain is replacing its Hidden Lake double chair with a high-speed quad.

Around the West

• Mount Bachelor near Bend, Ore., is replacing its most-used lift, the Pine Marten, with a high-speed quad.

• Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, retired its legendary tram in October after 40 years. A $25-million tram will be built to replace it, opening in 2008. In the meantime, a temporary two-seater chair will ferry skiers to the mountaintop from one of the existing lifts.

• In California, Northstar at Tahoe is adding a six-person chair. Alpine Meadows has a new 600-foot long superpipe and a terrain park with more than 25 hits, rails, and quarterpipes.

• Big Sky in Montana added 212 acres of open-bowl ski terrain accessed from the Lone Peak Tram in an area called Dakota Territories.

• In Idaho, Sun Valley's Dollar Mountain will be covered from top to bottom with 44 snow guns.•

• Ski Santa Fe has the first new chair in New Mexico in several years, a triple that opens up six new trails from the top of Deception Peak.