Your correspondent had the opportunity to sit down with the most important person on Alta’s mountain if you’re here to ski. What got him thinking about this interview was Alta’s splicing of cable on the Collins chairlift this summer. More on that in a moment. But first, our interview subject.
Shannon Corey is a fourth generation non-LDS Utahn who learned to ski from the Albion lift when she was seven. In addition to the usual mountain upbringing she played the piano from an early age (hold that thought because we’ll come back to it). After completing a degree in anthropology from the University of Utah, she found herself working at Zions Bank as a teller and vault manager. In the spring of 2005, she was held up in a bank robbery at her branch.
Not one to miss an opportunity, “I took two days of mental health recovery that they offered and went skiing.” She already had a friend who worked as a “lifty” and by that fall she’d quit her bank and hired on at Alta as a lifty herself. Thus started her great love affair with the Collins lift. “I’m not sure if it was a personality fit or what, by I just loved Collins.” And while each chair has a personality, Collins has her heart.
She never looked back (certainly on banking at least) and ran the through a rapid list of positions, lifty, then eight years Collins lift maintenance, roving foreman, etc, until arriving at the summit of Alta’s chairs after 17 years in Alta.
This is where her music background reenters the story. “The chairs all are living things. They have unique vibrations and there’s harmonics, and you learn to listen to their sounds. That’s how you know when there’s something off, a sheave wheel vs a bad bearing. That sort of thing.”
Fascinating history aside, Canyon Blog was keen to learn the how and why on splicing Collins’ “haul rope” as they call the main chairlift cable. The first thing to know is that Collins is two chairlifts in one. Both drives are at the elbow with the return terminals at the top and bottom. At those points there are two hydraulic rams that can take up the slack as more or less people mount the chair or the environmental conditions change. Over time, the haul rope stretches with use and so they have to cut out some of the slack.
As you can see from the photos it’s a highly technical and dangerous job. To cut out the five feet removed this year, Shannon and her crew had to drop a section off the towers, place plate clamps on either side of the section to be removed, pull up some of the slack from each end and then cut it out. The trickiest part though is the re-splicing of the cable. For that they bring in an expert from Wyoming. Then it’s simply rehanging the cable. Easy? Your correspondent thinks not…
What else has she to say of her decades in Little Cottonwood? This, “This place works for you or it doesn’t – those of us who fall in love with her, it’s simultaneously so big and so small. But there’s a harmony and I just love how the natural element play.” A musician’s heart for sure.