A frequent question we get or myth we hear at the Museum is about whether the Town Lift at Park City Mountain Resort used old infrastructure from the Silver King Coalition Mines aerial tramway system.
The answer is no: The two systems are separate. They do, however, share roughly the same path.
Work on the Silver King Aerial Tramway began in August of 1900 and the construction was scheduled to be done in 90 days and employ 50 men. The A. Leschen and Sons Rope Company of St. Louis was contracted for the work, which ultimately cost around $25,000. The 7,000-foot line of the tramway across the hills was lined with men laying foundations and erecting towers for the cable. On December 21, due to a shortage of lumber and bad weather, work on the aerial tramway was suspended until spring.
Eventually, twenty men stretched the traction rope for the tram in just three hours on April 25, 1901. The work of stringing the two standing cables was completed on April 30 and the ropes were tensioned on May 1. On May 25 the last bucket was strung, and June 6 saw the first bucket loaded with ore go over the system. Thousands of tons of ore passed by overhead until the mine closed in the 1950s.
After the mine closed, ore buckets were removed from the line and the traction rope (a cord of metal cables) was released and dropped to the ground below. In 1981, the terminal for the tramway, the Silver King Coalition Building, burned to the ground in a massive blaze that peeled paint from houses across the street.
But the tramway towers remained standing – and still do. The bases of the towers have been stabilized to maintain their upright status, but the towers have otherwise not been renovated or reused in any way. Luckily for Park City Ski Area, as it was then called, the line of tramway towers had a built-in path from the bottom of Main Street up to near the center of the resort’s terrain. In 1980, they proposed – and were approved – to build a new lift from a new plaza where the Coalition Building had been up to just above the top of Payday Lift. The original proposed name for the lift was “Coalition West” to pay tribute to the lost mining era icon.
Credit: Park City Historical Society & Museum, Mel Fletcher Collection
Some Parkites were concerned about a lift passing over the top of homes, as a couple of the tramway towers do, but Nick Badami laid out a route to be narrower than the tramway towers, keeping the lift from going over rooftops. One historic home at 713 Woodside Avenue ultimately had to be moved (and now sits at 508 Marsac Avenue) to accommodate the path of the Town Lift.
The new towers for holding the ski lift were installed on August 2, 1985 by a helicopter operation carrying and placing each tower from above and a crew bolting them into place on the ground. The new lift officially opened on November 29, 1985, the day after Thanksgiving.
In a victory for the resort and skiers, the new lift gave access to the mountain directly from Main Street. And in a victory for historic preservation, the aerial tramway towers were left in place and a historic home given a new space. Since 1985, skiers have been able to ride alongside pieces of Park City’s past as they head up the mountain.
The Park City Museum is offering a members-only guided historical hike past all the aerial tramway towers and up to the Silver King Mine on September 27. To sign up, join as a member at parkcityhistory.org.