I love skiing, but also while growing up skiing and hanging out around the ski patrol with my dad, who was a volunteer ski patroller,I appreciated the operations of ski areas. Ski lifts are complicated, useful, and cool looking pieces of technology. But I didn’t really have a huge interest in lifts as anything other than a way to easily get uphill to ski down.
Lift Blog is somehow both a classic independent comprehensive passion project web site, industry news resource, and generally interesting for skiers. It is a project of Peter Landsman, who works in the industry as a lift crew supervisor at Jackson Hole. But what makes Lift Blog special is not just the industry knowledge, but Landsman’s passion about lifts. Last year, he completed personally visiting all 2,381 ski lifts in the United States. The industry had one of the busiest years of capital investment and installed 66 new lifts in North America in 2022 and Landsman will be traveling to photograph each of them.
While traditional ski media contracting, Lift Blog is a source of ski industry news, skiing news, all filtered through Landsman’s encyclopedic knowledge of lifts. Thanks to Lift Blog, I’ve learned about lifts in places that I didn’t even know had skiable hills. And, as cities around the world invest in ropeways for urban transportation, it’s also about transportation policy.
Previously: Appreciating the Indie Web
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