A Lift Mystery Solved: Kirkwood’s Covered Wagon Lift Disappearance

We spent some time at Kirkwood this season to cover it for PeakRankings. You can read our thoughts on Kirkwood here, but our most interesting concern came about when we went to do some background research on the resort. We found some Internet articles about a Covered Wagon surface lift being installed in 2008, but we didn’t remember seeing this lift at all on the mountain. To make sure we hadn’t missed it, we took a look at the trail map—no Covered Wagon lift there. It was time to start digging.

Position of the Covered Wagon lift(s) during the 2017-18 season. (photo from skimap.org)

First things first, we wanted to make sure the lift existed in the first place. We went over to skimap.org, a website that hosts historical ski maps, and took a look at the 2008-09 map to see if the lift was actually ever installed. Lo and behold, it was—in fact, the lift appeared on the map in some way, shape, or form until the 2017-18 season. Located a short distance from the top of Lift 4, it was shown as a singular lift in earlier seasons, but as two separate lifts in later seasons. Regardless of the configuration, the whole structure was displayed as Lift 15.

We did multiple Google searches to try to find articles on the lift’s disappearance, but surprisingly, there weren’t any. We decided to call Vail Resorts (Kirkwood’s owners) to see what happened, but with all the resorts closed, we couldn’t get in contact with anyone who knew anything. We then spoke with a number of Kirkwood and South Lake Tahoe locals—some of them knew that the lift was no longer operating (we felt comfortable publishing the review after confirming this), but none of them knew much about its removal or why it was gone. Following our lack of success through traditional channels, we decided to post on a Reddit forum to obtain the answer; however, our question went unanswered.

Once we’d exhausted those options, we checked out liftblog.com, which hosts a comprehensive database of U.S. ski resort lifts. Surprisingly, the Covered Wagon lift wasn’t included in the Kirkwood section (this was especially surprising, as every other lift at other resorts we’d been to was thoroughly documented). We figured there was more to this story if the lift wasn’t included on the site, so we emailed the site’s author, Peter Landsman.

The only remnants of the Kirkwood Covered Wagon lift after its final 2017-18 removal. (photo courtesy Peter Landsman)

Peter got back to us within only a few hours. It turned out he had done some digging himself, and he was able to share that only a few remnants of the lift still existed on the resort. He decided to follow up with a Kirkwood lift mechanic he knew to get more information. His contact returned with our answer, and it was almost beyond belief to us.

The lift had to be removed every summer and re-installed due to “very onerous restrictions for visual impacts.” This was likely why the resort was able to change the lift’s configuration in different seasons. Among the components that needed to be removed each season were the operator’s shack, generator, and ski patrol shack. In addition, the towers and snow fencing were designed to be collapsible. According to Peter’s contact, maintaining the lift took “more money in cat work to open up than it was worth.”

While it’s disappointing that Kirkwood no longer provides lift service to the Covered Wagon area, we understand why they removed this lift after uncovering this information. Luckily, visitors can still hike to this area for some high quality advanced terrain.

Special thanks to Peter Landsman (author of Liftblog) for helping us crack this one!