Mount Hood Express Six-Pack: A Much-Needed Upgrade for Oregon’s Most Overworked Lift
The Mount Hood Express is Mount Hood Meadows’ first-ever six-pack chairlift.
For the 2023-24 season, Oregon’s Mount Hood Meadows performed a major upgrade on what’s arguably its most popular lift. This Mount Hood resort replaced its workhorse Mount Hood Express quad, which dated back to 1994, with a brand-new high-speed six-pack, bringing a substantial capacity increase. The Mount Hood Express is Mount Hood Meadows’ first six-pack; following this project, the resort retains six high-speed lifts in total.
This chair may run along the same lift line as the old lift, but it brings some much-needed benefits to this prominent terrain pod.
An inset of the Mount Hood Meadows trail map, with the Mount Hood Express lift highlighted in red.
Experience Changes
Mount Hood Express is easily the most used lift at Mount Hood Meadows. Not only is it the out-of-base lift that provides access to most other areas of the mountain, but it has some phenomenal terrain underneath it as well (the lift serves what’s arguably the best advanced and expert terrain at Meadows when Heather and Clark Canyons aren't open). As a result, this lift on weekends is perpetually busy.
Experience Positives
Capacity
The new six-pack chairlift offers the capacity needed to service the crowds on weekends and holidays. Unlike a lot of modern detachable six pack chairlifts, which have chair spacing so wide they effectively transport only as many people as a triple or quad chairlift, the new Mount Hood Express maintains fairly tight chair spacing—resulting in a capacity of 3,600 pph (people per hour). The new lift can legitimately move a lot of people.
Comfort
The new Mount Hood Express also offers a significantly smoother and quieter ride compared to the old lift. The new lift comes with comfier seats, with more padding and deeper seats than the old chair. The detachable quads built by the company Poma from the 1980's through the late 1990's (such as the old Mount Hood Express) had chairs with benches that felt rather short—and could even feel like a lot of your leg was hanging off the chair. That certainly doesn’t occur anymore!
With a capacity of 3,600 pph, the Mount Hood Express’s chair spacing is among the tightest of any six-place chair in North America.
Resiliency
The new lift also introduces a chair rail at the bottom, facilitating a quicker response to inclement weather conditions by allowing the removal of chairs during events like rime ice. This process expedites the lift's operation after such weather events, akin to the mechanisms employed by other lifts like Mount Hood Meadows’ Cascade Express and Timberline Lodge’s Magic Mile & Palmer chairlifts. Speaking of weather events, we also anticipate better wind performance versus the old lift; while the lower parts of the lift are well-protected, the upper lift line can be pretty exposed to wind, and the larger, heavier chairs should allow for better resilience in this type of weather.
Loading Efficiency
Even though the new Mount Hood Express is a six-seater chairlift, we imagine misloads will actually decrease compared than the old detachable quad. The 90° loading angle makes for a shorter walk from the loading gate to the spot where the chair picks you up. The old one had quite a few misloads on busy days, as the distance from the “Wait Here” line to where the chair picked you up left room for things to go wrong.
Experience Downsides
We really only noticed one notable downside to the new Mount Hood Express lift: there is now only queuing on the left side of the bottom terminal (looking uphill). The old lift had queueing on both sides at the bottom. With the new setup, getting on the Mount Hood Express after coming down Eric's Corner, Lady Slipper, or other runs under Stadium Express will be more painful.
The Mount Hood Express lift now only queues customers on one side of the terminal, making it tougher to get to the lift line from the Stadium Express side of the resort.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the new Mount Hood Express brings a lot of benefits to Mount Hood’s largest ski resort. The new six-pack not only gets visitors up the mountain more efficiently, but also provides a more comfortable ride and better resiliency from tough weather. It may not be the most “in your face” upgrade, but we expect it to provide a strong foundation for Mount Hood Meadows’ most popular terrain zone for years to come.
Considering a ski trip to Mount Hood Meadows this year? Check out our full Oregon and Pacific Northwest rankings, as well as our comprehensive Mount Hood Meadows review. You can also check out our Mount Hood Meadows review in video form below.
