The Austrian Tirol ski area of Sölden has announced a major summer construction project ahead of next winter season 2019/2020.
The altitude village of Hochsölden is to benefit from a new state-of-the-art 10-seater gondola feeder lift – as big upgrade on the current double chairlift.
Hochsölden is a small but growing off-shoot of the famous ski resort with its twin glaciers. The village now has 619 guest beds and last winter recorded 69,000 overnight stays. The new lift should greatly enhance the resort’s attractiveness, the lift company hopes.
The new €10m Dopplemayr lift will climb from the valley station at 1,933m, serve a mid-station at 2,090m and reach its mountain station at Giggijoch at 2,287m . It’s a vertical climb of just over 350 metres over the lifts nearly 1.2km length, but the purpose is to provide a better connection than the old chairlift built in 1986. It will follow an almost identical route.
The new lift will have 23 cabins and a capacity of 1,330 people per hour and will take less than six minutes to reach Giggijoch. The timetable for building the lift is tight. The dismantling of the old chairlift will start at the end of the winter season with the new lift due to go into service at the beginning of December 2019.
In addition, the slope will be widened near the valley station to remove a long-standing peak time bottleneck.
