My least favorite part of skiing/snowboarding is dangling 30’-40’ above the ground on the way up the mountain before every run. Sure, coming down is probably objectively many times more dangerous, but I get a massive reward for that risk (fun). I cannot figure out the reward anyone gets for hoisting me to ridiculous heights on the lift. I realize drifts can get very deep and an exceptionally low lift might get buried from time to time, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to prevent that from happening, or clear it away when it does. Even a 15’ lift would make me feel a lot more comfortable, and I doubt that would ever get buried.
In the eastern US new lifts are considerably lower then older ones. Some can be reasonably jumped off at several points.
My take on it is:
1 less expectation of really deep snow
2 better ability to remove deep snow if needed
3 desire to get the lifts below the trees so they are out of the wind, which allows them to run more consistently
4 better ability to shape the earth below if needed and place the lift and towers in the right spots to take advantage of the natural shape of the mountain.
5 Less emphasis on cost minimization of the lift, more on safety including evacuation.
A few years ago, one of the slopes around here got over 8 feet of snowfall in a single 24 hour period. Now consider an entire winter of snowfall, and that the drifts will be higher yet. Not only could a mere 15’ lift get buried; I’d be surprised if a winter went by that it didn’t.
I suspect that keeping lift-borne skiers close to the ground is rarely a high priority. A ski lift is inherently expensive, and if it can be made more direct - and thus quicker - with less use of expensive materials, the fact that folks who ride it are 20’ further from the ground than they might be is not much of a problem. (Some of them no doubt enjoy this.)
As for rescues, once you are 15+ feet high, jumping down is not a safe option, and the logistics of a rescue are non-trivial. Ski lifts are reliable, so a small reduction in the difficulty of dealing with a rare problem need not be an important consideration.
Along with the speed and cost considerations, there’s an upper limit to the length a chairlift can be. At some of the larger hills, the bigger lifts are already pushing that length and so a less-direct lower route might mean having less vertical gain or having to change chairs to get to the top.
Go to Candanchú in the summer, the lifts float waaaaaay overhead; it’s quite surrealistic, those bars and chairs floating in mid-air, above the cows and the lilacs and the grass.
Go in winter, and if the slopes are open, those same individual lifts carry people on the ground. Go after a few heavy snowfalls, the bars for those are barely extended - I’ve seen one of the easiest slopes closed for skiers and turned into a sled-slope because the lift was almost buried. On that same day, people on the chairlifts were having to pay attention to how they placed the skies, as they could drag on the snow if placed by the typical idjit who can’t be bothered lift them into place correctly.
Another reason is to keep jackasses from jumping off the lift whenever they want. It shakes the cable due to the weight loss, and if enough people did it at once I could see Bad Things Happening.
I suppose the simple reasons are that you want to avoid smacking the downhill skiers on the run beneath in the head, even if the snow gets high. You could get rid of this by not having a run underneath the ski lift, but you’d have to fence it off – otherwise skiers would go there, anyway, and the owners would still be liable.
For many years, Mount Cranmore in North Conway, NH had a lift that combined “low to the ground” with “fenced off” . It was their unique “Snowmobile”, which wasn’t the usual craft of that name, but an odd contraption built by the owner – it was a series of linked carts on an elevated wooden track (that you couldn’t go under, except at “bridges”, because the structure extended all the way to the ground)
http://teachski.com/articles/cranmoreskimobile/cranmoreskimopbile.htm
It was shut down in the late eighties and dismantled. I saw it in position, but inoperable, before it was taken apart. The reason it was taken down shows why people don’t use these things, or allow for low lifts – they take up too much space, and are a pain to keep up.
More on the Cranmore Skimobile:
Which brings up another issue. Although I never saw it in action, I get the impressiojn that it was a hechuva lot slower than a normal lift
The Skimobile in action:
The higher the towers, the fewer of them you need. Take a look at trams; they only have 3-4 towers total but they are wicked high off the ground.
One downside of high towers is that the chairs are exposed to the wind. It can be a discomfort to the skiers but the main problem is that it means you have to shut down or slow down the chairlift in high winds. Many ski areas in New England will go on “wind hold” and only the lowest lifts can stay open. Granted, these are usually lower on the mountain where there’s less wind anyway, but the height of the lift towers is a factor.
Mount Snow in Vermont ran several low-to-the-ground chairs, built in the 30s I think, that had wooden benches suspended from an overhead track that were pulled by a chain - my guess is it was a modified industrial conveyer of some sort. Slow and noisy, unlike the Cranmore skimobile which was whisper quiet.
I tried but failed to locate a picture or any information about these, but I rode them many years ago.
Because if ski lifts were low, we would not be able to make scary movies about them.