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 SUN VALLEY, IDAHO

In a development that impacts two Mountain Collective members, Aspen Skiing Company is building a new hotel one mile from Sun Valley’s River Run Base Area. SkiCo broke ground on the $62 million, 175,000 sq. ft. Limelight Hotel Ketchum in the summer of 2015, and expects construction to be complete by December. The property will feature 99 hotel rooms, 14 for-sale condominiums with 12 lockoff units, plus a restaurant and lounge, pool, hot tub, and other amenities. It is modeled after the company’s existing Limelight Hotel in Aspen, Colo. The 14 condominiums range in size from 1,500 sq. ft. 2 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom units to 3,500-plus sq. ft. units with 5 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. Pricing starts around $900 per square foot. The hotel is designed to be a silver level LEED certified building, which requires several efficiency measures to attain, among them additional insulation; high efficiency boilers; 100 percent LED lighting; and low-flow water fixtures. With so much specialty work needed, SkiCo says it’s been challenging to find enough qualified tradespeople in the southern Idaho market, but the project is still on schedule. Construction is being managed by McAlvain Group of Companies, Inc. out of Boise.

PATS PEAK, N.H.

Pats Peak covers 100 percent of its terrain with snowmaking. But to boost capacity and run more fan guns at one time, it needed to upgrade its electrical distribution to power the on-board air compressors. Previously, the circuits in place only allowed it to run a handful of fans at once. This summer, the family resort laid a new 4,600-foot circuit along existing trails, with some lines being hung from existing utility poles. Minimal land clearing was required for the underground portion of the installation. This increased power distribution will allow the area to run 30 to 40 fan guns, including six new fans that are a mix of HKD Diablo and Halo models, as well as SMI Polecats, at the same time. The additions bring the resort’s arsenal of fan guns to 95. Most of the new guns will be fixed on towers in high-traffic areas and other locations that require a lot of snow, including terrain parks and the tubing hill.

SCHWEITZER, IDAHO

In December, Schweitzer will debut its new, 9,000 sq. ft. Summit Lodge, which has been under construction since July 2015. It will feature a full-service restaurant and bar, cafeteria, and space for group functions. It will also be the new home for ski patrol dispatch. The site came with several challenges. It required the resort to import 400 yards of material via dump truck to achieve final design grade for the building. The material was excess from another building project in the base area. The lodge will be powered using the feed from the top drive of the Great Escape Quad, which is about a 200-foot run from the quad to the transformer. Signal from existing fiber at the top of the Basin Express and Lakeview Triple lifts will be shot to the building via antenna, 1.2 miles away. Crews installed a 2,000-gallon grease trap, and two 7,000-gallon in-line septic tanks at the building site. A 7,100-linear-foot effluent only gravity line drops 1,775 vertical feet from the building to the existing wastewater system at the base. It is made of HDPE welded four-inch pipe, DR-11 rating up high, and DR-7 rating lower. The water feed is made of HDPE welded two-inch pipe, DR-7 rating (300 psi) with roughly 7,000 feet of run and 1,300 feet of elevation gain from an existing 200,000-gallon reservoir. A booster station at the midway point has a three horsepower duplex booster pack with 300 psi working pressure. It will deliver five gpm to a new 19,000-gallon storage reservoir at the lodge site. And electricity? “With this portion of the project, our local power cooperative requested that conduits for a new primary run to the top be installed as well,” says marketing manager Dig Chrismer. This gives the mountain a loop feed that allows for a backup power supply in the event the original feed fails.

CRANMORE, N.H.

Phase one of the Kearsarge Brook condominiums at Cranmore Mountain in North Conway, N.H., represents the first project in a planned $50 million base area redevelopment. This will add six new buildings, 106 residences, and 45,000 sq. ft. of new lodge space. The first 25,600 sq. ft. building will house 18 residential units, each with 1,300 to 1,800 sq. ft. of living space. These are being priced from $395,000 to $599,000. The project broke ground in September, and the goal is to have the building framed by this February. Completion is scheduled for fall of 2017 at an estimated cost of $8.7 million. According to spokesperson Becca Deschenes, it will be one of the first condo buildings in the state to use an energy-efficient electric heat pump system for both A/C and heat. This technology reduces carbon emissions and uses little power to convert energy to heat.