HUNTSVILLE — Snowbasin Resort is looking to give skiers their own “easy button” ahead of next year’s ski season.
On Thursday, with the 2024-2025 ski season winding toward its conclusion, the resort sent out a press release announcing a series of upgrades that are set to be implemented in the coming months ahead of the 2025-2026 ski season.
Snowbasin Resort Chief Operating Officer and General Manager Davy Ratchford told the Standard-Examiner Friday that the changes are akin to a long-running Staples advertising campaign.
“Do you remember that old commercial where you tap the ‘easy button’?” he said. “These enhancements, I think, are making the ski experience easy for people.”
Among those changes will be the upgrading of one of the main ski lifts.
“The Becker Lift will go from a fixed-grip triple to a high-speed quad so the guests can see almost a 50% reduction in time on that lift,” Ratchford said. “It’s really about a six-minute ride versus a 12- to 13-minute ride on the old Becker. That chair, why it’s really, really important — it makes accessibility to the Strawberry area and our learning train above Bear Hollow that much faster for people. When you improve lifts like this, it gives the guests more skiing time — less time riding lifts, more time skiing. We’ve been doing this for a number of years and this is just the next iteration.”
He added that people will have an opportunity to keep a piece of that Becker Lift history.
“The actual physical chairs that are on this, anytime you replace them, people love to get their hands on those chairs because it’s just a piece of history and people have a lot of personal connection to it,” he said. “A lot of people will put them up in their homes and have them as porch swings and things like that. This year, we decided to donate all of those chairs to the Snowbasin ski team.”
Ratchford said the Snowbasin Sports Education Foundation, a separate nonprofit, received the chairs to be auctioned off as a fundraiser.
In addition to the Becker Lift replacement, Ratchford said the resort will be utilizing RFID (radio frequency identification) technology to make the ticket-scanning experience easier.
“When you come to a ski lift and you have a ticket — from the old days, you might remember where you have a ticket hanging off of your jacket, they scan it and let you up on the lift,” he said. “The RFID is a pass that can go in your jacket and you don’t ever have to take it out…. It’s a gate that you stand next to, it senses your RFID in your jacket and it opens up the gate and then you can access the lift.”
He said it does more than just allow skiers to avoid having to physically present a ticket.
“That upgrade is a major investment,” he said. “It allows us to understand where people are on the mountain and they can track their vertical feet.”
The release adds there are also planned enhancements to several trails and that people who buy their 2025-2026 season passes can ski for free the remainder of this season. All of the infrastructure upgrades are expected to be finished by the opening of the 2025-2026 ski season.
Ratchford said making things easier for skiers through infrastructure upgrades will have a positive impact on the resort experience.
“Easy translates to more runs,” he said. “Easy translates to more skiing for their family. Easy is what we’ve tried to do with this and make it as easy as we can and encouraging families to come up.”
For more information on the upgrades at Snowbasin and season passes, visit https://www.snowbasin.com/.