Chairlift: For The Skier Who Has Everything

Some people buy lift tickets. Others buy lifts.

Or at least the classic old chairs from the decommissioned ones.
At 10 a.m. on Sept. 30, 2016, Suicide Six put 60 of the 80 chairs from Lift #1 on sale for $350 each. By 10:15, all 60 had sold and the website had crashed from so many people trying to access it.

The lift, installed 38 years ago, is being upgraded this year to a $1.5 million Leitner- Poma quad. The proceeds from the sale went to the Woodstock SkiRunners, the oldest ski club in the East, and local school’s Friday ski programs. Suicide Six’s owner, the Woodstock Inn and Resort, is holding onto the other 20 and two were donated to the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Museum for an auction on Nov. 19.

Then, on October 21, Killington quietly put up chairs for sale for $300 a pop. Within minutes, those were gone too.

Chairlifts are hot commodities: items to be turned into benches or porch swings, office furniture or something else.

A search on eBay at press time only turned up a Norwegian double chair (located in Norway) for $1,800 and a chairlift that had been transformed into a bench in Crested Butte for $2,995 (free shipping!).

But so far, the highest price we’ve ever seen paid for a chair was in 2007 when Mad River Glen auctioned o the last of its original 158 iconic single chairs from 1948 on eBay. The last one, Number 69, went for $7,850 after a fierce 10-day bidding war.

Of course, the money raised went to a good cause: in the spirit of keeping its soul pure and its powder fresh, Mad River replaced the old single chair with, you guessed it, a new single.