OK, the fact that a CN official A: has a luxury rail car and B: managed to delay a world record breaking construction project by parking it on a single-tracked stretch of track is *extremely* iconic of the Canadian rail system as a whole. I hear Americans complain about the bad passenger service in the US and go "yes but at least the freight trains work, we don't even have that!"
So you said Nein (9) when you were eleven (11) in 2001. And it was about cable splicing, the towers weren't hit by Al Quaeda, it was the cable splicers looking for jobs! You heard it here first. Sorry my brain just connected the numbers and I thought this could be a great conspiracy theory😅
Turns out that if you are one of few with a very specific skillset you can pretty much ask for as much money as you want. Its not like they can just go to the next guy who will do it cheaper
@@brettadams6734first of all we don't really care about giving freedom to Canada we just need to stop paying the 100 million Americans pay to keep Canada's economy afloat.... Second of all Canada would be lucky to become a state then they'd have freedom of speech and pew pews two things Canadians don't have now but most importantly we would give them the freedom not to have their money confiscated if they disagree with the government (most Canadians didn't forget the trucking protest)...... But you don't have to take my word for it as Justin Trudeau he's being kicked out of office as we speak....
Small correction. At 3:18 you showed it was shipped to the Port of Vancouver in British Columbia. It was actually shipped to the Port of Vancouver in Washington.
@@livwake The IOC is known to be very protective of its IP and will not hesitate to issue DMCA takedowns (or worse) for even so much as using the 5 rings logo without permission. Just *mentioning* them without using any of their marks should be ok, but Sam is likely being extra cautious and doesn't want to risk anything.
What you say at 1:06 is incorrect, as something similar had been atempted and already existed. The 3S bahn in Kitzbuehel was build in 2004. This does have a shorter span at 2500 m, but the peak2peak is basically a little bit bigger copy.
And in 2003 a more classic style gondola was build connecting two resorts in France. Les Arcs and La Plagne. Based on a very different system. However, it too connects two peaks and has no support towers for 1800 meters. Its not comparible, but i figured you'd be interested in this:)
3S gondolas are something cool, but nothing new. The only thing different is that it is across two peaks instead of over a gorge or cliff. Edit: The oldest one was built in Saas Fee 1991 and this one was also already built in 2008
Tss 🤫, don’t tell them that 😂, most of them never been in Europe and don’t even know that gondolas in Europe far more modern, and such projects like peak2peak (3S) were done before in many places 😂
iirc when this gondola was built, the bulk of Whistler's clientele were upper-middle-class and ski bums, in addition to the wealthy (early-bird season passes could even be attainable for middle-class families if skiing was their primary sport). The resort had also hoped Peak 2 Peak would add to marketing during the run-up to Vancouver 2010 Olympics, in addition to becoming a tourist attraction itself. Worth noting: at that time, the resort wasn't owned by Vail Resorts (a Venture Capital™ company) and skiing hadn't yet begun its global regression into an ultra-rich sport - which has slowly been happening over the past decade. Of course, skiing at Whistler (both day tickets and season passes) is more expensive & less attainable today than 10 years ago.
You need to write a letter to Justin Trudeau to encourage more tax payer spending on projects with logistical hurdles- then have those hurdles well documented for a HAI writer to grab off of Wikipedia. Bonus points of it involves planes, bricks, or bureaucracy.
The Jackson Hole News and Guide refers to him as "Norm Duke of Wilson" so perhaps his duchy is smaller than the whole state of Wyoming and Sam just called him "Duke of Wyoming" because he seems to be the only one
It would be really cool if you could incorporate Metric values as well. I get that it wont fit in the script but it'd be enough if it was in parentheses on screen.
Brit here, so miles and feet no problem for me. But why do the Americans use pounds for large weights when tons/tonnes are so much easier to visualise? I think HAI usually gives metric as well as imperial, so perhaps this video rushed.
@@entropic_may Help from Germany here: A short king is roughly 1/1000th of a mile, and a tall king is slightly over 6 feet. The other kings fall in between. Hope that helps.
Maybe you can answer my question... he mentioned it would take a long time to transit a gondola that went down through the valley, but he never mentioned how long the one they built takes. About how long from one peak to the other?
One of the deadliest gondola incident ever happened because american aircraft flew to low and cut trough the rope. But it was in italy, so of course the US did not give a fuck and the pilots were never put in prison
@ i know it from seeing it in the news here in italy, if you go to the italian wikipedia page you can see a image of the cabin right after the crash. Stuff of nightmares
@@ENCHANTMEN_ They got court-martialed for destroying a video tape from the day off the incident. How can you use the evidence that was destroyed? Both of them were discharged from the military and lost all their benefits because of this. One of them got 6 months in prison. They both should have gotten a lot more time but you and the OP are just stating things that aren't true.
As a Central European, most of this story sounds surprisingly uneventful. Every winter there's a mountain building project somewhere in the Alps that includes crazy (Goldhofer) heavy haulage on mountain roads, short building times, rope splicing, and sometimes also cable cars from multiple ropes.
Thank u for making this video. This being my home resort it is always fun to learn more about it. 2 other minor things that have probably already been mentioned: 1. Please include metric, the resort is literally in Canada, and all the site info is in metric, so you probably had to convert all of it, can you put the metric in even if its just in brackets on screen 2. I believe it was port Vancouver in Washington, not Vancouver Canada, since they had the largest mobile cranes on the west coast at the time and those were needed due to the weight. Nowadays the Canadian port has such equipment, but at the time they needed to offload in the states as the Vancouver port would not have been able to move the spools from a staging yard to the train
My student pass at whistler is cheaper by hundreds of dollars than any Washington state ski area. $500 USD for the whole season vs over a thousand for crystal, and even cheaper than snoqualmie which is my closest mountain. Makes the drive up worth it for the much better terrain. Even if I wasn’t a student it would still be cheaper than crystal or snoqualmie.
Given the fact that there are multiple massive gondola projects in Europe and it's still relatively cheap, I would say that it has to do with corporate gred more than anything.
Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
3S gondola systems are getting more and more common in Europe (maybe elsehwere too, but idk) even without the specific circumstances described here, simply because 3S gondolas are a lot more stable in windy conditions in general and as such make for a more comfortable ride.
Vancouver's building one of those too! They put a university on top of a mountain (for some reason), and every time it snows the buses get stuck, so they're building a 3S gondola that won't get stuck (hopefully)
Sugarbush Resort, in Vermont, had a similar problem after they bought the neighboring Glenn Ellen. They went with a more traditional chair lift to cross the Slide Brook back country area. It hugs the terrain, so it winds up going up, down, up again, and finally down. It's a 11,012 foot long high speed quad with a net of only 400 feet vertical change, even though the difference from highest to lowest point is 1,557 feet. At over 2 miles long, it's the longest chairlift in the world. I don't think anyone's going to top it, as anyone else wanting to build cable transit that long goes with a gondola.
@@fonkbadonk5370 actually it's just the USA. However, that number (5 people) was from an article published in 2014. The number could well be lower, or possibly higher, now.
@@stickynorth The 5 are in the US. However, Norm Duke does projects all over the world. The article shown in the video quotes Duke as saying, "I’ve been to Tokyo, Barcelona, Mexico City, Switzerland, Toronto … but my main territory is the western United States."
Les Arcs and La Plagne in France had a very similar problem around the same time and used a very similar solution. The Vanoise Express now connects both ski resorts across a huge valley within 4 minutes creating one of the largest connected ski areas in the world!
Kudos to the great writing and research at Half of Interesting. I can tell rabbit holes were gone through to provide us with this great video!! And we can now all appreciate how difficult it was to get this gondala erected.
The Sandia Peak Arial Tramway on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, NM, has an unsupported span of a similar length, which was completed in 1966. However, it differs in two key ways. First, it is not a gondola cable car, but it has two larger cars, one of which goes up the mountain while the other goes down. Second, it travels from the base to the top--or near the top. The unsupported span is from the second tower to the top station, a span of 7,720 feet (2,353 m). According to Wikipedia, two newer cable car/tramways have longer unsupported spans.
you may be interested to know that this "3S" technology is soon going to be used for a gondola urban transit project, also in BC. Look up "Burnaby mountain gondola".
Congrats to Sam who managed to find a way to write off a trip to Whistler as a business expense. Gotta get those few seconds of B-roll going across the Gondola, right?
OK, two things; 1. Being a Brit, I immediately assumed "Norm Duke of Wyoming" was a guy called Norm who *was* the Duke of Wyoming, so I thought it was really cool he still did proper work in addition to being a Duke. Oh, ok, it's a guy called Norm Duke who is from Wyoming. Less cool. 2. The cement truck sliding down the ski slope @2:22 was hilarious 🤣
It's not that snow happens a lot in spring in canada, it's BC, which is much more mild than the rest of canada. It just happens a lot in the mountains across the entire west coast.
Oh I've been on that thing, nothing compares to the feeling of being in this small gondola the size of a van suspended between the peaks, with endless stretches of void under. The sky was covered by clouds so thick they were grey, and underneath us, we could just about make out the tip of the tallest great pine trees peeking from the dense thick fog of the same grey. All around us, the same shadowless grey, even in the direction of the station we had left only minutes ago. The cable hung above the void, disappearing into the clouds. Unreal experience.
I think the distance between towers has nowadays been just slightly beaten by the one at the Zugspitze - apparently by an extra 200m. Built by the same company, cost about the same too (very roughly).
This reminded me of a similar, but much shorter (1800m) lift in France, called the Vanoise Express. It connects 2 ski resorts together, has no support towers at all and has 2 doubledecker gondolas each fitting 200 people. Really impressive when you see it up close.
We visited Whistler back in the summer of 2016 and we rode on the Peak2Peak gondola. It was an impressive sight dangling hundreds of feet in the air over the valley, it felt like we were flying!
So this video made me curious and do more research. And interestingly the cables were actually unloaded at the port of Vancouver in Washington state, because the cranes in the Port of Vancouver BC weren't large enough it seems. However I couldn't find any information on the train blockage. I would be curious to learn more about that
@@JoonHong Not sure if i believe that story. As if the train would be unattended and there wasn't train traffic coordination (like ATC) that would handle that as a matter of course.
@@freekzero I have little knowledge on how Canadian railway works. However, I imagine the story would be different if this were in the US. (or they might have added some flavors to the fact, so the story can become more dramatic 🧂)
weird cause having rode it i always perceived it as the going all the way down and up type of gondola (and have always ranted - what a misleading name!)
If you haven't heard of the winter destination itself, I suspect that the only way you have heard of those names is that they were once codenames for Windows versions before they got their names finalised.
Reminds me of the Month Python Mountaineering Sketch where the intrepid but very cross-eyed explorers planned to build a bridge spanning the twin peaks of Kilimanjaro.
The beginning of the video says they needed to avoid having the gondola go down into the valley. But the pictures of the finished gondola clearly shows it going down into the valley.
The gondola descends some (the cables hang with slack) but the valley is incredibly deep, the graphics hugely understate what's actually almost a vertical full mile
Yes and no. The slack does drop over half way to the valley floor. Height in the middle is 436m/1427ft and the terminals are at about 3400 ft above the valley at the crossing point (not sure exact elevation but terminals are 6000ft and Base 2 is 2500ft and crossing is a touch higher). The whole "hour to go down and back up" thing is a bit of an exaggeration. Plus this gondola runs quite a bit faster than normal ski gondolas, 8.5m/s vs about 5.
Sounds like an episode of Fascinating Horror waiting to happen. Okay, it actually does sound pretty cool, and I live within a days' drive (albeit with an international border to cross), so...
Oh wow, two mountainous cities (in Canada and Switzerland) needing to use the panama canal valley seems to add a lot of time to the transportation. Did they think of a direct extra-extra-extra long gondola to carry the wires? Seems faster
The funnies part for me is the fastest way to get form Montreal to Vancouver by car was surprisingly, going to US and use the interstate system. Just shows you how crazy wide the Rocky Mountain is.
First, it is more a tourist attraction than a practical ski lift. But there are a couple valid use cases: 1. Your friends say they're on the other side. Makes it alot quicker to meet up with them. 2. If one of the main lifts is down on one side it can be quicker to go up the other side and P2P across. 3. And i guess just people who want to ski something on both sides on the same day. But really they're all just mild conveniences. Not really a particularly valuable lift to skiers especially given the original price tag. But for tourists and marketing it was a killer move.
If welding doesn't work how does unwinding both sides then winding them together not double the amount of wire and cause the same problem? Lots of problems here, please fix
Funny enough, Whistler Blackcomb, despite being the largest ski resort in North America, barely makes it into the top 15 worldwide. The top spots are all dominated by French, Austrian, and Swiss ski resorts.
Been on this personally and who ever decided that the cars should have a glass floor in center are truly evil. I am not even really scared of heights but it still made me very uncomfortable
I really want to shop at the Unprecedentedly Long Gondola Cable shop. I rode this in 2010 on the last day of the Olympics. It was unreal. Don’t look straight down.
A small but impactful addition would be displaying Metric values in parentheses on-screen. It would ensure that a wider audience can easily follow along!
The one time I went on this gondola, it was very cloudy, so we only got a glimpse of the valley below. What we saw was lots and lots of clouds. To make it worse, we were there for a wedding and due to my family's poor time management, we missed some commitments we made to help prep for my cousins weddimg
3:30 I noticed you covered how the spools got across the ocean, and from the ocean to the mountains, but you neglected to mention how they got from the factory to the ocean in the first place. Its not very common knowledge, I know, but Switzerland is in fact a land locked country. Though, I guess because its in the Alps, they could just... roll them down through Italy?
ok this was actually incredibly interesting wrong channel!!!! love to learn about absurd logistical operations like these crazy what mankind can achieve together
OK, the fact that a CN official A: has a luxury rail car and B: managed to delay a world record breaking construction project by parking it on a single-tracked stretch of track is *extremely* iconic of the Canadian rail system as a whole. I hear Americans complain about the bad passenger service in the US and go "yes but at least the freight trains work, we don't even have that!"
Would have never happened if the provincial government didn't sell BC Rail
I need a citation on this story its simply too good to be true
@@farzaan1752 ruclips.net/video/xEAJmxe27h0/видео.html
@@farzaan1752 ruclips.net/video/xEAJmxe27h0/видео.html
@@farzaan1752 ruclips.net/video/xEAJmxe27h0/видео.htmlsi=GKpV6lXiZ_ONc9u-&t=1390
I had a teacher who flat out said "you wanna make good money become a cable splicer"
obviously as an 11 year old in 2001 I didn't listen
So you said Nein (9) when you were eleven (11) in 2001. And it was about cable splicing, the towers weren't hit by Al Quaeda, it was the cable splicers looking for jobs! You heard it here first.
Sorry my brain just connected the numbers and I thought this could be a great conspiracy theory😅
And they say school doesn't tell you anything useful!
Turns out that if you are one of few with a very specific skillset you can pretty much ask for as much money as you want. Its not like they can just go to the next guy who will do it cheaper
@@ddeedje4093 bro what
they should have just levelled both mountains and built a huge walmart parking lot
The true solution to all our problems
Is this the freedom trump wants for Canada?
That's next...so people have somewhere to buy ski wax.
This
@@brettadams6734first of all we don't really care about giving freedom to Canada we just need to stop paying the 100 million Americans pay to keep Canada's economy afloat.... Second of all Canada would be lucky to become a state then they'd have freedom of speech and pew pews two things Canadians don't have now but most importantly we would give them the freedom not to have their money confiscated if they disagree with the government (most Canadians didn't forget the trucking protest)...... But you don't have to take my word for it as Justin Trudeau he's being kicked out of office as we speak....
3:33 Corruption vs weaponized corruption
this part needs more attention like wtf
absolute insanity
its everywhere isn't it. Can't even be shocked
@@andreask-rasmussen9524yeah I get the feeling he found out about the project and intentionally parked his personal train there
The BC Rail Scandal continues!
Small correction. At 3:18 you showed it was shipped to the Port of Vancouver in British Columbia. It was actually shipped to the Port of Vancouver in Washington.
Well, this will appear at the end of 2025
I blame Vancouver.
@@columbus8myhw I concur
The devil is in the details.
A classic mistake, confusing Vancouver with Vancouver.
6:25 Today I learned that if you’re really good at splicing cables, you too can become the Duke of Wyoming.
6:28 c
I can think thye could slice it on ground, before the going on peak😂
the shortest distance between two points is a straight line you learn something new every day
Where in reality the shortest distance is even smaller. It's as easy as just build a wormhole.
@@MartinBesenyi lemme go build a wormhole real quick
@@fa113n_l3af Worms do it all the time
Except when it's a geodesic... or other trickery...
It's a catenary, straight line cables are impossible in a gravitational field.
You forgot to mention WHY this had a certain deadline… but I guess Sam doesn’t like talking about the Olympics.
Bingo! How awkward to write a story not talking about the story...
Why doesn’t he?
FWIW the basic idea has been in play long before the Olympics were handed to Vancouver. But the exposure sure made the expenditure more palatable.
@@livwake The IOC is known to be very protective of its IP and will not hesitate to issue DMCA takedowns (or worse) for even so much as using the 5 rings logo without permission. Just *mentioning* them without using any of their marks should be ok, but Sam is likely being extra cautious and doesn't want to risk anything.
What you say at 1:06 is incorrect, as something similar had been atempted and already existed. The 3S bahn in Kitzbuehel was build in 2004. This does have a shorter span at 2500 m, but the peak2peak is basically a little bit bigger copy.
And in 2003 a more classic style gondola was build connecting two resorts in France. Les Arcs and La Plagne. Based on a very different system. However, it too connects two peaks and has no support towers for 1800 meters. Its not comparible, but i figured you'd be interested in this:)
3S gondolas are something cool, but nothing new. The only thing different is that it is across two peaks instead of over a gorge or cliff.
Edit: The oldest one was built in Saas Fee 1991 and this one was also already built in 2008
Tss 🤫, don’t tell them that 😂, most of them never been in Europe and don’t even know that gondolas in Europe far more modern, and such projects like peak2peak (3S) were done before in many places 😂
Also, it’s Swiss who are making them en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricable_gondola_lift
@@evgeniikarpov3797 Swiss made ropes. Not sure about the cabins. But Dopplemayr is an Austrian company.
Its crazy the level of engineering that humanity can accomplish when ridiculously rich people want to save time when they go play in the snow.
iirc when this gondola was built, the bulk of Whistler's clientele were upper-middle-class and ski bums, in addition to the wealthy (early-bird season passes could even be attainable for middle-class families if skiing was their primary sport). The resort had also hoped Peak 2 Peak would add to marketing during the run-up to Vancouver 2010 Olympics, in addition to becoming a tourist attraction itself.
Worth noting: at that time, the resort wasn't owned by Vail Resorts (a Venture Capital™ company) and skiing hadn't yet begun its global regression into an ultra-rich sport - which has slowly been happening over the past decade. Of course, skiing at Whistler (both day tickets and season passes) is more expensive & less attainable today than 10 years ago.
Skiing there isn't completely unaffordable if you obtain season pass, but still only obtainable by the top of upper-middle class
Whistler-Blackhome tickets are actually pretty reasonably priced. Of course the hotels are not.
@@sigstackfaultonly compared to other high end US resorts.
@jpayis skiing an ultra rich sport? I know more middle class or lower people who ski than ever
Just feeling special as a canadian to have a video made about something here.
I saw the 2 peaks in the thumbnail and instantly thought it had to be Whistler
*switzerland sorry not sorry :(
You need to write a letter to Justin Trudeau to encourage more tax payer spending on projects with logistical hurdles- then have those hurdles well documented for a HAI writer to grab off of Wikipedia.
Bonus points of it involves planes, bricks, or bureaucracy.
I heard you put cheese curds on fries. Isn't that contribution to the universe enough? I would stop there and call it a win.
@@WanJae42naw, the CanadaArm is also something I as a Canadian am proud of :)
So is his full name “Norm Duke of Wyoming” or is it just “Norm Duke” and he lives in Wyoming. Because one is much cooler than the other
His name is norm duke and he lives in the void
It's just Norm Duke, and he lives in Wyoming. Not sure why Sam said it that way.
@@MirzaAhmed89 because funny
@@MirzaAhmed89 it sounds cooler
The Jackson Hole News and Guide refers to him as "Norm Duke of Wilson" so perhaps his duchy is smaller than the whole state of Wyoming and Sam just called him "Duke of Wyoming" because he seems to be the only one
It would be really cool if you could incorporate Metric values as well. I get that it wont fit in the script but it'd be enough if it was in parentheses on screen.
Brit here, so miles and feet no problem for me. But why do the Americans use pounds for large weights when tons/tonnes are so much easier to visualise? I think HAI usually gives metric as well as imperial, so perhaps this video rushed.
Another Brit here, aware of miles/feet but cannot conceptualise them nearly as easily as metric.
@@entropic_may Help from Germany here: A short king is roughly 1/1000th of a mile, and a tall king is slightly over 6 feet. The other kings fall in between. Hope that helps.
@@roginkAustralian here nothing imperial means anything to me
The video isn't in French 🤷🏻♂️
i live in whistler and ride it several times a week. never gets old
Why didn't Amy get sent to ride the gondola to see how it was?
Budget cuts😔
As a quasi-local; Always wait for the silver gondolas. The glass floor is awesome. Also awesome being able to ski both peaks so easily.
As someone with acrophobia, ALL THE NOPES!
@@ChristianAkacro yep, i'll take the traditional route and snowboard one mountain on one day, and the other mountain the next.
Hehehehehe fuuuuuuuuuck that noise. Unless my co-riders want me to have a panic attack mid gondola, lol
The glass floors aren't really floors that you stand on, it's a window in the middle of the cabin that is fenced off so you can't stand on it
Maybe you can answer my question... he mentioned it would take a long time to transit a gondola that went down through the valley, but he never mentioned how long the one they built takes. About how long from one peak to the other?
3:19 the cables were actually delivered to the other Vancouver, in Washington
If they had been delivered to vantucky, they would have been sold for meth within 24 hours.
is that true?
No it wasn’t lmao
@@MrJoelerjoeler 22:22 in ruclips.net/video/xEAJmxe27h0/видео.html
One of the deadliest gondola incident ever happened because american aircraft flew to low and cut trough the rope. But it was in italy, so of course the US did not give a fuck and the pilots were never put in prison
I remember that Plainly Difficult episode!
If it happened in the US, they still wouldn't give a fuck. They don't discriminate, all lives are equally worthless 😇😇😇
One of them got a slap on the wrist for concealing evidence. But of course, they didn't repeat the trial with the new evidence.
@ i know it from seeing it in the news here in italy, if you go to the italian wikipedia page you can see a image of the cabin right after the crash. Stuff of nightmares
@@ENCHANTMEN_ They got court-martialed for destroying a video tape from the day off the incident. How can you use the evidence that was destroyed? Both of them were discharged from the military and lost all their benefits because of this. One of them got 6 months in prison. They both should have gotten a lot more time but you and the OP are just stating things that aren't true.
As a Central European, most of this story sounds surprisingly uneventful.
Every winter there's a mountain building project somewhere in the Alps that includes crazy (Goldhofer) heavy haulage on mountain roads, short building times, rope splicing, and sometimes also cable cars from multiple ropes.
i was thinking the same this project looks like the s3 sytem in autria
Thank u for making this video. This being my home resort it is always fun to learn more about it. 2 other minor things that have probably already been mentioned:
1. Please include metric, the resort is literally in Canada, and all the site info is in metric, so you probably had to convert all of it, can you put the metric in even if its just in brackets on screen
2. I believe it was port Vancouver in Washington, not Vancouver Canada, since they had the largest mobile cranes on the west coast at the time and those were needed due to the weight. Nowadays the Canadian port has such equipment, but at the time they needed to offload in the states as the Vancouver port would not have been able to move the spools from a staging yard to the train
One of the reasons why the ski passes are like 3 times more expensive than anywhere else
Worth it
My student pass at whistler is cheaper by hundreds of dollars than any Washington state ski area. $500 USD for the whole season vs over a thousand for crystal, and even cheaper than snoqualmie which is my closest mountain. Makes the drive up worth it for the much better terrain. Even if I wasn’t a student it would still be cheaper than crystal or snoqualmie.
Given the fact that there are multiple massive gondola projects in Europe and it's still relatively cheap, I would say that it has to do with corporate gred more than anything.
I prefer to think of him as Norm, Duke of Wyoming.
Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
@@MirzaAhmed89 Tough. Duke Norm doesn't care about your puny laws.
@@MirzaAhmed89 Tell that to Norton I, Emperor of These United States and Protector of Mexico. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
@@MirzaAhmed89 I think that Constitution thing is supposed to be more flexible now that America has a king immune from the law of the land.
3S gondola systems are getting more and more common in Europe (maybe elsehwere too, but idk) even without the specific circumstances described here, simply because 3S gondolas are a lot more stable in windy conditions in general and as such make for a more comfortable ride.
That are the most capable ropeway type (comparable propably only to funitel and arieral tramway) so that why propably.
Vancouver's building one of those too! They put a university on top of a mountain (for some reason), and every time it snows the buses get stuck, so they're building a 3S gondola that won't get stuck (hopefully)
There are also some in Asia, but not in Ski resorts
@@1224chrisngLast i heard that was still a proposal being investigated, not a done deal.
Were gonna need more videos on Normal Duke Of Wyoming
And I want to know about this cable splicer shortage! Bc they use giant cables in other things like shipping also.
There are YT videos of cable splicing. Start small and work your way up. Like many specialized trades. Until you are the cable guy
Sugarbush Resort, in Vermont, had a similar problem after they bought the neighboring Glenn Ellen. They went with a more traditional chair lift to cross the Slide Brook back country area. It hugs the terrain, so it winds up going up, down, up again, and finally down. It's a 11,012 foot long high speed quad with a net of only 400 feet vertical change, even though the difference from highest to lowest point is 1,557 feet. At over 2 miles long, it's the longest chairlift in the world. I don't think anyone's going to top it, as anyone else wanting to build cable transit that long goes with a gondola.
it'd be nice if they ever run it.
can we get a sole video on how to braid those cables together
Tell me about it! That's the buried story here. Only 5 cable splicers on the planet? WTF? Why am I just finding about how rare this job is now?
@@stickynorth I think he said in North America. If that's "the whole planet" to you, BOY do I have news for you.
Look up "how to splice stranded rope" and you'll see a similar idea. I'd bet it's the same concept but at a higher level.
@@fonkbadonk5370 actually it's just the USA. However, that number (5 people) was from an article published in 2014. The number could well be lower, or possibly higher, now.
@@stickynorth The 5 are in the US. However, Norm Duke does projects all over the world. The article shown in the video quotes Duke as saying, "I’ve been to Tokyo, Barcelona, Mexico City, Switzerland, Toronto … but my main territory is the western United States."
that corruption part should have A LITTLE more attention!
I don't think it's true. It doesn't make sense. I think it's a joke or is referencing something obscure.
Honestly disappointed that Duke was the cable splicer’s last name, and he wasn’t actually some obscure Wyoimingite nobility.
Me too, then I remembered Wyoming isn’t real
Les Arcs and La Plagne in France had a very similar problem around the same time and used a very similar solution. The Vanoise Express now connects both ski resorts across a huge valley within 4 minutes creating one of the largest connected ski areas in the world!
Kudos to the great writing and research at Half of Interesting. I can tell rabbit holes were gone through to provide us with this great video!! And we can now all appreciate how difficult it was to get this gondala erected.
The Sandia Peak Arial Tramway on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, NM, has an unsupported span of a similar length, which was completed in 1966. However, it differs in two key ways. First, it is not a gondola cable car, but it has two larger cars, one of which goes up the mountain while the other goes down. Second, it travels from the base to the top--or near the top. The unsupported span is from the second tower to the top station, a span of 7,720 feet (2,353 m). According to Wikipedia, two newer cable car/tramways have longer unsupported spans.
you may be interested to know that this "3S" technology is soon going to be used for a gondola urban transit project, also in BC. Look up "Burnaby mountain gondola".
No way guess who I found
Why does that not sound like a lot of money to me? Maybe because I've been obsessing with the California high speed rail project!
Projects are a lot easier when you own all the needed land.
American infastructure contracts are pillaged by contractors
@@westrim And when you have minimal earthwork to do
2:49 More metric please
With this being in Canada shouldn't it be titled "This 3km Long Gondola..."? Come on, America! Catch up :)
no
100%
100% NO!! We don't need to catch up. Kilometers suck.
Congrats to Sam who managed to find a way to write off a trip to Whistler as a business expense. Gotta get those few seconds of B-roll going across the Gondola, right?
OK, two things;
1. Being a Brit, I immediately assumed "Norm Duke of Wyoming" was a guy called Norm who *was* the Duke of Wyoming, so I thought it was really cool he still did proper work in addition to being a Duke. Oh, ok, it's a guy called Norm Duke who is from Wyoming. Less cool.
2. The cement truck sliding down the ski slope @2:22 was hilarious 🤣
It's not that snow happens a lot in spring in canada, it's BC, which is much more mild than the rest of canada. It just happens a lot in the mountains across the entire west coast.
Oh I've been on that thing, nothing compares to the feeling of being in this small gondola the size of a van suspended between the peaks, with endless stretches of void under. The sky was covered by clouds so thick they were grey, and underneath us, we could just about make out the tip of the tallest great pine trees peeking from the dense thick fog of the same grey. All around us, the same shadowless grey, even in the direction of the station we had left only minutes ago. The cable hung above the void, disappearing into the clouds. Unreal experience.
Correction at 3:20: They shipped the cables to Vancouver, Washington, 400km south of Vancouver, BC.
Not to be confused with Norm Duke the bowler, of course, who I imagine is more proficient with splits than splicing
I think the distance between towers has nowadays been just slightly beaten by the one at the Zugspitze - apparently by an extra 200m. Built by the same company, cost about the same too (very roughly).
I've wanted this video for some time now. Thank you
You're not putting a 97t spool on a "traditional semi truck"!
We did the Peak-to-Peak in summer of 2011. I knew it was cool, but I didn't realize just how new it was and how insane the construction was!
As a telecom lineman it’s really interesting to see a highly scaled up version of logistical issues that line workers deal with daily.
3:40 that’s a joke right..? right???
“Fancy hydraulic sliding doohickey” is a sentence I never thought I’d hear on HAI.
Discovery Channel has a full documentary on this. I love it and that's where my love for cable driven transport begins
This reminded me of a similar, but much shorter (1800m) lift in France, called the Vanoise Express. It connects 2 ski resorts together, has no support towers at all and has 2 doubledecker gondolas each fitting 200 people. Really impressive when you see it up close.
We visited Whistler back in the summer of 2016 and we rode on the Peak2Peak gondola. It was an impressive sight dangling hundreds of feet in the air over the valley, it felt like we were flying!
So this video made me curious and do more research. And interestingly the cables were actually unloaded at the port of Vancouver in Washington state, because the cranes in the Port of Vancouver BC weren't large enough it seems. However I couldn't find any information on the train blockage. I would be curious to learn more about that
ruclips.net/video/xEAJmxe27h0/видео.html 23:22 will solve your curiosity 😉
@@JoonHong Not sure if i believe that story. As if the train would be unattended and there wasn't train traffic coordination (like ATC) that would handle that as a matter of course.
@@freekzero I have little knowledge on how Canadian railway works. However, I imagine the story would be different if this were in the US.
(or they might have added some flavors to the fact, so the story can become more dramatic 🧂)
I'm struggling to deal with whether that CN Rail story was true or not because that was so ridiculous that it sounds just like an HAI joke.....
More skiing videos! Always more skiing related videos
weird cause having rode it i always perceived it as the going all the way down and up type of gondola (and have always ranted - what a misleading name!)
G-Link Wagrain's 2.3km peak to peak gondola is pretty similar, tho quite a bit smaller
Yesssss ive been waiting for this video since I saw my first chairlift I’ll be visiting this in two days
Can you site the source for the developer having to buy stocks to call the president of the CN?
as a transportation engineer, this video is exactly what I needed today
If you haven't heard of the winter destination itself, I suspect that the only way you have heard of those names is that they were once codenames for Windows versions before they got their names finalised.
Did they make it out of bricks?
I have ridden this gondola. It is great! Beautiful views.
Have you gone over the Cloudraker suspension bridge? I love that thing.
Reminds me of the Month Python Mountaineering Sketch where the intrepid but very cross-eyed explorers planned to build a bridge spanning the twin peaks of Kilimanjaro.
As someone who lives near whistler and ski's there frequently I can say that that it is a really cool experience
I’ve seen this gondola before and I’m so, so happy that you made a video on it
The beginning of the video says they needed to avoid having the gondola go down into the valley. But the pictures of the finished gondola clearly shows it going down into the valley.
The gondola descends some (the cables hang with slack) but the valley is incredibly deep, the graphics hugely understate what's actually almost a vertical full mile
Yes and no. The slack does drop over half way to the valley floor. Height in the middle is 436m/1427ft and the terminals are at about 3400 ft above the valley at the crossing point (not sure exact elevation but terminals are 6000ft and Base 2 is 2500ft and crossing is a touch higher).
The whole "hour to go down and back up" thing is a bit of an exaggeration. Plus this gondola runs quite a bit faster than normal ski gondolas, 8.5m/s vs about 5.
@@greebler_elf The mile is from the highest point you can get to on Blackcomb down to the village.
I've ridden it before, and I never realized how fucking crazy it was to build. Incredible stuff
Sounds like an episode of Fascinating Horror waiting to happen.
Okay, it actually does sound pretty cool, and I live within a days' drive (albeit with an international border to cross), so...
I have taken this peak to peak, and it is awesome!
Oh wow, two mountainous cities (in Canada and Switzerland) needing to use the panama canal valley seems to add a lot of time to the transportation. Did they think of a direct extra-extra-extra long gondola to carry the wires? Seems faster
Boy, I hope Brilliant has a foundation course in cable splicing.
As fascinating an accomplishment as this is, watching this video is as close as I’m interested in getting to this thing.
The funnies part for me is the fastest way to get form Montreal to Vancouver by car was surprisingly, going to US and use the interstate system.
Just shows you how crazy wide the Rocky Mountain is.
Noob here. Why would someone want to go peak to peak? Wouldn't they want to ski one mountain and go up the another to ski both?
First, it is more a tourist attraction than a practical ski lift. But there are a couple valid use cases:
1. Your friends say they're on the other side. Makes it alot quicker to meet up with them.
2. If one of the main lifts is down on one side it can be quicker to go up the other side and P2P across.
3. And i guess just people who want to ski something on both sides on the same day.
But really they're all just mild conveniences. Not really a particularly valuable lift to skiers especially given the original price tag.
But for tourists and marketing it was a killer move.
Just went there, great food, amazing views, and incredible skiing.
Lot of HAI videos in a short period of time.
If welding doesn't work how does unwinding both sides then winding them together not double the amount of wire and cause the same problem? Lots of problems here, please fix
I used AI to answer that same question. Now I understand.
You stagger the individual strands so it is only slightly thicker at any given point. Same process as with regular lifts.
Someone just watched the free 40 min documentary about this gondola on youtube and decided to make an 8 min recap. Good recap tho
00:10 you know what else is massive?
What
My wenis.
MY MOM
@Inflight777 LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW TAPER FAAAAAAAAADE
@@josephrosner905😂😂😂😂 of course
I like to imagine that the stock footage hoodie guy in HAI videos is actually Sam posing like he's a shutter stock model
Funny enough, Whistler Blackcomb, despite being the largest ski resort in North America, barely makes it into the top 15 worldwide. The top spots are all dominated by French, Austrian, and Swiss ski resorts.
This felt more like a half length Wendover Productions video instead of the usual Half as Interesting
Been on this personally and who ever decided that the cars should have a glass floor in center are truly evil. I am not even really scared of heights but it still made me very uncomfortable
I just rode this a few weeks ago, no idea so much effort went into building it
I really want to shop at the Unprecedentedly Long Gondola Cable shop.
I rode this in 2010 on the last day of the Olympics. It was unreal. Don’t look straight down.
How is this not a Sam video? It has all his major interests?
A small but impactful addition would be displaying Metric values in parentheses on-screen. It would ensure that a wider audience can easily follow along!
The Peak-2-Peak is genuinely so fun to ride though! Kinda terrifying if you get the singular glass bottom one tho ...
Not terrifying as it is just a small window with a railing. Also there are 2 of them.
@@freekzero Oh whoops! Also which ones have a small window? I thought they all had the side panels.
If Sam’s not talking about airplanes and trains, of course he’s talking about ski resort stuff.
The one time I went on this gondola, it was very cloudy, so we only got a glimpse of the valley below. What we saw was lots and lots of clouds.
To make it worse, we were there for a wedding and due to my family's poor time management, we missed some commitments we made to help prep for my cousins weddimg
3:30 I noticed you covered how the spools got across the ocean, and from the ocean to the mountains, but you neglected to mention how they got from the factory to the ocean in the first place. Its not very common knowledge, I know, but Switzerland is in fact a land locked country. Though, I guess because its in the Alps, they could just... roll them down through Italy?
We have a lot of trains in Switzerland, so that's probably it
If they ever play Jet Lag Hide and Seek in Canada, I know one place where Sam will go.
3:46 this really does sounds like cn rail... There's dozens of legal battles between saskpower and CN rail over land ownership.
ok
this was actually incredibly interesting
wrong channel!!!!
love to learn about absurd logistical operations like these
crazy what mankind can achieve together
Yeah I think I’ll take the up and down the mountain option, as opposed to dangling high above the valley
I thought you said Norm Duke of Wyoming, to not get confused with Norm Duke, PBA Hall of Famer and of bowling's goats LOL
Good old Austrian engineering :) And if you want a nice long hole in the mountain too. You (hopefully) know where to find us.
This is wild to see immediately after getting back from Whistler
The INSANE Engineering of a 2-Mile Gondola.
Great, now we can ski up one mountain and down the other!
That's how skiing works. right?