There are few sports as expensive as skiing.
A daily lift ticket alone typically costs more than $100 with top resorts, such as veil, charging up to $209 for a day's skiing.
It'd be easy to call this a ripoff.
After all, all those $209 are getting you is access, along with thousands of other people, to one of 32 lifts between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Does it really cost that much for a resort to run a few lifts?
Well, the short answer is sort of.
Ski lifts are a simple enough concept.
With the most common design, chairs, each with a capacity between one and eight, are connected to a continuously rotating cable pulled by motors at the top or bottom of the lift.
Between all the redundancies and safety systems, though, they end up being fairly complex machines, and complex means expensive.
Well, it varies widely, depending on length, capacity, specifications, and location, costs for the construction of a new lift alone regularly reach $10 million, and most large key resorts have dozens of lifts.
In Vale's case, once again, they have 32.
