Before Your Time: Selling Vermont

If you ride up Mount Mansfield today, you’ll probably take a “quad,” a sturdy chairlift that holds four people. Or maybe you’ll pack eight companions into a fully enclosed gondola. But the revolutionary design that helped the ski resort industry take off was comparably modest: It held just one rider at a time.
The original single chair from Mount Mansfield was once the longest, highest chairlift in the eastern U.S. By today’s standards, it was woefully inefficient.