STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Carol Holding rode the new Challenger lift on Saturday. Now, you can hitch a ride on Wednesday.

Sun Valley Resort’s long-awaited unveiling of its new Challenger and Flying Squirrel chairlifts is finally here.

The resort will cut the ribbon at 8:55 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 20.

A welcome ceremony led by Sun Valley’s General Manager Pete Sonntag and Mountain Operations Director James Grant will commence at 8 a.m., along with live music from DJ Alex.

Officials will ring the customary bell and cut the ribbon at 8:55 a.m. And the first chair will be up, up and away at 9 a.m.

“This undertaking has been one of the most ambitious mountain projects we’ve accomplished in many years, and I could not be more proud of our team and excited to show our guests what we’ve been hard at work on since last spring,” said Sonntag. “These two new lift openings mark an exciting next chapter for Sun Valley Resort and we look forward to celebrating with our community, our guests and the entire Sun Valley team.”

Carol Holding, who bought the resort with her husband Earl in 1977, took the new six-passenger Challenger lift for a test drive on Saturday.

“She was dead set on going,” said Sonntag. “That lift is awesome. You’re going to love it. And the snow is pretty amazing over on that side of the mountain.”

Workers started plowing last year’s 200-plus-inch snow on the Warm Springs side of the mountain a week before the mountain closed in mid-April so they could remove the old Challenger and Greyhawk lifts and have the new ones in place before Christmas of this year.

They have put it through extensive testing, including places multiple gallons of water on each chair to test the load.

The new chairlifts are expected to improve skier circulation on the mountain.

• They installed 28 towers and 109 chairs in the days for the Challenger lift leading up to the 2023-24 ski season.

The cutting-edge Doppelmayr six-pack is a unique chairlift custom designed for Sun Valley Resort. It replaces both the Challenger lift and the shorter Greyhawk lift as it will enable skiers and boarders to get off at mid-mountain where the terminus for the old Greyhawk lift was.

The ride to mid-station will take 3 minutes and 20 seconds The mid-station exit, which provides access to racer venues, makes Challenger the first D-line chairlift with a mid-station in North America

The ride to the top covers a distance of 3,138 vertical feet in eight minutes—just over a minute faster than the old one. The vertical rise over a slope length of 8,693 feet, is the largest in North America.

The lift powered, by a 1,690-horsepower motor, can ferry people 1,181 feet per minute.The capacity is 2,465 people per hour.

• The new Flying Squirrel chairlift—a Doppelmayr four-pack--will transport skiers from the Warm Springs base to mid-mountain near the top of Picabo Street. It will enable skiers to get to the River Run and Seattle Ridge areas without having to go to the top of the mountain.

The former Flying Squirrel lift burned during the 2013 Beaver Creek Fire.

The new one has has a vertical rise of 2,353 feet; the slope is 6,252 feet in length. The ride is 6 minutes and 15 seconds from top to bottom. The 800-horsepower motor allows the chairlift to run 1,000 feet per minute.

The new lift can ferry 1,795 people per hour. It has 21 towers and 98 chairs.

• Advanced skiers will also be able to reach Warm Springs via the newly extended Lower Flying Squirrel trail. The black diamond run has a pitch of 38 percent and offers 1,500 vertical feet of skiing. There are 14 snowmaking towers lining it.

The run is not expected to be open yet on Wednesday.

The Holdings have been generous in covering Bald and Dollar mountains with snowmaking, without which there might be no skiing so far this year. They also planted the resort with hundreds of trees after they bought it, turning the grounds around the Lodge from a flat treeless field into a beautiful mountain-scape.

They built the Sun Valley Pavilion and the luxurious mountain lodges, using Earl’s engineering expertise to add features like the towering picture windows in River Run Lodge that others said was impossible.

A few years ago, they built the long Broadway lift, which climbs into the sky offering amazing views of Pioneer Mountains and more.