STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Sun Valley Resort’s new high-speed quad should give riders a thrill when it opens for the 2020-21 Winter Season.

It rises out of the Cold Springs drainage a thousand feet before cresting a hill and taking a brief plunge. Then it rises another 600 feet.

The chair, which has been dubbed “the Sunrise lift” by some for the way it’ll catch the early morning sun, is nearly complete just in time for Sun Valley’s Thanksgiving opener.

Workers from Salt Lake City—the United States’ base for the Austrian-based Doppelmayr—worked this weekend to finish the lift.

Workers have been applying the final touches and should be finished this week.

On Friday they loaded 33 of the chairs—about half of them—with garbage cans full of water, then ran the lift to test it.

It passed, and they uncorked the cans to allow the water to trickle out as the chairs returned to the bottom, rather than create a muddy mess by dumping all the water in one place.

The  quad will open up 380 new acres of skiing encompassing everything from glades and chutes to an extended Broadway cruiser. It replaces the old Cold Springs two-seater, which at 50 years, was the oldest lift on Bald Mountain.

The new chairlift takes a bit of a plunge after cresting the ridge enroute to a landing point near Roundhouse Restaurant.

A man mixes concrete in a portable mixer.

The quad is more visible from Roundhouse slope than was the old Cold Springs lift.