The Magic Carpet

After Sugar Bowl opened in 1939, the only way to reach it for more than ten years was to arrive by train early in the morning and take a 15 minute ride in tractor drawn sleighs, a cold ritual that founder Jean Chickering recalled as the only time in her life she drank from a bottle because “It was so cold.” Sugar Bowl people talked for years about changing this until Jerome Hill financed the Magic Carpet, the first ski gondola on the West Coast and only the second in North America. Hill, a Renaissance man who was an artist, musician, and film maker, earned an Oscar for a documentary on Albert Schweitzer and was the grandson of Great Northern Railroad tycoon James J. Hill. The gondola opened in 1953, charged 15 cents one way and 25 cents round trip, and was later incorporated into Sugar Bowl. Originally it had 12 cars that held 6 people each and carried 450 passengers per hour. Because it was built in the summer of 1953 during the Korean War, steel for recreational activities was difficult to obtain, so the gondola was constructed from old mining equipment from Kentucky. After Jerome Hill died in 1972, the gondola went to the Alpine Winter Foundation, which sold it to Sugar Bowl. The present version was built in 1983 and can accommodate 1000 passengers per hour in fifty cars.

California · United States