Mount Bachelor Skyliner Six-Pack: A Major Capacity Upgrade, But How Noticeable?

The Skyliner Express is Mount Bachelor’s first-ever six-pack chairlift.

For the 2023-24 season, Oregon’s Mount Bachelor performed a major upgrade on one of its most popular frontside chairlifts. This central Oregon resort replaced its Skyliner Express quad, which dated back to 1989, with a brand-new high-speed six-pack, bringing a substantial capacity increase. The Skyliner Express is Mount Bachelor’s first six-pack; following this project, the resort retains eight high-speed lifts in total (the rest of which are still quads).

The new Skyliner Express is certainly a net positive for the resort, although its installation may have had more to do with maintenance costs than the best strategic placement for a six-pack chairlift on the mountain.

The Mount Bachelor trail map, with the Skyliner Express lift highlighted in red.

Experience Changes

On any given day at Mount Bachelor, the Skyliner Express is one of the busier lifts. The lift serves a fair amount of parking areas, and a lot of its runs funnel right back down to it (versus runs off more isolated chairs that spread people out). In addition, Skyliner oftentimes services the largest quantity of terrain parks at Mount Bachelor, with setups that are longer in length with more features than freestyle areas elsewhere at the resort. Finally, the Skyliner Express is also the main ski racing chair at Mount Bachelor, with frequent training and races done on the Cliffhanger run, and the Junior Race Center is also near the bottom of this lift. 

As a result of these circumstances, a high-throughput lift in the Skyliner area is crucial to the Mount Bachelor experience.

Experience Positives

Capacity

The new lift is an effective capacity increase over the old one. Similar to the new Mount Hood Express we recently visited, it has tight chair spacing and doesn't have the mediocre hourly capacity that some detachable six packs with really wide chair spacing suffer from.

Mount Bachelor’s employees are really effective at managing lift queues and loading almost every chair to maximum capacity on busy days. Combined with the throughput improvements, the new Skyliner Express has cut down on wait times a bit and now moves noticeably more people. The new six-pack also has automatic loading gates at the bottom terminal, something other Mount Bachelor lifts (including the old Skyliner Express) don't have.

Resiliency

The new Skyliner Express’s chairs provide much better wind resiliency than not just the old quad, but the rest of Mount Bachelor’s similarly-positioned chairlifts.

The Skyliner Express sits at a near identical elevation to the Pine Marten Express and Outback Express, with similar wind exposure as well. On a day when the Pine Marten Express, Outback Express and Northwest Express are closed for the whole day due to wind, the Skyliner Express—with its heavier six seater chairs with slatted backs—may still be able to run at a reduced speed! This means that everyone at the West Village (which is the main arrival portal at Mount Bachelor) won’t be trapped, as they can take the Little Pine lift over to the Skyliner Express to get to the rest of the mountain.

Thanks to its heavier, slatted-back chairlifts, the Skyliner Express offers better wind resiliency than Mount Bachelor’s high-speed quads.

Experience Neutralities

Limited Ride Improvements

In terms of ride experience, the new Skyliner Express isn't that remarkable of an improvement over its predecessor. It runs at the same speed as the old quad, and at Mount Bachelor, that more often than not means running lifts well below their design speed—which is a bit of a bummer considering how long a lot of the lifts there are.

The new chairs offer comfortable padding, the ride is smoother than the old lift, and the terminals are quieter and aesthetically pleasing, but that's about it. The "hockey puck" footrest design of modern Doppelmayr brand chairlifts are present on the new Skyliner Express—these tend to have mixed reception in the snowsports community compared to the traditional footrest design that has been around for decades, as they're way less snowboard friendly, and for those with larger skis such as myself rocking all-terrain skis, I constantly feel like my skis will slip off the footrest. For perspective, the old Skyliner Express and the new Mount Hood Express six pack have the traditional footrest design.

Missed Investment Opportunities Elsewhere

From a strictly crowd flow perspective, one could argue that some of Mount Bachelor’s other lifts should have been upgraded to six-packs before Skyliner.

The old Skyliner Express was down for the majority of the 2021-2022 ski season due to a bullwheel failure (here’s a relevant article about that debacle). While the previous Skyliner Express was on the older side for detachable chairlifts and had its fair share of mechanical struggles over the years, it's interesting to think they made a significant multi-month repair on it to get it ready for the 2022-2023 ski season—in which it operated without issue—only to replace it the following season.

With the successful completion of that major repair, some might argue that an upgrade for either the Pine Marten Express or Sunrise Express should have been a higher priority. These lifts see more traffic than Skyliner—serving as the primary access points from their respective base areas—and provide access to sought-after terrain. The Pine Marten Express admittedly still has significant operational life left, having been largely renovated in 2006, but the Sunrise Express is only four years younger than the old Skyliner lift. Perhaps we’ll see a replacement for one or more of these lifts in the coming years as well.

The Skyliner Express six-pack feels a bit weird sandwiched between two busier high-speed quads.

Final Thoughts

While other lifts may have benefitted more from the capacity upgrade, the new Skyliner six-pack brings a lot of benefits to Mount Bachelor. The new six-pack provides a throughput boost to a busy terrain pod and better wind resistance than the resort’s other lifts. We expect it to provide a strong foundation for Mount Bachelor’s intermediate and freestyle experience, as well as its windy-day operations.

Considering a ski trip to Mount Bachelor this year? Check out our full Oregon and Pacific Northwest rankings, as well as our comprehensive Mount Bachelor review. You can also check out our Mount Bachelor review in video form below.