It’s double bubble time at Okemo Mountain Resort in south central Vermont.

The Ludlow resort has installed a second bubble chair, the Quantum Four, servicing the ski area’s Jackson Gore pod, that replaces the Jackson Gore Express Quad.

This bring to two the number of orange-tinted lifts at the resort making it the first in North America to feature multiple bubble chair lifts.

“The cost and what you expect the return to be is the biggest issue,” says Okemo president Tim Mueller.

It has a large retractable windshield-like dome that protects skiers and riders from cold temperatures, snow, rain and wind.

The chair is also heated.

“Basically it is a gondola but you don’t to have take your skis off,” he said.

Ludlow’s notoriety was once as a mill town on the Black River made prosperous by wool in the 1800s. Red brick and Victorian homes sprang up. The highly reputable Black River Academy, built in 1889 and now a museum, graduated historic figures like a president. On the edge of the Green Mountains in a lovely valley, Ludlow is growing again as home to Okemo Mountain Resort which opened to skiers in 1956.

The mountain has 121 trails and glades serviced by 20 lifts. With a summit elevation of 3,344 feet, it has some 2,200 feet of vertical.

The season typically runs from mid-November through late April.

Last winter Okemo installed a six-pack bubble lift— Sunburst Six. It runs  6,430 feet with a vertical rise of 1,670 feet and carries 113 chairs at a speed of 1,000 feet per minute. It deliver skiers and riders to the summit of Okemo Mountain in 6.4 minutes. The cost of the lift, including installation, was $6.9 million. It replaced the old Northstar quad.

Jackson Gore, with its base village, made its debut in 2002 with seven trails. The trail counts grown since then, with some glades too. Also springing up at the pod is Okemo adventure zone with activities like miniature golf, zip line and mountain coaster plus a fitness center.

Mueller says Okemo went for a second bubble lift because it is “what the market wants.” The mountain operations team looked at the terrain and guests using that area of the resort and opted for that kind of lift.

“The bubble is comforting to the skier,” he says.

The bubble chairs are heated, with an electrical pulse moving through the seats when they go round the terminal.

The new bubble chair will also whisk skiers to former natural snow trails Rolling Thunder and White Lightning that now have snowmaking on them.

That’s the third straight year, at more than a $1 million, that Okemo has expanded its snowmaking, upping its coverage to a whopping 98 percent.  In addition to 1,125 state-of-the-art, energy efficient HKD tower guns, Okemo utilizes hundreds of snowmaking guns of varying types.

The bubble isn’t the only new lift at the resort. A new fixed-grip Leitner-Poma chair was installed at SouthFace Village, the newest on-mountain community at the resort. When complete, the development will have 14 residences, says Mueller.

Another infrastructure enhancement is the addition of RFID cards. Okemo becomes the third Vermont ski area to use the radio-frequency-identification-enabled cards that are scanned through special gates at eight of the resort’s lifts.

Vice president of marketing Dave Krulis calls the cards a great convenience.

“They can be reloaded online,” he said.

The card can be kept inside jackets and pants pockets.

This technology makes the cumbersome visual checking of lift tickets and season passes moot. After an initial visit to the ticket window to purchase a Real. Easy Card, skiers and riders can go direct-to-lift on subsequent visits; they simply go online to load new products like lift tickets and even resort credit onto their card prior to visiting.

Okemo’s also putting some nice touches in its terrain parks thanks to its  partnership with Snow Park Technologies. The Homeward Bound terrain park is has a new name to recognize the contributions of Okemo’s first snowboarding program director Gordon Robbins. This park will include jumps, hips and features that will highlight and celebrate Robbins’ love for riding.

Image courtesy of Okemo