What's changing on the mountain
The Gunbarrel chairlift has been in service since 1988, meaning the existing quad will have run for nearly 40 years by the time its replacement opens. The current lift climbs approximately 426 metres of vertical in six minutes and ten seconds.
The new six-seater will keep a similar travel time, but the added seating will lift capacity from 2,800 to around 3,000 skiers per hour. Thredbo says the new chair will use the same design as the recently installed six-seat lift at Mt Perisher, built on Doppelmayr's D-Line platform and engineered for the wind and weather conditions typical of Australian resorts.
A lift with a history of chair detachments
Gunbarrel's replacement isn't only about age. The lift has been involved in two notable incidents during its service life. In July 2019, a skier fell after a four-person chair became dislodged from the haul rope near the top of the lift during an exceptionally strong wind event, with gusts in the area reported at around 90 to 110 km/h. The skier fell an estimated 5 to 10 metres into snow and escaped with minor bruising.
That followed an earlier 2016 incident in which an empty chair detached from the lift during public operation. Investigations into the 2019 incident attributed the detachment to the severity of the wind event rather than a broader mechanical fault, though the lift's history of chairs separating from the haul rope has been a long-running point of scrutiny among close observers of Thredbo's lift network.
Doubling down on snowmaking at Friday Flat
The Gunbarrel project sits alongside a second major investment: a new all-weather snowmaking unit at Friday Flat ahead of the 2027 season, roughly doubling the capacity of the unit installed this year. That first unit already proved its worth during a difficult natural snowfall season, helping Thredbo build a workable base at Friday Flat and keep the beginner area operational despite limited snow.
The second unit is intended to let the resort cover the entire Friday Flat area, including the beginner bowl, learner carpets, Thredboland, Giddy Up and the Burrow, with around 50 centimetres of machine-made snow before the season even opens, independent of natural snowfall.
"If you saw Friday Flat at the beginning, in a very obviously limited snowmaking year, we had about four cat widths wide," Diver told Snowy Mountains Magazine. "I want Friday Flat to be side to side, and I want every part of Friday Flat to be open."
Thredbo also plans to upgrade its pump house, expand snowmaking pipelines and add further fan guns, with a longer-term ambition to extend all-weather snowmaking toward the Cruiser area, High Noon and potentially thinner sections of Supertrail.
A shift in priorities for Thredbo's lift programme
The Gunbarrel decision marks a change from Thredbo's previously stated plans. The resort had earlier flagged the Snowgums double chair as next in line for a six-seat replacement; that project has now been pushed back in favour of Gunbarrel. Diver indicated the Kosciuszko Express is expected to be the next major lift replacement after Gunbarrel, though it presents a different engineering challenge given its exposure to strong winds.
"We're looking for a really good solution to the Kosciuszko Express replacement, which obviously has to have the ability to operate in much higher winds, given the propensity for wind hold days,"
he said - suggesting Thredbo's broader lift modernisation programme is likely to continue well beyond the Gunbarrel upgrade.
