For years, Resorts of the Canadian Rockies has operated a little like that friend who still rocks a flip phone because “the old one works fine.” While the rest of the ski industry spent the last decade building shiny new lifts, bubbles and heated seats nobody asked for, RCR mostly stayed quiet.
Now, seemingly out of nowhere, they’ve decided to up the ante.
Fresh off announcing a $50 million investment into Mont-Sainte-Anne earlier this year, RCR has now unveiled four new lift projects across Fernie, Kimberley and Kicking Horse over the next few seasons. And honestly? Some of these upgrades have been badly needed for a long time.
Fernie
Fernie is getting the biggest facelift of the bunch with two new high-speed quads expected before the 2027-28 season.
First up is the Elk chair. If you’ve ever ridden it, you already know this upgrade is overdue. The current fixed-grip quad is long, slow, and basically serves as a mandatory patience exercise before getting anywhere interesting. The new detachable quad should cut ride times roughly in half while finally creating a smoother high-speed route from the base area toward Great Bear, Lizard Bowl and Cedar Bowl.
The second project heads into Cedar Bowl, where a new high-speed quad will replace the current scavenger hunt required to lap the zone. Right now, skiing Cedar efficiently involves the Haul Back T-Bar, the Boomerang triple and Great Bear Express, which feels less like skiing and more like assembling IKEA furniture.
The new lift turns all of that into a single-lift lap.
The downside? Cedar Bowl’s reputation for hidden powder stashes may take a hit once everyone can actually get back in there quickly.
Kimberley
Kimberley’s upgrade is a little less flashy, but still important.
The resort’s old Tamarack double chair, whose bones date back to the early 1970s, is finally being replaced with a fixed-grip quad ahead of the 2026-27 season.
Will it completely transform the resort? Probably not. But it should improve reliability, increase capacity and modernize one of the oldest lifts still hanging around in the RCR network. Sometimes a good old-fashioned life-cycle replacement is exactly what’s needed.
Kicking Horse
Kicking Horse might be getting the most important upgrade overall.
For years, the resort has basically functioned like a mountain balanced on one lift. The Golden Eagle Gondola carries an enormous amount of responsibility for a resort with more than 4,000 vertical feet, because it’s currently the only realistic route from the base to most of the upper mountain.
That’s finally changing.
For the 2027-28 season, the Pioneer double chair will be replaced with an extended high-speed quad running from the base area all the way to the bottom of Stairway to Heaven. Translation: Kicking Horse is finally getting a legitimate second route up the mountain.
That’s a huge deal.
Not only should it improve crowd flow and make lower mountain laps way faster, it also adds some much-needed redundancy after last season’s gondola incident, when a cabin detached from the line carrying eight passengers. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured, but it definitely highlighted how dependent the resort had become on a single lift.
The new Pioneer lift is also expected to become one of the longest detachable chairlifts in Canada, climbing more than 2,500 vertical feet.
