Heavy Lifting!  Last Saturday I went to shoot a video about a
helicopter that was removing the old Deer Crest chairlift. This
job is a necessary first step before receiving the slightly
larger towers that are being built for the new Mountaineer
Express chairlift on Little Baldy Mountain at Deer Valley.
Before I even left home, I saw a strange helicopter flying by
the Wasatch Mountains. A few moments later, I was picked up at
Snow Park Lodge by Chuck English, Deer Valley Resort’s Director
of Mountain Operations.  On the way up to the lift, Chuck
explained that Dopplemayr, the company supplying lifts to Deer
Valley, had orchestrated a complex and precise operation to
remove the eighteen towers assemblies that constituted the Deer
Crest chairlift and bring them down to the bottom of the lift in
less than two hours. He further explained that the helicopter
used for the operation was a very expensive piece of equipment,
costing around $4,000 per hour of flight time. I knew a few
things about choppers, but not much