CARRABASSETT VALLEY — The use of a pair of skidders instead of a helicopter for part of the construction of a new $3-million Skyline Quad chairlift has helped Sugarloaf keep the project on time and on budget, a spokesman for the resort said recently.

“We didn’t have to fly any concrete in, which we thought we might have to, so we actually saved some money there,” said Ethan Austin, communications manager for the resort. “We were able to do it all with skidders and rigging up some counterweights and things like that. Basically we were able to just back it down on skidders with buckets on them.”

Cement trucks delivering the concrete were able to drive up the mountain’s main work road, Binder, where the concrete was then transferred to the skidders.

But the chopper will fly too, likely in early September, when the resort begins the process of installing the towers that hold the 21 tons of steel cable that will haul chairs up the face of the mountain over some of the resort’s steepest terrain, Austin said.

The new four-passenger chairlift, manufactured by Doppelmayr-Garventa, replaces the aging two-passenger Spillway East and Spillway West lifts.

Spillway East was the scene of a mishap in December 2010 when high winds and an in-progress lift adjustment led to a derailment that caused several chairs to drop to the snow below, injuring six passengers.

A derailment is when the cable carrying the chairs comes off the tracks which carry the cable over the chairlift towers.

That lift was repaired and eventually reopened for the end of the 2010-11 ski season, but Sugarloaf’s parent companies, Boyne Resorts and CNL Lifestyle Properties, had previously decided to replace the lift with the new chairlift as part of a 10-year expansion and development plan at the resort.

The new chairlift will be the first above-the-ground lift to go in at the mountain since the Whiffletree Quad, a four-passenger detachable chairlift, was installed on the east side of the resort in 1997, according to Brad Larsen, the resort’s director of sales and marketing.

Austin said work on the new lift is expected to be completed by the resort’s annual homecoming weekend Oct. 7-9. But the lift is not expected to carry any skiers until later in the ski season, most likely mid-to-late December.

Austin said he believed the resort will stick to a traditional opening plan with snowmaking scheduled to start on the trails served by the resort’s SuperQuad chairlift. He said that lift was also the benefactor of a $500,000 investment of new circuitry, converting the lift’s analogue control panels to a digital system. The new controls are expected to help keep the lift running more efficiently and decrease the frequency of unintended stops, Austin said.

Other improvements at Sugarloaf this summer have included an expansion to and refinement of its newest gladed skiing area, Brackett Basin, which stretches between Sugarloaf’s eastern slopes and the western slopes of neighboring Burnt Mountain.

The tree work has been going on for much of the summer and done in accordance to a plan developed by the resort with guidance from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Austin said alpine habitats and nesting areas for vulnerable species of plants, animals and birds like Bicknell’s Thrush were left untouched as part of the forest thinning effort.

sthistle@sunjournal.com