New Chair, New Era: 49° North Retires Its Original 1973 Payday Lift for a Modern Doppelmayr Quad

At 49 Degrees North Mountain Resort in northeastern Washington, a chairlift that has carried beginner skiers up the mountain's lower slopes since the resort's very first season has finally been retired — and its replacement, a brand-new Doppelmayr fixed-grip quad named Dreamer, is now open and ready for the 2026-27 winter.

The end of an era for Payday

The new lift replaces the now-retired Payday chair, a fixed-grip two-seater that had been in operation since the resort's inaugural season back in 1973 — records show its year of construction as 1972, the year construction on the ski area itself began. For more than five decades, Payday served as the resort's principal learning lift, the low-angle stepping stone between the beginner conveyor and the rest of the mountain. Reviewers have long noted that the only true beginner terrain at 49° North exists off the lower-mountain Payday chairlift — the natural next step for newcomers who had graduated from the resort's first-timer conveyor.

The sunset of the old double chair became something of a local moment in itself. In a social media post, the resort wrote that "the Payday lift served our visitors well for many, many years, but this new Doppelmayr quad will take that experience to the next level for all of our newer skiers and riders, families, kids, and lesson programs." A number of the old double chairs were offered to the public in mid-July for $550 apiece (before tax), and the tokens of memorabilia proved highly coveted, selling out within days. The resort has hinted that similar sell-offs could happen again as further lift upgrades continue.

Meet Dreamer

Dreamer — the name now attached to the completed project — services Treasure Hill and Gold Chute, taking on the duties Payday had held for decades. The new Doppelmayr quad follows a different alignment than its predecessor: its bottom terminal sits much closer to Grubstake, making it easier to reach from the lodge, while it unloads slightly higher up the slope and closer to Gold Chute. The new fixed-grip quad has a marginally longer line than the double it replaces, running 1,956 feet, and — unlike Payday — comes fitted with restraint bars for rider safety.

The terrain feeding the new lift has been reworked to match. A new section has been added to the Gold Chute trail extending up to Dreamer's unload, eliminating the flat, skate-across section skiers previously had to cross to link into the run — the trail is now a gentle downhill throughout. In a statement, the resort thanked Doppelmayr USA "for all their help and support making this new lift a reality," calling the completed project ready to "transport visitors on their next great adventure."

Part of a longer modernization push

The Payday-to-Dreamer swap is the latest chapter in a sustained infrastructure push at the Spokane-area independent, which has spent the past several years steadily modernizing a lift fleet that, until recently, lagged the rest of the Pacific Northwest's larger resorts. The project follows a bigger, more prominent overhaul of the mountain's lift network: in 2021, 49° North installed the Northern Spirit Express, a $7 million detachable quad carrying guests to the summit and cutting uphill ride times to seven minutes. Built by Doppelmayr USA, Northern Spirit remains the newest, longest and most powerful chairlift in the state of Washington and the wider Inland Northwest, surpassed regionally only by the gondolas at Crystal Mountain and Idaho's Silver Mountain. That lift itself replaced the fixed-grip double Bonanza chair, which had fallen from its overhead cable in 2020, injuring two guests. Prior to Northern Spirit's installation, 49° North was, in fact, the largest ski resort in the country still without a modern, detachable express chairlift.

Behind the scenes, the Dreamer project had been in planning for some time. As of last winter, engineering and forestry preparation for the Payday replacement was already 95% complete ahead of the summer 2026 construction season — work that, per this week's completion, has now been fully realized on schedule.

More than just lifts

The chairlift work sits alongside a wider run of capital investment at the resort. 49° North has also carried out extensive summer trail work this year, brush-cutting 80 of its 90 runs to improve early-season coverage and snow consistency, and has added a Prinoth Leitwolf groomer — billed as the world's largest and most advanced — capable of laying down 21 to 22 feet of corduroy in a single pass. On the guest-services side, the resort's Calispell Creek Lodge has gained 150 additional seats on its lower level along with new ADA and family restrooms, building on last year's relocation of skier services into a new 7,000-square-foot Experience Center. The resort has also invested more than $1 million in recent snowmaking improvements.

Looking further ahead, 49° North has also indicated plans to add a rope tow to its terrain park in the near future.

A growing profile in the Inland Northwest

Located near Chewelah, 49° North bills itself as eastern Washington's largest ski area, spanning 2,325 acres of terrain across seven lifts. The resort has been under the ownership of a group led by Seattle-area businessman Tryg Fortun since 2019, which also owns Silver Mountain in Kellogg, Idaho, acquired three years earlier in 2016. Washington's ski scene is generally dominated by a handful of heavy-hitters closer to Seattle, such as Stevens Pass and Crystal Mountain, but 49° North's steady run of lift, snowmaking, grooming and lodge investment over the past half-decade has positioned the independent operator as one of the more aggressively modernizing ski areas in the Inland Northwest — a trajectory the retirement of its original 1973 beginner chair, in favor of a purpose-built Doppelmayr quad, makes emphatically clear.