Brian Ramsey - Moving the masses

He’s probably transported more people than a New York City bus driver. The only difference is most of Brian Ramsey’s passengers are not off to work but play.

Brian has been the friendly, ‘get the job done’ face of Doppelmayr in New Zealand for 40 years – the company just celebrating 50 years in NZ last week with a special NZ Ski Area Associations gathering in Christchurch (8 April).

In that time Brian’s been responsible for overseeing and managing highly technical Doppelmayr lift and gondola installations all over the world, taking him from Whistler’s Blackcomb Ski Resort and far-flung parts of China to Russia, for many months at a time.

In fact, he’s done it for so long he’s now on round two. “We’re now replacing equipment that’s 25 to 30 years old in the likes of China where gondola systems can carry 1.2million domestic tourists alone,” he says.

It all started when Brian, raised in Dargaville, quit his building job at 22 to work as a liftie at Tūroa. “I decided to become a ski bum,” he grins. “It was more fun.”

The son of a Northland contractor, he’d always been into sport and loved the outdoors. A schools’ representative hockey and tennis player, Brian spent heaps of time at the beach, holidaying with his family at Kai Iwi Lakes and Bayly’s Beach. At 12 his parents took him to Whakapapa to try skiing. He was hooked, off on many teenage ski weekends to Ruapehu, Tūroa and Whakapapa once he started his building apprenticeship with C & A Morse in Dargaville at 17.

In 1983 Brian did an Outward Bound course, then quitting his job and heading to Tūroa where he lived in the Ohakune staff accommodation. “It was very social,” he grins.

In 1985 his Tūroa boss invited him south to work for Doppelmayr helping install the new Remarkables Skifield’s Shadow Basin and Alta chairlifts.

An environmentally controversial and sensitive project, it was a challenge dealing with DOC.

He worked the first winter there as lift supervisor returning to Doppelmayr to install the Sugar Bowl lift in 1986. “At the end of that season we moved the Shadow Basin lift 60m up the hill.”

There were some laughs, like when ski area manager John Cooper landed the snow cat in a small lake while grooming avalanche debris off Shadow Basin. “They had to truck another groomer over from Coronet. We nicknamed the groomer Calypso after that,” Brian chuckles.

Sugar Robinson managed Coronet Peak and there was much rivalry with the new kids on the mountain block.

“Coronet was getting more snow that first year due to strange weather patterns so Bill Black and Dennis Egerton would fly snow in in large nets by helicopter onto the trails.” The first fan snow guns arrived in 1986, by then Brian an occasional Ski Whizz star at Eichardt’s planting race flags in the snowmobile.

He then worked on the Skyline Gondola and Whakapapa’s Waterfall Express that summer.

There was a stint at Ruapehu then three lift installations at Whistler Blackcomb – over 80 40-foot containers of equipment shipped over from Austria, a six-month project. “We were putting a T-Bar tower into the ice on the Horseman Glacier with a helicopter when it got away and slid down the ice.”

Dad of two daughters, Brian’s alternated between hemispheres for much of his life, hugely grateful to patient wife Di - a teacher, for maintaining home base. He spent 11 years doing 20 back-to-back summers. From NZ’s Stockton Coalmine to Mr Samsung’s Phoenix Park and Olympic villages in South Korea and Salt Lake City. He’s worked all over the States too, Beaver Creek to Durango, and the prestigious private Yellowstone Club, frequented by Bill Gates. Even the Aussies love Brian’s work - Mounts Buller and Hotham, Thredbo and Perisher.

His first Chinese gondola project was in Wuhan in 1995 – ironically a place synonymous with the reason it became his last in 2020. “Until Covid I was in and out of China for six years.”

Working through interpreters the culture and dialect in every province was different. “It was challenging at times,” Brian says. “The first thing you learn is how to order ‘one cold beer’.”

Even in 1995 there was huge security – armed guards with AK47s on each level of the massive bridge over the Yangtze River by their hotel.

On his last project there in 2019 Brian had a security guard roommate – accompanied 24/7, even in a mountain compound. They were in a demilitarised zone surrounded by top security with missiles being developed nearby. “One day the military turned up to our hotel and we were shipped out and flown back to Beijing for the weekend.”

Life back home has been a bit simpler and he’s now working on completing the new Soho Chair behind Cardrona.

Who knows? Maybe Frankton’s new urban gondola into Queenstown may be next. “It’s about moving people. That’s the nature of our game,” he says.