The Ski Journal • Volume 17, Issue 1 • THE CABLE GUY

Jorg Tonett tests the wire on the new Base to Base Gondola at Palisades Tahoe, CA inside the terminal on the Alpine Meadows side. Photo: Ryan Salm

Jorg Tonett is ordering a coffee at Tahoe House in Tahoe City, CA. “Your name?” the barista asks.

“Bob,” says the 47-year-old through a strong Swiss accent. I give him a curious look. “That’s my restaurant name,” he says with a straight face. “Try getting them to spell the name Jorg.”

Tonett found his way to Northern California by splicing and inspecting cables on some of the most legendary chairlifts and gondolas in the country. The Base to Base Gondola at Palisades Tahoe that opened in late 2022? That’s his cable work. The wire on the Jackson Hole tram that was replaced in 2008 and the previous Snowbird tram are his too. Though 80 percent of his work is for ski resorts, Tonett helps install airport people movers, amusement park gondolas and other public-transit solutions. “If you move people by cable, I get involved,” he says.

All chairlifts and gondolas at ski resorts operate via a thick metal cable that’s strung between towers. A cable comes with an end and a beginning, so splicing it means you connect the two extremities, creating an endless loop. Splicing a cable can only be done by hand, and in the United States roughly 10 skilled professionals do this type of specialized ropework for ski areas. Tonett can list most of them by name. “There’s one guy I don’t know, but I know his name,” he says, laughing.

Tonett grew up on a dairy farm in Switzerland’s pastoral Lower Engandine valley. His family kept 12 milking cows, 15 sheep and two goats on a steep hillside. The ski area of Motta Naluns was close enough that he could ski during his lunch breaks from school as a kid.

When I ask him how he got into this line of cable work, he says with a smirk, “I don’t know. I wasn’t smart enough to be a lawyer? I honestly never thought this would be a life career.”

At age 19, he left his hometown for another Swiss village to do a mechanical engineering apprenticeship, and Tonett and a roommate got into mountaineering. When he realized he could combine the worlds of mountains and engineering in chairlift construction, he pursued and ultimately landed a gig with what is now the Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group, an Austrian-based company that’s one of the world’s leading manufacturers of ski-area tramways and chairlifts.

Tonett left Europe for the Lake Tahoe area in 1998 to work on the installation of Palisades Tahoe’s then-new funitel. Just 22 years old, he ended up staying put and years later, in 2011, he convinced his now-wife, an Austrian and avid skier named Katharina, to jump across the pond. Today, the couple run their own Tahoe-based cable-installation business, Wire Rope Service, completing cable work year-round across the country. They have two daughters, now ages 6 and 8, and the family skis together as much as they can each winter.

“We’ll be riding the chairlift and my 8-year-old daughter will say, ‘Dad, did you splice this? It’s rough,’” he says with a proud-dad chuckle. “You can tell how well a cable is spliced by how smooth the ride is.”

He tells me that the middle of a cable—the place where the two ends meet—is called the marriage. “Why do you think it’s called that?” I ask him. Tonett speaks three languages fluently—English, German and Romansh—but it takes him a second to find his words. “You need to meet in the middle,” he says. “They need to get along with each other so it doesn’t fall apart.”

Tonett installs cables for new chairlifts and gondolas (this summer, he installed a new gondola at Tahoe’s Homewood ski area and a new Challenger chair at Idaho’s Sun Valley), and also does a lot of upkeep and regular surveillance of an existing cable’s condition. “The cable is reliable if you do your maintenance,” he says. “A cable can last two years or 40, depending on how well you take care of it. It’s like a marriage—you have to keep working at it.”

The Ski Journal - Volume 17, Issue 1

THE CABLE GUY

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