Spokane was home base for Byron Riblet, whose monumental engineering achievements in the mining and skiing transportation industries have been incorrectly attributed to his younger brother, Royal. His contributions to the development of early Spokane have also gone unrecognized. He designed large railway projects, platted new additions, laid courses for the city’s first steam-driven and electric railways, and designed the waterworks that still provide clean drinking water to the city today.
Thus Riblet Tramways was born and, with many of the mines installing and rebuilding tramways, the success of the business was almost guaranteed. Riblet lived in Sandon until 1901, when he moved his operation to nearby Nelson. There, he operated his business with the help of older brother Walter in management and younger brother Royal in sales. In Nelson, Riblet noticed how the Scandinavian miners rode the tramways up to the mines with their skis and then skied down the slopes to town after work. His trams were, in essence, the first aerial ski lifts in the region.
In 1908, Riblet returned to Spokane and by the 1920s business was booming, and the company had contracts with mines across North America, Canada and South America. Royal Riblet was instrumental in landing the lucrative contracts in South America and was awarded 40 percent of the company. He used this newfound fortune to construct his famous home on the bluff overlooking the Spokane River in the Spokane Valley, known to him as Eagle’s Nest, the current Arbor Crest Winery Cliff House.
The 1930s were a hard decade for the Riblet Tramway Company. Byron Riblet eventually fired his brother Royal for fraud, and the company went through several changes to stay afloat during the economic hardships of the Great Depression. The world of mining was in a downward spiral, and aerial tramways were not a top priority for most companies. Riblet had to reckon with the fact that his company was in dire straits.
CARL HANSEN
The bright spot of the period was Carl Hansen’s ascent within the company. Hansen, who had worked for many years as an engineer at Riblet Tramway Company, was responsible for its resurgence and survival into future decades, holding the business together while Riblet was floundering. In 1939, Hansen approached his boss with the idea of designing and building a ski chairlift. In 1936, the Union Pacific Railroad had installed the nation’s first chairlift at Sun Valley, Idaho. Riblet looked at chairlifts as toys and was concerned that they would have to build an unmanageable number of them to match the income they would get from one large mining tramway…