



With all of the Skyline towers in place, thanks to last weeks helicopter excitement, the next order of business is stringing the new haul rope (cable). As you may recall from an earlier post, this particular haul rope is bigger than your average cable, weighing in at a bulky 21-tons. And as you can probably imagine, getting a 21-ton cable up onto the towers and around the bullweels is a bit of a process.

To do it, the spool of cable is staged at the bottom terminal, and a separate, smaller cable is spliced to the end of the haul rope and lifted up on top of the sheave trains. The smaller cable is attached to a winch, which is located at the top bullwheel. When the winch is turned on, the new haul rope slowly but surely unwinds from the spool and travels up and onto the sheave trains.

Once the end of the haul rope reaches the top, the crew will relocate the winch down to the bottom, and begin pulling the haul rope around the bullwheel and down the other side. The process is slow going, and will take a couple of days to complete.

Once the haul rope has been strung over all of the towers, the crew will splice the two ends together, under the supervision of an expert who specializes in this type of splicing.

If all goes well, we should be splicing by early next week, so stay tuned for more pictures. In the meantime, check out some of today’s photos below.