The downtown shops haven't been the only game in town since Christmas Day.

While a hefty number of locals have been out taking advantage of bargain-basement prices, a record number hit the slopes at Mount Sima onTuesday.

It's estimated there was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 700 people on the hill.

"It was the busiest day in recent history,” Parker Hickey, Sima's general manager, said in an interview Wednesday.

Hickey said Sima sold 516 lift tickets Tuesday. By his estimation from monitoring traffic in the lift line, there were another 150 to 200 skiers and snowboarders with season passes.

"It was a huge day for us.”

Hickey said from what he knows of the numbers over the last three or four years, Tuesday was something of record.

And with the additional capacity of the new Doppelmayr quadchairlift, the wait times to get a ride up the hill were no more than four or five minutes at the longest, said Hickey, who was hired as the new GM last January.

As time goes by and everybody – staff, skiers, boarders – gets used to the new chair, he said, he expects efficiency will increase.

They are now, for instance, encouraging the use of a line for singles, to reduce the number of chairs going up with just three people aboard instead of four, he pointed out.

Hickey said he was particularly pleased to see the crowd Tuesday, given the "hiccup” Sima experienced just before closing last Friday, when skiers and boarders were stranded on the lift for 40 minutes.

It took some time for staff to navigate their way tbrough the method of bypassing a safety switch that had tripped after a couple of youth sent a chair swinging when they jumped off at the top of the hill, instead of getting off normally.

Hickey said after going through the steps with representatives from Doppelmayr on the other end of the phone to get the lift restarted, he's confident if the same thing was to happen again, Sima staff would have the lift going in five minutes or fewer.

There were approximately 200 day tickets sold on Boxing Day Monday and another 260 Wednesday, though Hickey said he can't estimate the number of season passes that were out because he wasn't actively monitoring the line like he was Tuesday.

The general manager pointed out there are plans to maximize the chairlift's capacity for next winter.

This spring, 35 racks to accommodate mountain bikes will be added to the string.

Come next winter, the racks will be replaced with 35 more chairs, in addition to the 99 in place now, Hickey explained.

The additional chairs will expand capacity from the current 1,350 passengers an hour to 1,800, which is the comfortable capacity for Mount Sima.

In addition to offering mountain biking this coming summer season, Sima will open its new one-kilometre ZOOM zipline which starts at the top of the hill, and its new Monkido Aerial Adventure Course near the bottom of the slope.

The Doppelmayr lift is designed to bring passengers up and down the hill.