ENFIELD — Whaleback Mountain is seeking community support to help repair a mechanical failure that halted its chairlift service late last month and could threaten its ability to operate next season.

Whaleback has several surface lifts, but the double chairlift, manufactured by Poma in 1970, is the only one that takes skiers and riders to the summit.

“We’ve known for quite some time that the end of this chair’s life was coming,” Whaleback’s Executive Director Jon Hunt said by phone Tuesday. A new chair, though, is a “massive investment, and as a nonprofit, we don’t have those resources.”

The mountain shut down the chair on Feb. 27, “out of an abundance of caution” after operators “started to hear a rattle in the gearbox,” Hunt said. The rattle turned out to be a failure of the bearings within the lift’s gearbox.

February saw record numbers of visitors to the mountain, but those numbers dropped abruptly when the chairlift halted. Although surface lifts continued to operate, Hunt estimated that the mountain lost as much as $200,000 in potential revenue with the loss of summit access.

On March 13, Whaleback’s board of directors posted a letter on social media and by email announcing a fundraising campaign to raise $250,000 to fix the issues with the current chairlift.

The repair would involve taking the roof off the base-area terminal, “detensioning” the cable to which the chairs are attached, and removing the bullwheel.

The gearbox would then be lifted out of the terminal with a crane and sent to a specialist company for repair, Hunt sai d.

“We’ll have to fabricate parts and shop around, because it’s an older model,” he said. “It’s quite a project.”

As of Tuesday, the campaign has raised $80,000, Hunt said.

Hunt said that he is thankful for the early outpouring of support for the chairlift repair campaign.

“We’re really excited about the future, we just need a little bit of help,” he said.

In the meantime, the mountain has begun to accept proposals for a new chair, and has “quietly” launched a capital campaign to fund that purchase, Hunt said.

“Even if we had the money to replace the chairlift today,” Hunt said, “we’d still be looking at a season or two before we could get it installed,” due to manufacturers’ timelines.

Whaleback wants to get the Poma back online so that it doesn’t miss a season or two of top-to-bottom access, which would be a significant hit to its revenue.

Whaleback plans to announce its summer program registration and music concert schedule shortly, but those may be contingent on the fundraising campaign.

As with its relatively low lift ticket prices in the winter, during the summer “we try to stick to our mission in providing affordable opportunities, so the cost of attendance doesn’t cover operating costs,” Hunt said.

This is not the first time Whaleback has faced financial challenges. Founded as a ski area in 1955, Whaleback closed for a few years in the early ‘90s, and then again from 2001 to 2005. After a foreclosure in 2013, a group of supporters created the Upper Valley Snowsports Foundation and reopened Whaleback as a nonprofit ski hill with a community-focused mission.

February’s gearbox failure makes the nonprofit hill the latest in a line of ski areas plagued by lift accidents and malfunctions this season, especially in New Hampshire. Though the incidents appear unrelated, they have caused disruptions and even injuries.

At Attitash Mountain in Bartlett on Feb. 2, a chair with a skier on it detached from its cable and fell to the ground, injuring the skier.

Three days later, a bolt detached from part of Cannon Mountain’s quad chair mechanism, resulting in ski patrol helping 64 people to evacuate via ropes.

In mid-February, ski patrol evacuated 120 people from a lift after high winds caused a cable to derail at Pat’s Peak in Henniker.

“Even brand new lifts can have issues,” Hunt said, “so we’re not alone in this, but we do recognize that it is time to replace this chair.”

Tax deductible contributions to Whaleback’s repair effort may be sent to the Upper Valley Snowsports Foundation at 160 Whaleback Mountain, Enfield, N.H. 03748 or at the mountain’s website whaleback.com.

Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.