The gondola at a Colorado ski resorted recently experienced a significant malfunction, leading to hundreds of skiers stranded. In what has been described as a “once in a lifetime” incident, 174 individuals were left stranded on the gondolas at the Winter Park ski resort. Reportedly, the ski lifts automatically shut down after a crack was detected in its infrastructure.
“We were going up to do our first run, my wife and I, and we stopped. Stopped for about 15 minutes and we started kind of thinking, maybe it’s unusual,” skier Aleksey Dmitriyev explained to the press. “I called the line, and the line saying if it’s less than 20 minutes don’t worry, call us back… Then we waited a bit longer and we started seeing ski patrol coming down and talking to people from the ground to the cabin, like saying how many of you in the cabin, all that.”
According to reports, it took almost five hours to rescue all 174 park attendees who were left stranded on th lift. “Everybody was pretty calm, ski patrol was calm and professional and assured us,” Dmitriyev said, illustrating the predicament. “It was kind of interesting because he kind of knew what he was doing, but we were a little bit concerned.”
Despite the interruption to his ski trip, Dmitriyev was undeterred and continued skiing throughout the afternoon. “We skied a few runs after that, we used a different lift, of course, and it was still an OK day but once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said. Dmitriyev also captured footage of the incident in which a rescuer could he heard giving the instructions, “We are going to send a seat up, we are each going to get in a seat individually and slowly lower everyone down.”
Having experienced the harrowing incident firsthand, one person on Reddit wrote, “I was one of the unlucky many stuck on the gondola. Took about 5 hours in total to get my feet back on the ground. Shout out to the patrollers working their assess off to get everyone down safely. Got a sweet $10 coupon redeemable at Winter Park for my time.
Edit: I was contacted by Winter Park yesterday and they offered me a couple of day passes for the inconvenience so luckily they have done a bit more than the coupon to make up for our day.”
“I was one of the people that got evac’d via belay (I have the video from the gondola to prove it). Kind of a cool experience even though the bigger picture is a giant bummer for a lot of people. Kudos to the WP Ski Patrol who handled the situation with extreme skill and professionalism. Shame that this happened, but appreciate them getting us down quickly (all things considered) and safely,” another person commented in the thread, adding another testimony.
Another person in the Reddit thread offered the unfortunate perspective of the employees at the park who are tasked with getting the ski lift back in operation. “Feel bad for the lift crews that are going to have to spend all that overtime during the holidays to get the lift towers inspected,” they said. It’s really going to suck for everyone as I expect the forest service to demand NDT inspection on all of the critical components which will severely inhibit lift capacity. I really hope the mountain leadership does the right thing and brings in addition help to get all of the work done as quickly and safely as possible.”
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Featured image credit: Featured image credit: Pudelek (Marcin Szala), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jasn%C3%A1_Ski_Resort_-_gondola_lift_Kosodrevina_-_Chopok_(3).jpg