Guests at a Chinese ski resort recently went through a traumatizing experience.

The South China Morning Post reports that a chairlift stopped rapidly due to a malfunction, leading to the chairs rapidly swinging with passengers onboard. The ski resort wasn’t specified by the Post, but it’s located in western China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. The resort was able to safely evacuate everyone that was on the chairlift. The ultimate cause of the malfunction was abnormally cold weather.

Image/Video Credits: South China Morning Post

The situation at the Montana Snowbowl is pretty bad right now.

Earlier this month, one of the Snowpark chairs slammed into a lift tower, throwing a toddler off, and then destroying the chair, making the kid’s father hang on for his life and eventually jump off. Both were ok, but the father was furious over the lack of communication from management, lift operations, and ski patrol. Since then, it has become known that the Snowpark chairs swinging into the lift tower is quite common.  The owner of Montana Snowbowl, Brad Morris, did apologize for the incident, but they didn’t reveal any info about the incident to their social media followers.

Eleven days later, the Montana Snowbowl finally released a public statement. They apologized and said safety is paramount to them. The Snowpark chairlift is closed until they can make modifications to run the lift safely.

A major issue for the Snowbowl is guests feel in the dark due to a lack of communication. They don’t announce lift closures and their social media communication is minimal. They usually only post a snow report on their social media pages occasionally. Many on their social media channels are annoyed that it took them eleven days to make a public statement, and also allege that they’ve experienced the Snowpark chair ramming into the lift towers.

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Image Credits: The Missoulian, Montana Snowbowl

One of the scariest chairlift accidents ever occurred at Gudauri Ski Resort in the country of Georgia back in March of 2018.

Videos of skiers being tossed from the chairlift spread like wildfire on the internet as skiers and riders across the globe looked on with horror.

Clips from the original video have been embedded below. Fair warning to those of you that have not seen it before, it’s pretty hard to watch:

At least 11 skiers were seriously injured in the incident.

The accident was initially believed to have been caused by voltage fluctuation or brake issues, but a French investigative firm determined it was human error that led to the terrifying incident:

“However, after the chairlift was stopped, the operator had to introduce specific sequence of procedures and after implementation of the certain actions, the operator had to switch the chairlift on to the diesel generator power and bring the tourist to the safe site where they would have left the chairlift.

Unfortunately, according to the current conclusion, the operator made a mistake. The combination of the actions that he should have had carried out were not implemented in compliance with the relevant instructions – it was a human error.”

Essentially, the chairlift operator failed to turn on the backup generator, which caused the lift to rollback.

Georgia’s Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development suspended the lift operator, and launched an investigation into the resort. Here’s an excerpt from his statement back in 2018:

“Prior to the completion of the investigation, the authority will be suspended to the operator being on duty when the chairlift accident occurred. Issues related to charging of other liable persons will be detailed after completion of the official investigation.”

The incident remains a seminal moment in chairlift safety for ski resorts across the globe.

Around 250 people were evacuated from a ski lift at Marble Mountain on March 5th after a malfunction completely shut the lift down. The evacuation took between two and a half to three hours, resulting in two teens being sent to the hospital for mild hypothermia.

The incident occurred on the Lightning Express lift, where one of the wheels that the lift line sits on (sheave) suddenly stopped turning, causing the entire lift to shut down. According to CBC, it took approximately 15 minutes to evacuate a single lift with the help of firefighters, search and rescue groups, and ski patrol members.

At around the same time of the Lightning Express malfunction, another lift, Newfie Bullet, shut down due to an issue with its motor. The issue with the second lift was apparently identified on the night of March 4th, but employees of the resort believed the issues were fixed by the next morning.

It’s good to see that no one was seriously inured due to this malfunction, especially with some pretty wild lift accidents occurring throughout this season. Shoutout to the crew that managed to get skiers off the resort in a fairly timely manner.

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Image and Video Credit: Marble Mountain on Instagram

Elk Mountain, PA is one of the best ski areas in the mid-Atlantic region. I might even go as far as to say that is THE best in the region, but their no tree skiing policy is a little bit lame.

Nonetheless, Elk serves up 1000′ of vertical, steep trails that are actually fun, quad-busting mogul runs, and some of the best snow within a couple hundred miles.

Elk is in the news today for how well they handled a chairlift evacuation over the weekend. WNEP16 reports that 170 skiers were safely evacuated after a gearbox failed.

WNEP16’s Mindi Ramsey witnessed the chairlift evacuation at Elk Mountain. She said:

“The crews, though, were really good about explaining about what exactly they had to do. They had to scoot off the edge of the seat a little bit, and they were kind of on a little bit of plastic. And they were let down slowly with a rope. So it was all very clean. You could tell they had practiced this before,”

Good on the mountain ops and ski patrol teams that safely evacuated these skiers. This might sound a little dramatic, but they’re heroes in my book.

According to CBS Boston, Mount Snow in Vermont had some trouble during their opening weekend. One of the lifts ran into a mechanical issue, leaving 190 skiers on the chairs for close to two hours before they were rescued. All skiers were safely rescued and the lift was set to run the following day.

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Does anybody else have an irrational fear of this happening, or is it just me? I guess you could spin two hours on a chairlift into a beneficial experience. Maybe you hash out a fight with your significant other, you catch up on the posts here on Unofficial *wink wink*, or you have a crippling anxiety attack that you’ll never make it off the lift! Either way, it probably won’t be that bad. This does bring up memories of the movie Frozen that came out in 2010. It’s just a little bit different than Disney’s Frozen…

*Featured Image Credit:  James McGrail, CBS Boston*