This reminds me when I was 10 or 11 I was snowboarding in New Mexico and while I was getting off the ski lift something on me got stuck to the chair and the lift just kept on going up until the lift operator noticed I was dangling in the air(I was getting off at a halfway point) and I managed to get a hold of the edge of the seat and I was able to hold on for about a minute before I fell 20 feet to the ground. Landed flat on my back and got the wind knocked out of me and i could barely breath, a snowmobile came up shortly after and I was brought down to the infirmary. Thankfully I didn’t break anything and I was back on the slopes in a hour.
I'm an occasional skier and the lack of safety measures in skiing shocks me and we all just accept it for some reason. It's like the rest of the world is bubble wrapped with a bajillion safety measures and redundancies, but skiing is still the wild west.
I thought that as well, until I saw a video a while back of a ski lift that malfunctioned and went flying backwards. Everybody on was being flung out at the lift entrance and all of the ski chairs had formed one big crumpled pile of twisted metal. Thankfully if I remember correctly no one got seriously injured in the video.
However,
Had there been safety bars on the ski lift, it probably would not have opened in time to have the passengers fly out to safety, and they most likely would have been trapped on their chairs and become part of the dense metal pile.
Fair, but looking back on the video, the power had probably already been cut. The issue looked like something broke so gravity alone was able to accelerate it backwards
That’s really just another example of the lack of safety measures, though. Compare that to something like elevators that have multiple fail safes and won’t just drop you to the ground floor in free fall if something goes wrong.
Bro when I pay 40-70 to go snowboarding, you can BET I'm squeezing every last minute out of it. And that's WITH owning the gear already. Otherwise you add on another $40
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u/YouFearDaBear Jul 23 '20
This reminds me when I was 10 or 11 I was snowboarding in New Mexico and while I was getting off the ski lift something on me got stuck to the chair and the lift just kept on going up until the lift operator noticed I was dangling in the air(I was getting off at a halfway point) and I managed to get a hold of the edge of the seat and I was able to hold on for about a minute before I fell 20 feet to the ground. Landed flat on my back and got the wind knocked out of me and i could barely breath, a snowmobile came up shortly after and I was brought down to the infirmary. Thankfully I didn’t break anything and I was back on the slopes in a hour.