Children Falling off Chairlifts

by on January 22, 2011 in Skiing, Snowboarding

Children Falling off Chairlifts
Beaver Creek Chairlift Photo
Beaver Creek Chairlift Photo

Minturn, CO – I was reading in the Vail Daily a couple days ago about a 5-year-old boy who fell off the Avanti lift at Vail on Saturday January 15th. The young skier fell from 20-30 feet and was released from the hospital that evening. When I went to Google to find out more about the story, I found other stories about children falling from lifts, but could not find more about the original story I was looking for.

Is this a common problem, and if so how do we prevent this? When I was a child I don’t remember people falling off lifts and we didn’t have high speed quad or safety bars. It is scary how many YouTube clips there are of people falling off lifts. On January 10, 2011 an eight year old boy was caught by ski patrollers as he was dangling from a lift at Snowmass, the Patrollers used a safety pad to catch the boy.

This past Tuesday a young skier fell off a lift in Park City Utah at Deer Valley, the boy fell 20 to 30 feet. On December 30th a boy fell off a chair lift at Snow King Resort in Jackson Wyoming, are the number of incidents higher due to more skiers on the hill or is caused by something else? In two of the cases the children were with their ski instructors, I don’t know about you but perhaps the instructors need to teach the kids how to stay of the lift properly and general safety related to skiing and snowboarding.

Have you fallen off a chairlift before? Have you ever witnessed someone falling off a chairlift, we want to here from you. Please leave a comment with your story.

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  • http://www.ottawacitizen.com/injured+fall+from+chair+lift/4151804/story.html Christine

    I too was surprised how many stories I found after a young child fell off the chairlift at the hill my 5 and 7 year old sons take lessons every Sunday. I was not there for the accident but it was in our local paper in Ottawa, ON Canada.

    Here is the link…

    http://www.ottawacitizen.com/injured+fall+from+chair+lift/4151804/story.html

    • http://www.mtnweekly.com Mike Hardaker

      Christine,

      Wow thanks for the update, hopefully the child is going to be ok. Glad he was wearing a helmet! Wish the lift ops would have handled this better. Thanks for the comment and we hope you can continue to follow along.

      Mike Hardaker

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