Man dies from fall off Heavenly ski lift

Damn. THat's quite unfortunate.

Did he have the safety bar down at least?

The 19 year old victim was said to have leaned over to attend to a leg cramp. He did not have the safety bar down and just fell from the chair 30' to his death.

Really makes you think. Just 30', enough to kill you.

Yeah. And no safety bar? That's bound to happen to those people anyway. Can't say it's not his fault. Unfortunate, yes. But oh well.

"No safety bar down". Maybe there wasn't a safety bar :.

Alta and many CA areas have almost no "safety bars". It expected that you know what you're doing on a lift. Imagine!

Maybe it's not the Northeast - Holy..........

Damn. This sucks. Such horrible news right at the start of the season. Condolences for his friends and family.

Currently all skiing is off the Dipper and Comet high speed quads. Both are equipped with restraint bars but not foot rests. All snow is manmade at this time and base is sufficient for skiing but there are places where it would be a long fall.

I may seem cold (those who actually know me, know different), but it was his time, and I have no remorse in saying so, as I believe "untimely" deaths by accidents, such as this, are subconsciously chosen.

No one just falls off a lift unless they are acting without regard for their life (cramp or no cramp). It's like walking out in front of traffic unconsciously. If the fact you're thirty feet off the ground doesn't convince you to protect your well being, then perhaps you don't really value it.

May he find his way to his right place.

I tend to agree with you. Though a larger combination of factors could also be in play, there might have been an ice slick on the chair he didn't notice, the lift bounced in just the wrong way. So he may have been acting recklessly but not to a huge degree.

Some people have no innate fear of heights. It's believed to possibly be a genetic trait since it seems to run in families and ethnic groups. Many workers on Skyscrapers in New York were Mohawk Indians, who were commonly described as displaying no fear of heights. Though there is debate as to whether these people attained this lack of fear through training and conditioning or genetics - but there are a very few people who with brain scans display hardly elevated stress levels even when confronting a great height. Pretty unlikely that this kid that though.

Yeah, I'm sorry, but I just don't get the no safety bar thing. I lived in the Rockies and PNW for years and rode barless chairs no problem, but I just don't see how you can make the argument that it's somehow safer without a bar.

I wouldn't say that it is SAFER without a bar, but I wouldn't call a chair without one "unsafe." How many times have you just suddenly fallen out of a dining room chair or an office chair?

Condolences to friends and family. That is horrible.




I have had two frightening (or at least alarming) experiences on chairs without bars. Once I was twisting around to take a photo behind me when the chair suddenly stopped and bounced. The combination of unexpected motion, my awkward position, and the disorienting effect of looking through a camera viewfinder made my immediate reaction "Oh ****". More a perceived than real problem, but I was plenty scared for a moment.

The other was when I fell asleep (woke up about 30 seconds from the top). Fortunately years of practice in meetings has made me a stable chair sleeper.

Tragic -- BE safe out there guys Take care of yourself -- use the damn safety bar , its COOLER to live

Really? OMG! Nobody ever complained? That must be illegal!

Usually, areas that don't have bars will also shut down the lift when conditions become unsafe due to high winds .... just like they do with gondolas and other lifts.

However ... :

You don't want to be on the wrong side of the learning curve when the wind comes from behind and the chair is swinging like the demons were unleashed.

When you are the last off before they shut down .... it' usually time to go in and change your shorts. Been there one time and don't ever want to go through it again.

In the days when dinosaurs still roamed in the valley below the lifts ... and chairs were not "quads & triples", but were on the smallish side, you could actually wedge your poles across when the wind came up.

My condolences to his family and friends! This is tragic no matter what he was doing and hopefully some people will learn from this lesson.

Interesting that this happens now when just last month (October issue) they had an article in Skiing magazine about riding the chair without using the bar. If I remember correctly the numbers were 169 (now 170) died while not utulizing the safety bar verses 161 dying while using a safety bar.

It's come up many times as an issue in the Rockies. Colorado Ski Safety Act was kind of the pioneer of the idea. Following the Teller lift accident at Keystone, they did a very thorough investigation of safety differences of safety bar vs. no safety bar. It was concluded that the difference in outcome of accidents is negligible.

Just an example (albeit far fetched): in the event of a gearbox lockup in which the haul rope was literally stopped immediately, the entire line will often hit an oscillation point where the line is violently going up and down. Your first thought might be that you'd want a safety bar to keep you on the chair. But on further thought, probably not. There are three distinct possibilities in a serious oscillation issue. #1, your bar is down and you are being smacked up out of your seat an into the bar, and back down, over and over and over. Talk about pelvic fractures, internal ruptures of abdominal organs, maybe even split ribs, collapsed lung, etc. #2, you bar is down and the oscillation combined with the weight on your chair is enough for the hanger or grip to fail. Down goes your chair, and you're stuck in it with your "safety" bar down. #3, your safety bar is up. You either can manage to stay with the chair and avoid the blunt trauma that the bar would cause, or you are ejected from the chair. In the west (esp. CO and UT), where the snow is more often soft and forgiving than not, you can survive the semi-controlled fall with few injuries (unfortunately for the young man in question, it was not a controlled fall. sounds like he probably landed on his head, neck, or back. bad news). Depending on the snowpack and how you fall, you might hop up and ski off. There is of course, the possibility that you are either above nasty hard pack or ice, or you are significantly high in the air. And yeah... that kinda sucks, 'cause you're gonna be in bad shape.

Point is, there are reasons to say no safety bar. At least in Colorado, it is entirely up to the ski area operator whether to have bars or not for winter operations. Any lift that operates in the summer, however, must be equipped with a safety bar.

So it's not OK to fall from a chair in Colorado during the summer when there is no snow and you will need a bar cause the gearbox won't fail and the bar won't hurt you?

Colorado is a pretty "business friendly" environment so I trust anything coming out of Colorado about as much as I trust Canadian Health Ministry Studies on Asbestos Mining.

I'd love to get my hands on these actual studies and see how they did their controls ... :

No. In the summer in the rocky mountains, what are you going to fall onto? In the summer, the chances of serious injury with no safety bar are much greater.

I know. It just tosses the whole gear box failure thing right out however.

When you sort the sand of accident data you look at lots of factors that may or may not influence the outcome. Things like mortality or morbidity when loading when the bar isn't a factor .... did they sort them out.

Those are the kinds of things I like to know before I put stock in any study.

PS .... I've seen a few rigged studies! Data is so easy to massage.

I'll see if I can get some materials from the study. I'm not sure how publicly they're available, but I'll try. If I find anything, I'll fill you in.

A little more off topic, Who remembers this thread from the summer?
http://forums.epicski.com/showthread...ight=lift+test

I wouldn't say a chair without a bar is unsafe, but I certainly would not be doing a lot of moving around without a bar. You legs arent dangling from office chairs and you are not sitting on a potentially slick surface with the ski pants and possibly snowy or icey chair seat.

This is just another sad reminder that macho psychotic behavior (not using a safety bar when one is available) can be dangerous. When my kids were young and paid no attention to anything, I never let them on a lift without a safety bar. Regarding summer vs. winter in Colorado, is someone nuts? Do they think you can't get killed falling 30-40 feet onto packed snow?

Sure the safety bar may not be statistically significant, but then do you really want to be the lucky 0.1% that fell out of the chair & died like this guy did? No thanks!

While this ultimately leads into a completely subject, I wonder why people would think that things can just happen to them with no will of their own to influence outcome. :

I can't imagine living life feeling so utterly powerless as to be a pawn of happenstance. Neil Peart said it eloquently:

There are those who think that life
Has nothing left to chance
With a host of holy horrors
To direct our aimless dance

A planet of playthings
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
The stars arent aligned ---
Or the gods are maligned
Blame is better to give than receive

You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice

You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill

There are those who think that they've been dealt a losing hand
The cards were stacked against them ---
They were born in lotus-land

All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate
Kicked in the face
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate

Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt
Thats far too fleet...

If only full face helmet man were there to save him.

in Japan, when loading the lifts, the locals automatically pull down the safety-bar.

I hate it.

I avoid riding chairs with locals because of it, too.

I too can sit in a restaurant chair without falling onto the floor.

I have much respect for the family. But I for some reason doubt they are concerned about some fricking safety bar.

Get over it people, blow on your fricking coffee before you burn your lips and sue McDonalds.

the kid died, and I'm willing to bet that he would have died with the safety bar in place. Why- because I don't believe in luck. And- I didn't die the two times I rolled my truck wtihout wearing a seatbelt.

I'm with VA on this one- I'm willing to show my respect for the deceased, but will admit that it has nothing to do with a safety bar. And if anyone is so paranoid to think that a safety bar will save their life, well... buckle up, I guess.

Bush,

I feel your example is a bit flawed. Given the speeds the lifts run (even the high-speed detachables) blunt trauma would be highly unlikely. Also, the girp connections that are used are designed to withstand forces that the occupants in the seat would not survive. A grip/connection failure would likely be due to a structural flaw and at that point you are simply playing the odds of being on the chair when it gives (stoppage or not).

If your scenario were to be played out 100 times, I would guess that there would be many times more people fall out of a chair with the bar up, than would receive blunt-trauma from hitting a secured bar. Now you have to factor the odds of not being injured in the chiar vs luckily surviving the fall.