65 people evacuated from Heavenly chairlift
Sixty-five people were evacuated from North Bowl chairlift at Heavenly Mountain Resort today.
At 10:58am Jan. 3 an unoccupied chair on the downhill side fell from the lift.
No injuries were reported.
This is a fixed grip triple chair on the Nevada side of the South Shore resort. Fixed grip means the chairs are permanently attached to the cable.
The chairlift will be out of service until the maintenance team can evaluate what happened.
The lift was stopped immediately, according to resort officials. Ski patrol then was able to bring everyone off the lift.
North Bowl lift is in the master plan to be replaced with a high speed detachable quad, but there is no date when this will happen.
— Lake Tahoe News staff report
Evacuated?
Did they wait on the lift for hours until they were lowered down or just slowly backed up to the base of the lift?
Amazed this event wasn’t on the six o clock news.
They did wait for quite a while..some said more than 2hours. People were repelled down from each chair. Heavenly ski patrol employees are well trained in evacuating people from the chair lifts. No one was injured.
My friend and I rode that lift several times in the last week. We joked about how sketchy it was and even had an evacuation plan in the event the entire lift toppled backwards. Based on how the posts are sitting, it looks like gravity is taking its toll on it.
At one point my friend told me to look up and see how the only thing connecting the chair to the cable was one tiny weld.
Just a few days later and this happens. Guess my buddy was on to something. Glad no one was hurt. Time for Vail Resorts to step up their game. They got lucky on this one. I guess my buddy and I did as well.
It was going to be replaced with a new high speed chair to the top of the mountain years ago. The Save North Bowl Woods movement put an end to it.
Totally agree Dustin. I rode it the day before and could not believe how unsafe/sketchy it felt. Next day and a chair FALLS OFF. With the absolute price gouge that Vail charges to everyone you’d think they would have safer equipment. Completely unacceptable IMO.
Just a thought even with the strictest controls on the planet, airliners fail mechanically.
North bowl chairlift is about 38 years old, and if you ski a lot of different resorts you’ll discover there are plenty of older lifts still in service all over the state and region.
It is strictly regulated by one of the state divisions with required certs to operate. I know many of the maintenance guys at heavenly and I can tell you they take our safety seriously.
Having said that something failed, whether that was caused by human oversight is unknown. It’s part of life, we do our best to ensure the machines we use work properly but as Forrest Gump said “*#it happens”
Im so glad no one was hurt. So glad.
A grateful skier.
You guys (and your buddies) will notify the world sooner next time you have a “feeling” about safety, right?
Of course they had an evacuation plan in place, because that is the responsible thing to do. They also train regularly for the possibility. It hardly means that they knew that the chair was unsafe.
No fixed-grip chair will ever be “…slowly backed to the base of the lift”. They don’t work that way. There is no “reverse” on a fixed-grip chair.
Dan Wilvers, I concur.
That canyon is one of the worst places to have to conduct an evacuation. Well done by the Heavenly professionals.