An 8-year old boy fell 30 feet from a ski lift near Lake Tahoe on Sunday. The force of the fall and the nature of his injuries prompted first responders to call for a helicopter to airlift the child to an emergency room in nearby Reno.
Sierra-at-Tahoe, the resort where the accident occurred, did not respond to a request on Wednesday for an update on the boy’s condition. It’s still unclear why he slipped from the lift.
While falls from ski lifts are rare, the possibility weighs heavily on the psyches of many novice skiers and snowboarders.
In January, a 12-year old girl fell from a chairlift at Mammoth Mountain as horrified witnesses recorded the accident with their phones. Resort employees could be seen scrambling to spread a net beneath the girl, but when she fell, she mostly missed the net.
The girl’s mother posted on social media that her daughter’s injuries weren’t serious and that she fell because she slipped getting on the lift and never had a chance to lower the safety bar.
Those bars are designed to hold skiers and snowboarders in place while the lifts transport them up the mountain. The chairs are often dozens of feet off the ground, so the experience of riding without the bar down can feel like flying through the air on a park bench — with no seat belt.
Not surprisingly, it’s extremely unnerving for inexperienced skiers or for people who have a healthy fear of heights.
Lowering the safety bar is mandatory at many European ski resorts but for years has been optional in the U.S., leading to occasionally awkward interactions between freedom-loving devotees of self-determination, who chafe at every perceived incursion by the nanny state, and people who would prefer to err on the safe side.
It’s a seemingly eternal topic on social media skiing forums.
The rugged individualists’ arguments run the gamut from a sincere nostalgia — many chairs designed and installed in the 20th century didn’t even have safety bars, they note — to the intentionally absurd. As one Reddit poster wrote, “It gets in the way of my AR-15.”
As absorbing as the debate has been, technology appears to be settling it without much regard to the feelings of the old guard. Many of the newest lifts in Europe lower the bars automatically.
At Mammoth, the bars on the most recently installed high-speed lifts can’t be raised manually. Riders have to wait until they rise automatically at the top of the hill.
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