Scary - lift roll back in Georgia

[François Pugh]

Being an old man (58) with a lot of mileage, I can attest that the brain can work in many different ways in critical situations. Sometimes it seems your brain is fast enough to compile a PhD theses in critical life or death situations, sometimes you are a dis-embodied observer, and sometimes your actions just happen.

Me, I would jump with skis on, land it switch and ski away . Regardless of sticking the landing, I can move faster with skis than without skis for a short time. the snow there looked pretty hard, impact would not be all that different, unless you thought to use the skis (you may or may not be thinking) deliberately for that purpuse, and even then it would only be a slight difference. If the snow were soft, from experience, I would rather slide on skis than post-hole into a sudden stop.

Maybe the emergency brake should be on by default (giant springs with mechanical advantage like drum brakes with shoes pinned at the proper end?) and rely on hydraulics to take them off, instead of relying on hydraulics to apply them.

 

[Talisman]

Me, I would jump with skis on, land it switch and ski away .

Ride it switch back to the lodge? Nicely done.

 

[Talisman]

Why do you believe having skis off would be best?

As others have mentioned PLF. Given a choice (which is unlikely in the moment) I would prefer to jump with no skis to land on the balls of my feet and complete a PLF roll. No skis mean no switch landing though.

 

[Goose]

That's really terrifying, however. 90 percent of the time I'm skiing with my young kids, and I might have had to make a wrenching decision for them.

making decisions is not always easy and especially with your kids.

One time when my daughter was little and had already been on the chair a number of times........Some how shortly after we leave and take off she goes flying out of the seat. I instinctively (reflex like) reach down and grab her. I had her by the smallest margin of grip. Basically between my thumb and index finger (with my glove on) I was barely able to grasp a sliver of her jacket at the shoulder. Lest just say the grip I had was very poor and I was squeezing my two fingers with all the strength I had in them.

And so......Im yelling to stop the lift over and over as Im also thinking what to do but they aren't responding sow e keep moving.......and not being far from the loading zone, knowing I would probably not be able to hold on for too long I thought to drop her right there while we were still low enough. But then I thought what if she gets injured? whatif my chair or the next chair and the peoples skis hits her head/face/whatever the case because we are not stopping? And so I then hold her longer thinking maybe I can pull her up after all. I keep yelling during this process. And now we are not only heading up a little higher but also at an area where the ground dropped some and we are over rocks and a small stream. Now Im beginning to realize again I cant pull her up and losing my two fingered grip as I cannot squeeze my two fingers any longer and draining of that energy. On the other side the small rocky stream the ground itself rises sagain and that's thankfully when the chair finally stops. Thankfully I was past the stream and in the spot that was again low enough (chair to ground) where a worker (as I painfully waited) was able to get over there underneath her and at that point my grip failed and she dropped (not so far) and he caught her easily. .

This wasn't at all any most dramatic thing. But for my daughter of course it was and it potentially could have gotten a lot worse. Anyway the point of bringing this up is that even when we think rationally we still don't have the correct answers and there is always question and uncertainty while in the heat of the moment.

Drop her but then risk my chair or the next chair and skis injuring her? don't drop her and just maybe I can get her back up? So I chose to avoid the potential for injury of possibly the next chair/skis/etc from injuring her and basically couldn't put her in that harms way. My brain (heat of the moment) just wouldn't let me do that. But now what? Now this could potentially get very ugly very quickly. Thankfully it didn't and the chair stopped at just the exact best possible place before no return and a truly real ugly scenario could have developed. In one sense I could say I made the right choice as she was not injured at all. But one can also say I should have let her go early. And I even still question that would been the correct thing. But what if that somehow injured her? Than that wouldn't have been the correct thing and how would I have felt?. These things are not easy to plan at all. Things just happen and you never really know what you will do once involved in it.

 

[Goose]

and so we are on this chair and figuring what we want to do. I can certainly get with that. But now what if your with your kids, spouse, whoever? or even someone elses kids etc? what do you do for any of them as for helping them get off but also thinking skis on or off for them and they are holding on dumbfounded. Im probably thinking just throw them off before I go off. But exactly when to start doing this? You need to be at the right height and yet that probably means closer to the action point of this disaster. Now other people on the ground also in the way. I mean this stuff is just crazy to be involved with. The scenarios can just pile up. Its just like ...wow! your at the mercy of a hundred different possible things that can go wrong or right.

 

[Goose]

You know whats strange though? Ive been in a number of bad situations in my life (ithink most of us have at one time or another).
This is something I recall reading up about because after one incident ( a car crash) it really got me curious and many people will testify to this same thing as well. When in the midst of a potential threatening situation it can all happen as though in slow motion. Of course its happening very fast in real time but I can recall thinking and reacting as thought it was all in slow motion. And in that same incident my friend who was with me swears the same exact thing. That everything was like it was slow motion. That's happened a few times in my life. Its like the brain is thinking so fast that time slows down. I can recall every second as though it was minutes. Strangest thing I thought interesting to bring up and possibly others have had this happen while in a threatening situation. Hers a wiki link on it fwiw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception

 

[Uncle Louie]

You know whats strange though? Ive been in a number of bad situations in my life (ithink most of us have at one time or another).
This is something I recall reading up about because after one incident ( a car crash) it really got me curious and many people will testify to this same thing as well. When in the midst of a potential threatening situation it can all happen as though in slow motion. Of course its happening very fast in real time but I can recall thinking and reacting as thought it was all in slow motion. And in that same incident my friend who was with me swears the same exact thing. That everything was like it was slow motion. That's happened a few times in my life. Its like the brain is thinking so fast that time slows down. I can recall every second as though it was minutes. Strangest thing I thought interesting to bring up and possibly others have had this happen while in a threatening situation. Hers a wiki link on it fwiw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception

I have experienced the slow motion effect. It's real.

 

[NE1]

I have experienced the slow motion effect. It's real.

Me too - motorcycle accident - had time for several thoughts and to cover my head as I was in the air upside down over the car (60's - no helmet).

 

[YolkyPalky]

So I'm guessing all gearing systems and braking systems completely failed? And it simply became a free-wheeling cable line being pulled backwards by the combined weight of the skiers on the "uphill" side of the chairlift? You can see the chair does slow down eventually, maybe partly because more and more weight is offloaded, albeit violently, maybe partly because of the chair pileup at the bottom.

 

[Goose]

Me too - motorcycle accident - had time for several thoughts and to cover my head as I was in the air upside down over the car (60's - no helmet).

ha..well not really funny, but a did similar on highway too. Why I say "ha" is because it reminds me just how much we are at the mercy of every scenarios happenings as they are always so different. I walked away from that high speed accident on a crowded highway. Totaled bike, etc and as I went head over heals and slid between tires on both sides of me Im thinking in slow motion ..."which vehicle was now going to run me over"... But another occasion literally between only10to15 mph believe it or not I broke 4 ribs, a color bone and punctured a lung. Not a scratch on the bike. You just never know what/how/why which way things will happen.

 

[Viking9]

And we still have people who worry about the Russian’s.

 

[John Webb]

Just figured out in must be Georgia in former USSR, not Georgia, US which I didn't think had skiing.

There was a ski area in Georgia USA for many years called Sky Valley Ski Resort but it closed 4 years ago lol. Nearest skiing is Cloudcroft AL lol.

 

[ChrisFromOC]

When I first saw the headline I was thinking that I didn’t know they had any ski hills in Georgia, but there have been lots of advancements in artificial snowmaking ...

 

[cantunamunch]

When I first saw the headline I was thinking that I didn’t know they had any ski hills in Georgia, but there have been lots of advancements in artificial snowmaking ...

Whtcher gonna do - 'muricans can't say Gruzia right and no one would recognize their own name for it

 

[John Webb]

Another scary lift accident in Colorado last year had a happy ending. The victims friend was the slackliner !

"A man who got tangled in an Arapahoe Basin chairlift Wednesday morning and was hanging unconscious from his neck was cut down
by a professional slackliner who climbed up a lift tower, slid approximately 30 feet across the lift’s cable and cut him free with a knife
tossed from ski patrollers."

https://www.pugski.com/threads/arapahoe-basin-friend-rescues-friend-hanging-from-backpack.3758/

 

[YolkyPalky]

Another view of the incident, from someone's helmet GoPro cam it appears, and you can see just how scary this was, and how a couple of people may be injured more than just a scrape. Still, it appears no one was seriously hurt, thankfully.

Maybe a Mod can consolidate all the posted YouTube clips into the First Post or something.

 

[NPhoenix]

Bar Up!!!

What's your emergency plan?

Lots of vids of this accident in Georgia today. Apparently fortunatley no-one killed.

Thanks for posting this. I'm going to go over this with my kids.

 

[trailtrimmer]

That no serious injuries report seems a little fishy. The one person pinned under the chair laying under the bullwhwheel wasn't moving after it stopped. The other guy with him couldn't move under his own power. There will be plenty of people with ongoing spinal and joint issues as well.

 

[Karen_skier2.0]

That no serious injuries report seems a little fishy. The one person pinned under the chair laying under the bullwhwheel wasn't moving after it stopped. The other guy with him couldn't move under his own power. There will be plenty of people with ongoing spinal and joint issues as well.

I don't buy that at all. A few look either unconscious or in shock.

On a side note, I think I know how to say "jump" in Russian.

 

[Muleski]

I've heard update reports of a number of "grave injuries"....

I was skiing today with for a few runs with a friend who rides a long carving board, in hard boots. He was talking about one of the lifts at another area, where the lift runs over a pond near it's base......now that would be a mess. There is netting, but still.

We both had friends on the king Pine lift that rolled back at Sugarloaf. Seeing this makes us realize how fast the lift foreman gut into action and applied the manual brake. Even if it didn't stop it right away, it clearly slowed it down. Nothing like this.