Ski patrol lift evacuations

Now, I have wondered about this for sometime – what happens during / how do they do / lift evacuations at ski resorts? Well, I found the (an?) answer on Flickr….

Over on Flickr I found some interesting photos of the ski patrol at Beech Mountain, USA, practicing a lift evacuation (Beech Mtn Ski Patrol – a lift evacuation photoset). Further digging in Flickr also produced some photos from Whistler (photo1, photo2, photo3, and photo4) and Powder Ridge (photos). Basically it all looks pretty scary and something I would not like to go through! Imagine dealing with that problem and going through the procedure in a raging blizzard? So far, there have been two occasions when I thought I may have to be evacuated from a lift. One was at Killington in 1994. The weather was unbelievable. The wind was incredibly strong and the air temperature was around -10 centigrade, and this gave a wind-chill in the -20 to -30 range. The resort had signs up saying ‘you expose it – you lose it!’ and skier were being taken in to lift huts if they were seen to have exposed skin so the could warm-up. We were on the lift ‘Snowshed Double 2′ when both ‘Snowshed Double 1′ and ‘Snowshed Double 2′ (these lifts run parallel from Snowshed (map)), both stopped (freak gust of wind?). Our lift re-started quite quickly, but moved very slowly, but ‘Snowshed Double 1′ didn’t re-start for some 20 minutes. Those people must have been half-frozen when they finally got to the top.

The second time I was at Falls Creek in Australia (see earlier post). On that occasion we were using a lift to come down the mountain (the lift was the easiest way to get off the mountain as there was so little snow cover on the lower trails). Again, the weather was bad and we were being blown around in a blizzard and the lift stopped. It was cold! Very cold!! On that occasion if they had needed to evacuate the lift I couldn’t see how they were going to do it for our chair as we were suspended over a small cliff.