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We’ve all been on a chair at least once when everything suddenly just stops. Nobody’s loading onto chairs behind you. The line isn’t budging. Nine times out of 10, somebody at the top of the lift took a spill getting off the chair and it’s just taking the lifties a minute to help clear the carnage. Life goes back to normal pretty fast and you go on about your day.
But this is an entirely different ride altogether. God forbid some gale-force winds come ripping through while you’re 30-40 feet above the ground. Sure, there’s a deep, soft landing right below but that’s not necessarily a safety test you want to roll the dice on. The skiers in this video can probably attest to this logic after they found themselves hanging on for dear life at Big Sky Resort. It looks like the chairlift from hell and they have an empty chair facing them swinging even more violently – as a nice reminder that things are getting a bit gnarly.
While everybody seemed okay here and with all joking aside, it wasn’t too long ago things really did go bad at another Montana resort. A four-year-old reportedly fell from a chair at Montana Snowbowl last month when it malfunctioned. Making the nightmare scenario even more nightmarish, the boy’s father had to watch the whole thing go down in real time.
“I’m yelling like ‘someone help us’ and the lift stops a few seconds later,” Nathan McLeod told local news. “But at the same time, as Sawyer is falling, the lift chair just breaks apart and it just flips backwards. Like the backrest just falls off the back and so I’m like clinging on to the center bar while the chair is swinging. My son is screaming and I don’t know what to do. I’m like, ‘do I jump right now?’.”
