WINTER PARK, Colo. — More than 100 skiers and snowboarders on the Winter Park Resort gondola had to be evacuated from the cabins by rope after the lift shut down on Saturday.
A spokesperson for the resort said the gondola had an operation malfunction and stopped, as it is designed to do. The shutdown was first reported after noon, according to the spokesperson. Ski patrol began rescuing people from the cabins about an hour later.
After making sure that no one was in distress, ski patrollers climbed up the lift towers, shimmied to each of the gondola’s cabins and lowered the occupants’ equipment before helping people down one at a time, according to the spokesperson. There were no reported injuries.
> Watch: Gondola occupant gets rappelled down by rope
“It was not scary at all, and ski patrol did a pretty good job as well,” said Aleksey Dmitriyev, who was on the gondola when it stopped working. “It was kind of easy because first they took the skis and all the gear and rappelled the skis down.”
Dmitriyev said the rescue felt “very safe.”
Taylor Scotland was on the gondola with her father and sister for their first run of the day, when they got stuck.
“It was really tight. The max people in a cabin is 10, and there were eight. We were pretty squished in there, and we were sitting in the same position for four hours. And the seats were made out of metal, so not pretty comfortable,” Scotland said.
She worked with ski patrol to rappel down from the cabin. Scotland said the hardest part was swinging her body around, as instructed by ski patrol, to finally make it back onto the terrain.
“You have to push yourself around, so you don’t get hit. So I turned myself around. I was pretty scared there,” Scotland said. “Once I got to the ground, I was good.”
Scotland was in one of the last cabins to be evacuated, so she was stuck for about four hours before finally making it out of the cabin.
On Sunday, Winter Park was working on repairs to fix the gondola, which is only six years old and one of the resort’s newest lifts.
“This is a rare malfunction. This isn’t something that would typically happen. So we are looking into what exactly did happen,” resort spokesperson Jen Miller said.
Miller said every year, every lift in Colorado is inspected at the beginning of the season by the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board. This year, Winter Park received their license from the board to operate the gondola, along with the other lifts at the resort.
“We were licensed and authorized to open the gondola at the beginning of the season this year. So we’ve followed protocol, and it was one of those failures that we really couldn’t have predicted,” Miller said.
On Sunday, the manufacturer of the lift, Leitner-Poma, was on site along with the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board. Both teams were working to determine what happened, repair the lift and prevent another incident in the future.
The crane and replacement part needed to repair the lift arrived Sunday from Grand Junction.
Around 4 p.m. Sunday, Winter Park said repairs on the gondola were progressing, and the new part had been installed. The gondola will be running for testing and evaluation Sunday and Monday.
Once the repairs are completed, the safety board will need to inspect the gondola and approve it for reopening.
“Pending evaluation and test results, the Gondola will open as soon as possible to the public,” the resort said.
Until then, the resort said its Arrow and Gemini lifts will service the Winter Park base area.
In addition to being peak ski season, the shutdown happened one day after the Winter Park Express train that takes people from downtown Denver to the resort began service for the season.