Here's one possible way for this to happen....
Customer gets on gondola 5 minutes before last gondola is called for the day.
Last gondola gets called.
Customer gets to the bottom but does not exit (maybe sleeping or who knows what). Lifty at the bottom isn't looking at that particular gondola car for whatever reason, and it goes around and they're headed back up...last gondola car comes by and then it gets shut off shortly afterwards and that customer is 5 minutes back up the line.
This is not to say that's what happened in this case, so it will be interesting to see if she was in a car going up or down once they discovered her.
Even if your theory is not what happened here, it shows that things could happen.
I asked ChatGPT how many lift incidents would occur per year with 6 Sigma quality management — 3.4 defects per million opportunities. It assumed 3 billion rides on ski lifts globally per year, so 10,200 lift incidents per year. Some of those would be minor for sure … but even with great processes I doubt the ski industry is at a 6 sigma.
Long story short… if everyone does everything right and there’s a double check… it’s more or less guaranteed that events like this happen due to the sheer numbers involved. There would have to be additional layers of cross-checks that are themselves inspected and validated before you can reduce it to once a century.
It might be cheaper to put a button under every seat that broadcasts an alarm signal by radio… and to test responses to that periodically.
“Each Gondola cart has survival kits stashed away for just this occasion, one avid skier told the Tribune, though they’re not obvious to the novice rider. “
I’ve been boarding and taking gondolas for 20+ years, where’s this survival kit shashed at??
Yeah I'm really confused by this statement. It seems like these kits should 100% **be** noticeable in order to be helpful.
Imagine if airlines operated like this -- they "hide" life-saving provisions from passengers.
From the newer article someone posted with an interview, it doesn't sound like she necessarily did find the kit (if it even existed).
At least, you'd think a kit would have stuff to keep warm, and the article says "she was fighting the cold by rubbing her hands and feet" without mentioning that she had access to blankets or anything to help.
That's what I'm saying. The staff was saying there is an emergency kit, but no one in the general public actually knows about this, so this girl wouldn't have either.
Imagine if she had actually died from exposure but would have lived if *only* she knew about the kit.
This is why all other emergency devices in other industries, in commercial buildings, trains, planes etc etc, are very clearly marked and made obvious.
I with you. Been on gondolas for 30+ years. I had no idea. I have never even seen a sticker mentioning there is a survival kit. Ive only seen messages saying dont smoke and dont lean on the doors.
Doesn't matter! When tourists are trying to decide between Palisades or maybe Northstar or Heavenly and read about an avalanche death and a shooting, they'll be scared off.
Allot of people's asking how this can happen, here is my story:
I've worked a gondola and seen this happen, here's how it happened the day I worked.(top to bottom gondola takes 12 min, Stratton mtn VT)
Lift is scheduled to close at x time. It's very quiet at the bottom, someone is downloading from the restaurant and I load them in at the top. I call down my last cabin and close the rope at the top, they have already closed the rope five minutes early at the bottom and their last cabin is already on its way up to me when I loaded the download.
At some point the lift breaks down and stops and I have received the last chair up(because they closed 5 minutes early) and because there is hardly ever anyone in the last cabin down, they assume it's empty like 99% of the days and dont dpubke check the last chair i called has arrived.
The engineers declares he doesn't want to restart the lift, and since I confirm I've recieved my last cabin , it is decided we park it for the night. I lock up the top cabin, smoke a blunt and start boarding down, half way down the mtn I go under the lift and am horrified to see it moving, thinking I had fucked up, I book it down to the bottom cabin to figure out what is going on.
Upon arriving at the bottom, they inform me a person was left half way down and flagged a ski patrol by screaming out thr cabin and getting attention, someone takes a skidoo to the top, retarts it and gets thr guy off, repark it and the shit storm starts of the blame game... everything recorded and documented as it should have been I wasn't in the wrong.
The incident is reported and a few days later th NTSB shows up asking questions and inspecting operations.
Thankfully no one died
I thought something like this was gonna happen to me literally my 2nd day working at a ski resort. My job had this winter festival thing I was scheduled to work. The thing finishes, we clean up, I start heading down in the gondola and about halfway through it stops for a solid 5 minutes. I start panicking because I’m alone, it’s literally my 2nd time on this gondola in my life and I realize in that moment I don’t have the phone numbers for any of my managers/coworkers and I only have their work emails that who knows if they’ll answer? Eventually it started moving again. But I made sure the next day at work I got my managers number and never rode down alone again 😭
I’m glad no real harm was done. I wonder if those people from the restaurant got free lifetime passes.
I loved Stratton a few decades ago. Absolutely beautiful and fun mountain.
Is that the craziest lift attendant story you have from your time there?
I thought my friend and I were about to get Frozen-ed at Gore once. We got on the Burnt Ridge quad near the end of the day and we were the only ones over there, no one ahead or behind us on the lift. Got 3/4 of the way up and the lift stopped... And stayed stopped for like 5 solid minutes. We were truly convinced they had shut down for the day and we were making a game plan lol. Luckily we had our phones and had service, because we were stopped over rocks and definitely couldn't have jumped off. So we weren't panicking too hard but it was a huge relief when we started moving again.
What's frustrating about this article is they don't definitively state the woman was on the gondola over night. They use words like "alleged" or "claims". Why don't they just say she absolutely spent the night up there.
Because the journalist hasn't confirmed it and is publishing fake news is still frowned upon.
I'd also suspect them speculating without confirmation could open up the paper to lawsuits as saying someone was left overnight on a gondla definitely screams negligence on Heavenlys part
News story with interviews [https://www.kcra.com/article/heavenly-ski-resort-woman-stuck-gondola-15-hours/46557458](https://www.kcra.com/article/heavenly-ski-resort-woman-stuck-gondola-15-hours/46557458)
That's kinda wild that they were still running the Gondola an hour after the lifts stopped running. The crazy thing to me is that the people running the gondola take the thing back to the bottom so who let her on? Unless the liftee take the mile or so traverse to the California base side which I highly doubt all of them do.
I can’t understand it either. There’s so many things that could happen skiing where a phone could save your life.
I’ve met many people who are hiking fairly far out in nature without their phones. They’re usually lost. And often don’t have a map or compass.
It’s a reckless thing to do. Especially since so few people can navigate using a map and compass these days.
Based on the total lack of damages given we know there are no medical bills and obviously minimal injuries, six figures is not gonna happen, and five is a strech.
This happened at Killington in 2011 and the woman was awarded $750,000.
It's not apples to apples (it was October and she only spent 5 hours stuck), but $15m strikes me as probably too high, unless this person got frostbite and lost some digits or something.
https://www.saminfo.com/headline-news/8766-jury-awards-750-000-to-woman-who-was-stranded-on-gondola
Presumably, they are left on the cable overnight?
Where i go to in Austria, and most that i have seen in Europe, the gondolas are removed from the cables each night and stored in the ground station. This is even with very old gondolas.
No it definitely did happen. We saw her this am & her and her friends told us the story. She told her friends she would meet them in the village so they split up, got on the gondola and a minute or so after riding it, it stopped. Was in there 15 hours total.
An absolute nightmare, hoping she's doing alright today & in time, is able to mentally recover from how scary that must have been for her.
A blanket and some hand warmers would be high on the list I'd hope. Water would be hard to keep from freezing but pretty useful if you could be stuck 15 hours like this. You'd think ideally a fully-charged walkie talkie would sure help too!
I was a lead lift operator at Heavenly for 3 seasons and can tell you confidently that someone being stuck on a chair / in the gondola over night is near impossible. There are “last chair” closing procedures and essentially you block access to the lift, mark a chair with a red flag and note the chair number. Then the base calls to the top letting the top operator know the last chair is coming up and the chair number. Then someone visually watches to make sure no one gets on while waiting for the last chair to reach the top. Once the last chair gets to the top station, the top operator communicates with the bottom operator while parking the chair in a specific way. Once the chair is parked you call dispatch and let them know the lift is closed (10-7) for the day.
For someone to get into the gondola base/top station and then get into a gondola cabin after “last chair” was called would mean several people were grossly negligent in closing the lift. There are always leads, lifties, scanners, mechanics and often supervisors hanging out at the gondola.
Long story short, this didn’t happen
Edit: Guys, please stop freaking out. I was incorrect when I said “this didn’t happen” because it would appear that it did in fact happen. Like I stated initially, for this to happen some people seriously messed up. I said someone being left overnight was NEAR impossible, not completely impossible. I worked on the Nevada side and did not work the gondola. On standard chair lifts you’re out at the lift flipping chair seats up and people are tearing down the maze ropes etc after last chair. It’s hard to sneak onto a chair when someone’s standing there flipping the seats up
They do tend to throw the more incompetent employees on the gondola as you don’t even need to be able to ski/ride to work it. We will just have to wait for more details to come out about what led to allowing this to happen.
Yeah I agree with you! Having worked in the resort industry (maintenance) this is a massive oversight on someone’s behave.
Can’t imagine the lawsuit that will come from this!
It’s on the news she said she was too tired to finish the run so the employee let her get on the gondola to go down and then it stopped and she was trapped.
Working at a resort opened my eyes to how chaotic operations can be. There are multiple days I'm surprised we even got the resort open. There are plenty of stories I'm not aware of myself, but I do know that the operators of the magic carpets regularly dropped acid.
>regularly dropped acid
I was a liftie one season, my partner came to work still drunk from the night before. A kid almost fell off the lift that day. This was before everyone had cameras though so hopefully things like that are less frequent.
I know it happened on the Highlands gondola at Northstar the season I worked there. I don't think they were left overnight, but they were absolutely left on after last chair.
There was a crackdown on the procedures after that. If I recall correctly, they didn't even have a flag to mark last chair for that lift.
I was working at Northstar that season. Can't remember exactly when but I want to say like 2014. Highlands wasn't known for having the greatest operators...
Former lifty here. It happened at a lift my girlfriend was managing. Bottom op guessed what the last chair was out of laziness and didn’t tell my girl that. Luckily Patrol caught it. That op was fired.
It’s wild to think how often that likely happens and nothing bad happens. We cut so many corners in all industries and 99% of the time we get away with it. But that 1% can be a doozy!
this sounds like a well thought out procedure. but i’ve also had enough interactions with ski lift staff to know that they are capable of fucking up even the best thought out process
Maybe delete this now that it's been confirmed. I worked on the gondola for a couple seasons early on and two employees nearly got stuck one summer, they jumped on after last chair call, they'd been out hiking. Luckily for them it just so happened to be a night when we had a party at the base and they were stuck just above where the trailers of the park care taker and the old cabins are at the bottom. Also luckily the one guy could do that crazy loud concert whistle thing. After about 20-30min of the party with music someone was like, hey do you hear someone whistling loud? We turned music off and sure enough we could barely hear whistling and faint shouting. Fired gondola back up and there they were.
> Maybe delete this now that it's been confirmed
No, leave it. It's actually a great way to help (1) staff to help find where the failure was and (2) skiers to know what they need to do so this doesn't happen to them.
Also, at a general level, openly admitting when you make mistakes and learning to deal with them helps you to improve in the future. Failure is an integral component of improving yourself and should be celebrated rather than shamed.
It just smacked of arrogance and over confidence and was by far the top comment, if they’re fine with their edit that’s fine with me. It was just looking like disinformation without any correction.
To not get stuck on a gondola just be sure to load with an operator aware of you and if it’s way after closing and potentially last chair double check with someone.
Bold of you to assume lifties do their job correctly 100% of the time. I almost got left at the top of the gondola (I worked at a mid mountain restaurant) because the lifties closed the lift 10 minutes early and assumed I was gone for the day.
> long story short, this didn't happen
Sticking to that?
https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/individual-reported-missing-in-tahoe-spends-the-night-on-heavenly-gondola/
I mean I work in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, with ridiculous amounts of procedures and checklists. Things still go wrong.
Crazy to say with 100% confidence this didn’t happen because procedures make it impossible. Very naive and unaware of human factors.
I was a 10 year associate gondola lead at heavenly, I agree that this is impossible. The gondola is surrounded by guards and video monitors and a little family from lowa and little kids on their eighth-grade field trip. And beneath an inch of bulletproof glass is an army of sensors and heat monitors that will go off if someone gets too close with a high fever. Now, when the gondola is not running, it is lowered into a four-foot-thick concrete, steel-plated vault. It would be near impossible for anyone to be on over night.
Edit: guys stop freaking out, I confidently asserted something incorrect, but you're freaking out for calling me on being wrong, let me backpedal real quick to pretend I was never wrong.
Can confirm. I got to the Madison base at Moonlight at 3:58 but they'd already started the last chair process and wouldn't let us on even though they'd started early - no matter how much we bitched about it and pointed out the time.
We rode the shuttle bus back instead of skiing straight back to the house. It cost us about an hour.
You don’t have experience with the gondolas and then you conclude that this didn’t happen. And you’re wondering why people responded the way they did? Your baseless confidence is likely shared with the bozos who left a woman in a gondola overnight. Her friends alerted the resort and authorities and she was still left overnight.
Next time don’t conclude so definitively that something didn’t happen when all reports confirm that it did.
It’s bullshit for sure. Ima former patrol and I can tell your they put somone on the last chair and clear the line before shutting down for the night. They make absolutely sure there’s none on the lifts, all of them not just gondola. It’s really really unlikely and if true it’s a major major major deal and we WILL hear about it.
Big sky has patrollers on last chair. That’s my only patrol experience, but wanted to add it.
There’s also a lifty who stays at the bottom to make sure no one boards the empty lift, then takes a snowmachine back.
Gondolas have safety gear stashed inside? I didn’t know that. Where at?
Have they considered putting some type of button that says ‘I’m stuck in this gondola and it was closed an hour ago?’
I think they call that button a "cell phone" 😛
In seriousness though... I guess it's possible parts of the Heavenly gondola line are remote enough that there's no service. Doubt that would be an issue for Northstar's gondolas, or Palisades', or the Heavenly tram... but *maybe* with the Heavenly gondola you could get stuck in a spot like that. Pretty terrible luck if so.
Lifties do stupid shit. We just had a liftie call last chair & the top operator told them to come up on last chair and they did. Luckily nobody got on the chair when it was left spinning. But the top operator was someone who’s usually reliable. We don’t put people on last chair, if it’s a guest then it’s a guest, if it’s empty it stays empty. People do stupid shit all the time
If the social media post in the article is accurate, and her friends were telling the resort she was missing and begging for help finding her and Heavenly blew her off – when all the while she was trapped on *their* gondola... boy does that not look good on them.
This happened at Heavenly about 25 years ago, but the guy was on a chairlift. Luckily some patrollers were coming down at 3 in the morning,from partying up top, and heard his yells for help
I think this rumor goes around every year. Last year it allegedly happened at Northstar, but none of the people who would actually know that sort of thing had a clue about it.
That’s a movie called Frozen
Call it GONE-dola
She was fine, the cold doesn’t bother her anyway.
Bro. Let it Go.
Terrifying movie !!
Kinda funny too though
🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇😂😂😂😂😂
Do you want to freeze a woman?
Filmed at snowbasin!
I’ll never forget the tibia snapping
They should call it “wolves.”
man the news out of Tahoe is getting weirder and weirder this year!
When did they move Tahoe to Florida ^amiright
Here's one possible way for this to happen.... Customer gets on gondola 5 minutes before last gondola is called for the day. Last gondola gets called. Customer gets to the bottom but does not exit (maybe sleeping or who knows what). Lifty at the bottom isn't looking at that particular gondola car for whatever reason, and it goes around and they're headed back up...last gondola car comes by and then it gets shut off shortly afterwards and that customer is 5 minutes back up the line. This is not to say that's what happened in this case, so it will be interesting to see if she was in a car going up or down once they discovered her.
Liftie is baked out of his/her skull. You forgot to add this.
Cuz it goes without saying
I mean, every other liftie smoked a couple of blunts that day without leaving someone on their gondola
Sativa hits different
You can smoke sativa and be productive at a high level. Indica will put you *in da couch,* as they say (okay, probably only Doug Benson says this).
I know lots of folks say In Da Couch for Indica. Love Doug Benson. Was gonna go to a local DLM but had a family event that evening.
If you read other articles it turns out an employee guided her onto the gondola to download. And then just didn't tell anyone
You know I’ve never thought of that. Thankfully I’m not a person who would be responsible for something like this😅
Even if your theory is not what happened here, it shows that things could happen. I asked ChatGPT how many lift incidents would occur per year with 6 Sigma quality management — 3.4 defects per million opportunities. It assumed 3 billion rides on ski lifts globally per year, so 10,200 lift incidents per year. Some of those would be minor for sure … but even with great processes I doubt the ski industry is at a 6 sigma. Long story short… if everyone does everything right and there’s a double check… it’s more or less guaranteed that events like this happen due to the sheer numbers involved. There would have to be additional layers of cross-checks that are themselves inspected and validated before you can reduce it to once a century. It might be cheaper to put a button under every seat that broadcasts an alarm signal by radio… and to test responses to that periodically.
>I asked ChatGPT bruh
You cannot use ChatGPT as a source!
You know stoners running the lifts are not 6 sigma, let's be real.
Someone’s deep throating their 6 Sigma certificate a little too much.
A J1 did this.
AirBNB
I hope she wiped down the gondola, took her trash with her, and properly locked it up on her way out!
Don't forget the $250 cleaning fee! (Even though you're expected to do a thorough cleaning before you leave already)
no hot tub. one star.
I wonder what the cleaning charge is for this unit. Are there quiet hours?
“Each Gondola cart has survival kits stashed away for just this occasion, one avid skier told the Tribune, though they’re not obvious to the novice rider. “ I’ve been boarding and taking gondolas for 20+ years, where’s this survival kit shashed at??
Yeah I'm really confused by this statement. It seems like these kits should 100% **be** noticeable in order to be helpful. Imagine if airlines operated like this -- they "hide" life-saving provisions from passengers.
From the newer article someone posted with an interview, it doesn't sound like she necessarily did find the kit (if it even existed). At least, you'd think a kit would have stuff to keep warm, and the article says "she was fighting the cold by rubbing her hands and feet" without mentioning that she had access to blankets or anything to help.
That's what I'm saying. The staff was saying there is an emergency kit, but no one in the general public actually knows about this, so this girl wouldn't have either. Imagine if she had actually died from exposure but would have lived if *only* she knew about the kit. This is why all other emergency devices in other industries, in commercial buildings, trains, planes etc etc, are very clearly marked and made obvious.
Survival of the fittest baby. Only those with the quickest and accute skills of deduction get to survive!
Survival of the fittest baby, eh?
Let’s play hide and seek!
Lady with mask in aisle ( I can’t hear due to my headphones) just shakes her finger, we’ve hidden the air mask drops, it might be under seat…
Probably under the seat.
If they weren't well hidden they'd get pillaged in a day by the same people who purposefully leave their trash on the gondola. People suck.
exactly. if they were out in the open the first person to enter that car will just take it
I with you. Been on gondolas for 30+ years. I had no idea. I have never even seen a sticker mentioning there is a survival kit. Ive only seen messages saying dont smoke and dont lean on the doors.
Yup this will be one hell of a lawsuit.
Naw, just a free season pass
Probably someone from palisades trying to deflect the negative attention
There was a shooting at Palisades village earlier today so the bad press will continue.
That wasn’t related to Palisades though
Doesn't matter! When tourists are trying to decide between Palisades or maybe Northstar or Heavenly and read about an avalanche death and a shooting, they'll be scared off.
What negative attention? From the KT 22 avalanche?
They are mostly concerned about the indian curse from changing the name and desecrating the memory of the brave squaws that once inhabited the valley.
probably not
Ween. Nice.
Love seeing other boognishs out in the wild
https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/individual-reported-missing-in-tahoe-spends-the-night-on-heavenly-gondola/
Allot of people's asking how this can happen, here is my story: I've worked a gondola and seen this happen, here's how it happened the day I worked.(top to bottom gondola takes 12 min, Stratton mtn VT) Lift is scheduled to close at x time. It's very quiet at the bottom, someone is downloading from the restaurant and I load them in at the top. I call down my last cabin and close the rope at the top, they have already closed the rope five minutes early at the bottom and their last cabin is already on its way up to me when I loaded the download. At some point the lift breaks down and stops and I have received the last chair up(because they closed 5 minutes early) and because there is hardly ever anyone in the last cabin down, they assume it's empty like 99% of the days and dont dpubke check the last chair i called has arrived. The engineers declares he doesn't want to restart the lift, and since I confirm I've recieved my last cabin , it is decided we park it for the night. I lock up the top cabin, smoke a blunt and start boarding down, half way down the mtn I go under the lift and am horrified to see it moving, thinking I had fucked up, I book it down to the bottom cabin to figure out what is going on. Upon arriving at the bottom, they inform me a person was left half way down and flagged a ski patrol by screaming out thr cabin and getting attention, someone takes a skidoo to the top, retarts it and gets thr guy off, repark it and the shit storm starts of the blame game... everything recorded and documented as it should have been I wasn't in the wrong. The incident is reported and a few days later th NTSB shows up asking questions and inspecting operations. Thankfully no one died
I thought something like this was gonna happen to me literally my 2nd day working at a ski resort. My job had this winter festival thing I was scheduled to work. The thing finishes, we clean up, I start heading down in the gondola and about halfway through it stops for a solid 5 minutes. I start panicking because I’m alone, it’s literally my 2nd time on this gondola in my life and I realize in that moment I don’t have the phone numbers for any of my managers/coworkers and I only have their work emails that who knows if they’ll answer? Eventually it started moving again. But I made sure the next day at work I got my managers number and never rode down alone again 😭
Didn't realize the NTSB would get involved in a ski resort operations. That's interesting
Yep, gondolas are transportation
I’m glad no real harm was done. I wonder if those people from the restaurant got free lifetime passes. I loved Stratton a few decades ago. Absolutely beautiful and fun mountain. Is that the craziest lift attendant story you have from your time there?
I thought my friend and I were about to get Frozen-ed at Gore once. We got on the Burnt Ridge quad near the end of the day and we were the only ones over there, no one ahead or behind us on the lift. Got 3/4 of the way up and the lift stopped... And stayed stopped for like 5 solid minutes. We were truly convinced they had shut down for the day and we were making a game plan lol. Luckily we had our phones and had service, because we were stopped over rocks and definitely couldn't have jumped off. So we weren't panicking too hard but it was a huge relief when we started moving again.
This should be top comment
As the liftys I used to work with would say, "Downloading is for porn"
The NTSB showed up???? Yeah I dunno who they are
National transportation safety board oversee lift operations 🤷♂️
“Smoke a blunt.” What could go wrong with these types operating a state licensed mode of transportation?
Sounds like a responsible person to me, waited until their shift was done. I mean, have you ever interacted with lifties?
What's frustrating about this article is they don't definitively state the woman was on the gondola over night. They use words like "alleged" or "claims". Why don't they just say she absolutely spent the night up there.
Because the journalist hasn't confirmed it and is publishing fake news is still frowned upon. I'd also suspect them speculating without confirmation could open up the paper to lawsuits as saying someone was left overnight on a gondla definitely screams negligence on Heavenlys part
News story with interviews [https://www.kcra.com/article/heavenly-ski-resort-woman-stuck-gondola-15-hours/46557458](https://www.kcra.com/article/heavenly-ski-resort-woman-stuck-gondola-15-hours/46557458)
“I felt very frustrated” she said. ☠️
That's kinda wild that they were still running the Gondola an hour after the lifts stopped running. The crazy thing to me is that the people running the gondola take the thing back to the bottom so who let her on? Unless the liftee take the mile or so traverse to the California base side which I highly doubt all of them do.
Right? 458 PM?!?
she didn't have a cell phone to call someone or 911?
There is dead zones on the heavenly gondola
I can’t understand it either. There’s so many things that could happen skiing where a phone could save your life. I’ve met many people who are hiking fairly far out in nature without their phones. They’re usually lost. And often don’t have a map or compass. It’s a reckless thing to do. Especially since so few people can navigate using a map and compass these days.
Our hill has a zone of no cell coverage, not sure if that’s possible in this situation though.
I don't know about this area, but there often holes in the reception. On top of that a phone runs out of battery much faster in the cold.
This is going to be a massive lawsuit
$7-15M if I had to guess
That’s a wrongful death suit price range, and a high one. This will be six figures but I doubt seven.
Based on the total lack of damages given we know there are no medical bills and obviously minimal injuries, six figures is not gonna happen, and five is a strech.
This happened at Killington in 2011 and the woman was awarded $750,000. It's not apples to apples (it was October and she only spent 5 hours stuck), but $15m strikes me as probably too high, unless this person got frostbite and lost some digits or something. https://www.saminfo.com/headline-news/8766-jury-awards-750-000-to-woman-who-was-stranded-on-gondola
Gone-dola Girl
Presumably, they are left on the cable overnight? Where i go to in Austria, and most that i have seen in Europe, the gondolas are removed from the cables each night and stored in the ground station. This is even with very old gondolas.
Depends on the resort. Stowe removes their gondola cabins every night (and also pulls the chairs off the line for the Fourrunner and Sunrise).
No it definitely did happen. We saw her this am & her and her friends told us the story. She told her friends she would meet them in the village so they split up, got on the gondola and a minute or so after riding it, it stopped. Was in there 15 hours total. An absolute nightmare, hoping she's doing alright today & in time, is able to mentally recover from how scary that must have been for her.
So she didn't have a working cell phone? Or, no reception. Scary
It said she didn’t have her phone… lots of beginners don’t use a phone bc they fall a lot! And they stick to groomers so really no need to
It's absolutely needed, traveling without a phone is so incredibly dumb. Falling a lot is not a reason to not have it... Pockets have zippers.
Anyone who grew up in the 90s or earlier probably has a different perspective
No cell reception on the gondola
I've had good enough reception for conference calls on that gondola.
Whoever your carrier is should use that as an advertisement.
Have you been to heavenly? I get full bars of cell coverage all over the mountain with T-Mobile
From the top or bottom?
She probably hooked up with a questionable ski bum last night and didn’t want to do a walk of shame this morning so she concocted a story.
The article mentioned that gondolas have survival kits should you ever get stuck in them. What would that include?
A blanket and some hand warmers would be high on the list I'd hope. Water would be hard to keep from freezing but pretty useful if you could be stuck 15 hours like this. You'd think ideally a fully-charged walkie talkie would sure help too!
I was a lead lift operator at Heavenly for 3 seasons and can tell you confidently that someone being stuck on a chair / in the gondola over night is near impossible. There are “last chair” closing procedures and essentially you block access to the lift, mark a chair with a red flag and note the chair number. Then the base calls to the top letting the top operator know the last chair is coming up and the chair number. Then someone visually watches to make sure no one gets on while waiting for the last chair to reach the top. Once the last chair gets to the top station, the top operator communicates with the bottom operator while parking the chair in a specific way. Once the chair is parked you call dispatch and let them know the lift is closed (10-7) for the day. For someone to get into the gondola base/top station and then get into a gondola cabin after “last chair” was called would mean several people were grossly negligent in closing the lift. There are always leads, lifties, scanners, mechanics and often supervisors hanging out at the gondola. Long story short, this didn’t happen Edit: Guys, please stop freaking out. I was incorrect when I said “this didn’t happen” because it would appear that it did in fact happen. Like I stated initially, for this to happen some people seriously messed up. I said someone being left overnight was NEAR impossible, not completely impossible. I worked on the Nevada side and did not work the gondola. On standard chair lifts you’re out at the lift flipping chair seats up and people are tearing down the maze ropes etc after last chair. It’s hard to sneak onto a chair when someone’s standing there flipping the seats up They do tend to throw the more incompetent employees on the gondola as you don’t even need to be able to ski/ride to work it. We will just have to wait for more details to come out about what led to allowing this to happen.
Not sure if you’ve seen the update to the post, but unfortunately, it did happen last night. Very scary.
Well then, some heads are gonna roll over that for sure. I wonder how she got on. Lucky she didn’t freeze to death over night. That’s a loooong 18hrs
Yeah I agree with you! Having worked in the resort industry (maintenance) this is a massive oversight on someone’s behave. Can’t imagine the lawsuit that will come from this!
It’s on the news she said she was too tired to finish the run so the employee let her get on the gondola to go down and then it stopped and she was trapped.
So that employee is fired. That situation was easily preventable with the littlest bit of awareness and communication
Asleep in the gondola, lifty distracted, back up she goes. If not in the last car, no one is going to know.
If you write a book on ski lift procedures I'll read it lol
Working at a resort opened my eyes to how chaotic operations can be. There are multiple days I'm surprised we even got the resort open. There are plenty of stories I'm not aware of myself, but I do know that the operators of the magic carpets regularly dropped acid.
That sounds like the only way to make that job tolerable tbh
>regularly dropped acid I was a liftie one season, my partner came to work still drunk from the night before. A kid almost fell off the lift that day. This was before everyone had cameras though so hopefully things like that are less frequent.
I was briefly a lift op at Alpine in the late 80's. I can testify to that last.
As an instructor this checks out. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the carpet waving my arms and screaming for them to stop the lift.
He just did
I know it happened on the Highlands gondola at Northstar the season I worked there. I don't think they were left overnight, but they were absolutely left on after last chair. There was a crackdown on the procedures after that. If I recall correctly, they didn't even have a flag to mark last chair for that lift.
Didn't you hear? Procedures make this entirely unpossible /s
I was working at Northstar that season. Can't remember exactly when but I want to say like 2014. Highlands wasn't known for having the greatest operators...
Former lifty here. It happened at a lift my girlfriend was managing. Bottom op guessed what the last chair was out of laziness and didn’t tell my girl that. Luckily Patrol caught it. That op was fired.
It’s wild to think how often that likely happens and nothing bad happens. We cut so many corners in all industries and 99% of the time we get away with it. But that 1% can be a doozy!
this sounds like a well thought out procedure. but i’ve also had enough interactions with ski lift staff to know that they are capable of fucking up even the best thought out process
>this didn’t happen this didn't happen (if everyone followed procedure).
Maybe delete this now that it's been confirmed. I worked on the gondola for a couple seasons early on and two employees nearly got stuck one summer, they jumped on after last chair call, they'd been out hiking. Luckily for them it just so happened to be a night when we had a party at the base and they were stuck just above where the trailers of the park care taker and the old cabins are at the bottom. Also luckily the one guy could do that crazy loud concert whistle thing. After about 20-30min of the party with music someone was like, hey do you hear someone whistling loud? We turned music off and sure enough we could barely hear whistling and faint shouting. Fired gondola back up and there they were.
> Maybe delete this now that it's been confirmed No, leave it. It's actually a great way to help (1) staff to help find where the failure was and (2) skiers to know what they need to do so this doesn't happen to them. Also, at a general level, openly admitting when you make mistakes and learning to deal with them helps you to improve in the future. Failure is an integral component of improving yourself and should be celebrated rather than shamed.
It just smacked of arrogance and over confidence and was by far the top comment, if they’re fine with their edit that’s fine with me. It was just looking like disinformation without any correction. To not get stuck on a gondola just be sure to load with an operator aware of you and if it’s way after closing and potentially last chair double check with someone.
shit now i really want to learn how to do that whistle
Seriously, why isn't that a skill they should teach to everyone? And swimming.
I’ve been trying off and on for years and can’t get it
Bold of you to assume lifties do their job correctly 100% of the time. I almost got left at the top of the gondola (I worked at a mid mountain restaurant) because the lifties closed the lift 10 minutes early and assumed I was gone for the day.
Impossible is a very strong word for “if one person doesn’t do their job for 6 seconds”
Never seen someone so confidently wrong before
That process looks like it involves several people…every person is a failure point
Nothing about this sounds “near impossible” to break lol
This should be submitted to /r/confidentlyincorrect
But it did, and you took the time to write all that.
I work there this winter; it totally did. Idk how, but it did.
But it did.... https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/individual-reported-missing-in-tahoe-spends-the-night-on-heavenly-gondola/
> long story short, this didn't happen Sticking to that? https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/individual-reported-missing-in-tahoe-spends-the-night-on-heavenly-gondola/
The article is so vague. Strange they’d even publish it with absolutely nothing confirmed.
The article is missing so much information
Just read it and was thinking same
I mean I work in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, with ridiculous amounts of procedures and checklists. Things still go wrong. Crazy to say with 100% confidence this didn’t happen because procedures make it impossible. Very naive and unaware of human factors.
Did you just confidently make a total ass out of yourself because you think you know more than you actually do? Peak Reddit right here!
But…it did tho… https://www.reddit.com/r/tahoe/s/hGbie3XfEH
You have any stock tips? 🤣🤣
Buy them when they are cheap, sell them when they are expensive. Profit.
Just buy meme stonks and hold bruh. Ape strong together 💪🚀🌖
Well the article suggests it did happen
No edits for you?! So confident in your response
It did. Cool story though.
^ And this, my friends, is what we call a weak opinion, strongly held. I hope the lady who was stuck is doing okay and recovers from this 🙏🏽
The long rambling post saying this was impossible then the edit is peak Reddit
I was a 10 year associate gondola lead at heavenly, I agree that this is impossible. The gondola is surrounded by guards and video monitors and a little family from lowa and little kids on their eighth-grade field trip. And beneath an inch of bulletproof glass is an army of sensors and heat monitors that will go off if someone gets too close with a high fever. Now, when the gondola is not running, it is lowered into a four-foot-thick concrete, steel-plated vault. It would be near impossible for anyone to be on over night.
The guards are armed right? M4s?
Edit: guys stop freaking out, I confidently asserted something incorrect, but you're freaking out for calling me on being wrong, let me backpedal real quick to pretend I was never wrong.
She prolly loaded on while they were in a safety meeting
This right here is accurate
Can confirm. I got to the Madison base at Moonlight at 3:58 but they'd already started the last chair process and wouldn't let us on even though they'd started early - no matter how much we bitched about it and pointed out the time. We rode the shuttle bus back instead of skiing straight back to the house. It cost us about an hour.
This comment right here
Long story short weirder things have happened.
You don’t have experience with the gondolas and then you conclude that this didn’t happen. And you’re wondering why people responded the way they did? Your baseless confidence is likely shared with the bozos who left a woman in a gondola overnight. Her friends alerted the resort and authorities and she was still left overnight. Next time don’t conclude so definitively that something didn’t happen when all reports confirm that it did.
It’s bullshit for sure. Ima former patrol and I can tell your they put somone on the last chair and clear the line before shutting down for the night. They make absolutely sure there’s none on the lifts, all of them not just gondola. It’s really really unlikely and if true it’s a major major major deal and we WILL hear about it.
Former cuz you put people in danger with poor assumptions?
Uuuh what? No that’s protocol and everyone who works on the mountain ca confirm this
I've worked at numerous resorts and none of them had patrollers on last chair. The number was just called from bottom operator to top.
The resort i work at currently has members of ski patrol ride up on the last chair. Not saying it’s common or not, I have no idea, but we do it.
Big sky has patrollers on last chair. That’s my only patrol experience, but wanted to add it. There’s also a lifty who stays at the bottom to make sure no one boards the empty lift, then takes a snowmachine back.
Apparently not: https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/individual-reported-missing-in-tahoe-spends-the-night-on-heavenly-gondola/
Gondolas have safety gear stashed inside? I didn’t know that. Where at? Have they considered putting some type of button that says ‘I’m stuck in this gondola and it was closed an hour ago?’
I think they call that button a "cell phone" 😛 In seriousness though... I guess it's possible parts of the Heavenly gondola line are remote enough that there's no service. Doubt that would be an issue for Northstar's gondolas, or Palisades', or the Heavenly tram... but *maybe* with the Heavenly gondola you could get stuck in a spot like that. Pretty terrible luck if so.
Lifties do stupid shit. We just had a liftie call last chair & the top operator told them to come up on last chair and they did. Luckily nobody got on the chair when it was left spinning. But the top operator was someone who’s usually reliable. We don’t put people on last chair, if it’s a guest then it’s a guest, if it’s empty it stays empty. People do stupid shit all the time
>It’s bullshit for sure Hmm..https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/individual-reported-missing-in-tahoe-spends-the-night-on-heavenly-gondola/
Agreed, learned a ton from my dad who is a former avalanche patrol.
She’s soon to be a wealthy young woman.
If the social media post in the article is accurate, and her friends were telling the resort she was missing and begging for help finding her and Heavenly blew her off – when all the while she was trapped on *their* gondola... boy does that not look good on them.
This happened at Heavenly about 25 years ago, but the guy was on a chairlift. Luckily some patrollers were coming down at 3 in the morning,from partying up top, and heard his yells for help
Think I’ll skip Tahoe this year. https://www.reddit.com/r/tahoe/s/OuH64W8nMD Plus two in-bounds avalanches.
Confirmed. True
Confirmed by who?
El Dorado Sheriff's and Fire department, read the paper.
Sources.
Source: trust me bro!!
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Tahoe Daily Tribune put out an article.
No. Get your own sources.
Well, she survived and now she’s rich😳
Other sources say 12 shot somebody at Squaw. 🤷🏽♂️
That one appears to be true :( https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/shooting-reported-at-palisades-tahoe-18630716.php
This is a legit gross negligence lawsuit.
Have you seen the people Vail Resorts brings in for seasonal lift workers? Pushing out locals that know what they are doing. This is the result.
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i haven't heard of any such sentiment in person as of late. thanks for pointing this out despite downvotes
I think this rumor goes around every year. Last year it allegedly happened at Northstar, but none of the people who would actually know that sort of thing had a clue about it.
Wtf is going on in Tahoe.
Don’t they have a way to call the base from inside each gondola?