He Had A Bad Day On The Slopes

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While listening to the news this morning, I happened upon the bit about the gentleman on the ski lift who got more than he bargained for on his journey.  While the outcome was good, it could have been catastrophic.  The man was not identified and I can say with certainty that I would not want to be identified, either.  I am sure that if onlookers had the means, photos would have been snapped and videos must have been captured for youtube fodder.   Laugh if you must (hard not to) the situation must have been perilous… dangling from a ski lift while exposed for seven minutes.  Must haven been a chilling experience.

Man left dangling upside down, pantsless after Vail lift mishap

JANUARY 6–In a bizarre incident that will surely lead to litigation (or an out-of-court settlement), a skier at Colorado’s ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift last Thursday morning. The January 1 mishap apparently occurred after the male skier, 48, and a child boarded a high-speed lift in Vail’s Blue Sky Basin. It appears that the chairlift’s fold-down seat was somehow not in the lowered position, which caused the man to partially fall through the resulting gap. His right ski got jammed in the ascending chairlift, and that kept him upended since his boot never dislodged from its binding. As seen in the photos on the following pages (which were snapped by fellow skiers), the Skyline Express lift was stopped shortly after the pair’s botched boarding resulted in the man dangling from the lift. The exposed skier was stuck for about 15 minutes before Vail personnel backed the lift up and successfully dislodged the unidentified man from the four-seat chair. The images on page four and five were taken by a local photographer who happened upon the rescue scene. In a statement released this afternoon, Vail Resorts, which operates the ski area, reported that the skier was not injured after being “suspended for approximately seven minutes.” The press release did not explain how the mishap occurred, only that “the man was caught on the chair.”

Any other proud moment anyone would care to divulge?  I was the victim of a depantsing in junior high.  A group of us were on our way to the science teacher’s desk and for some reason a fellow classmate had grabbed onto my back pocket and as I was walking, I suddenly felt a draft.  It was a good thing I had phys ed that day so I had a change of pants.  I did not stand around long enogh to see if the architect of the depantsing got the typical punishment of writing spelling words 15 times.

6 thoughts on “He Had A Bad Day On The Slopes”

  1. nothing like that happened to me while skiing, thank goodness. But I didn’t really like the experience anyway. I got yanked around by the rope tow and decided to not use it, so other kids (it was a ski club thru school, so I was stuck doing it for 5 weeks) jeered at me from the chairlift while I was climbing UP the hill with my skis on – no exposure involved, thank goodness.

  2. I actually would love to experience skiing at least once in my life be it snow or water… both sound like fun… as long as I did not have the above experience.

  3. Great! Thank you!
    I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
    Of course, I will add backlink?

    Sincerely, Timur Alhimenkov

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