A father was traumatized when his four-year-old son fell about 15 feet from a chairlift at a ski resort in Montana.
Nathan McLeod said that he and his two sons, the youngest of whom was four-year-old Sawyer, were enjoying their vacation at a Montana ski resort on Sunday, March 19, and decided to ride the Montana Snowbowl chairlift at the Lolo National Forest when the heart-stopping incident occurred.
According to McLeod, the child was sitting next to him while his older brother, six-year-old Cassidy, rode in the chair ahead of them with a snowboarder.
He said as they were going up, he watched his son in the chair in front of him and noticed that it was making huge, violent swings, but he had no idea what to do because he was behind them.
As their journey continued, the father got increasingly worried that the child’s chair would slam into the next tower, almost 40 feet off the ground, when the chair he and his younger son were on suddenly swung and smashed into the tower near them.
McLeod instinctively reached for his son’s hand, but the child slipped, which he described as a parent’s “worst nightmare.” According to the father, he started yelling for help and the lift attendant immediately ran up to his son after the fall and attended to him, but his son was screaming and he didn’t know whether his child had sustained any injuries from the fall.
McLeod was left hanging from the bar of the broken chair before he eventually let his tall 6’3″ frame drop down onto the snow. He said he went to check on his son and to warn the lift attendant about the broken chair and the incident.
To McLeod’s surprise, the attendant told people to watch out as they would start the lift again. He was perplexed because no one even looked at the broken chair and lift to ensure it was safe for the journey, especially after the incident.
The attendant started loading people up and the lift went up again.
McLeod, who was not satisfied with the resort’s action to rectify the situation, said that he was worried that there might be other unsafe chairs that had been ignored, which could lead to a fatal accident. He said they had been very lucky that the afternoon snow was soft and that his son hadn’t been severely hurt.
The Montana Snowbowl said in a statement that one of their engineers had inspected the chairlift, and stated that the probable cause of the chair swinging violently and the resulting fall was an unbalanced load.
The Lolo National Forest, however, asked for the Snow Park lift to be shut down pending an investigation as safety is always their top priority.
