A dad’s vacation at a Montana ski resort with his two sons was ruined and he made it known that he was not happy with what happened.
His four-year-old son fell while riding with him in a chairlift at the ski resort, and the man was startled and worried what to do while he was stuck in his damaged lift chair.
On Sunday, March 19, Nathan McLeod and his two sons – four-year-old Sawyer and six-year-old Cassidy – were on vacation at a ski resort in Montana. They went up on the Montana Snowbowl chairlift in the Lolo National Forest when the incident happened.
Sawyer was seated next to his dad, and his older brother rode in the chair in front of them with a snowboarder.
McLeod claimed that as they were going up, he noticed that the chair in front of him, which seated his son Cassidy, was violently swinging, and he was afraid that there would be an accident, but he was helpless to intervene.
As the ride continued, McLeod became increasingly worried that the older child’s chair would slam into the next tower, almost 40 feet off the ground, when suddenly the chair he and his younger son were on started swinging and crashed into the tower near them.
McLeod instinctively reached for Sawyer’s hand, but the boy slipped out of his chair and fell to the snowy ground.
The dad says he started yelling for help and a lift attendant immediately came to his son’s rescue, but it was unclear if the boy was injured and the child was very upset and crying. Meanwhile, his dad was stuck in the broken, smashed chair, holding on to the bar. He quickly removed his skis and, being a tall man, was able to jump down the approximately 15 feet to the snow.
McLeod claimed he warned the lift attendant about the broken chair and was shocked when no one even looked at it to see if the lift was safe. Instead, the attendant preceded to load new people onto the chairlift and started it up again.
The boy was fortunate that the snow was soft and that he had not been seriously hurt, said McLeod, who wasn’t happy with the attendant’s response to the problem and complained the lift was unsafe and could have led to a worse accident.
The Montana Snowbowl resort said in a statement that one of their engineers had examined the chairlift and determined that an unbalanced load was most likely to blame for the chair swinging violently and the subsequent fall.
However, the Lolo National Forest requested that the lift be shut down while an investigation is conducted.