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 Friday morning. The January 2 mishap apparently occurred after the
male skier 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 10:30 AM 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. (3 pages)
