Video at Pats Peak shows young skier falling to safety from a chairlift.
A nine-year-old skier was seen hanging from a chair lift over the weekend at New Hampshire’s Pats Peak. Footage of the incident shows the young skier just moments before falling from the chair and landing on a crash pad the ski area’s employees had brought out for safety.
Pats Peak officials told local news outlets that the young skier was uninjured. She was reportedly pulling the safety bar down shortly after getting into the chair when she slipped, so the entire scenario appears to have gone down just uphill from the loading area.
@danielzeng93 What happened in Pats Peak today. Luckily the kid is OK #patspeak #ski ♬ original sound – danielzeng93
Several videos of similar chair lift incidents have gone viral this season, including one incident at California’s Big Bear in which a woman was doing a pull up while seated and then slipped from the chair. Videos showed her hanging from the chair while her sister and friend held onto her until they reached the top of the lift.
Pats Peak is also no stranger to chair lift fiascos in the news. In February of 2025 the New Hampshire resort navigated a terrifying chair lift malfunction that required the evacuation of 120 people. The New Hampshire State Fire Marshal’s Office and the Passenger Tramway Safety Board determined that high winds had caused a mechanical malfunction on the lift, and staff had to lower each guest by rope over the course of 90 minutes that afternoon. Nobody was hurt in that incident either.
“Our staff is highly trained in life evacuations and worked closely with Henniker Fire and Rescue to ensure a smooth operation,” they said at the time.
As mentioned, chair lift accidents at least appear to be more prominent lately. At least one study published last summer suggests it’s not just a byproduct of social media spreading each incident like wildfire. Colorado’s Passenger Tramway Safety reported last year that there’s been a notable spike in chairlift falls since at least 2014. That study found one common occurrence contributing to chair lift falls that contradicts the two recent accidents mentioned here — people not lowering the safety bars. Another quantitative study published in 2023 found a significant gap between regions within the U.S. where skiers and snowboarders are likely to lower the safety bar and places where they are not. The data came from observing 6,343 chairs with 16,286 passengers and an average of 41.6 percent chance of safety bars being used overall. In the Northeast, safety bars are in use by skiers and snowboarders 80 percent of the time. That number plummets to just 39.2 percent in the heart of the Rockies, however.
“In places like Canada, Europe and much of the Northeast, using a restraint bar is just part of the experience — and it’s time we normalize that across the rest of the U.S.,” Mike Reitzell, the head of the National Ski Areas Association told The Colorado Sun. “We recognize that to increase the use of restraint bars — which exist for a reason — we need a cultural shift, much like the one we saw with helmets 20 years ago. That shift happened not through regulation, but through guest education and strong industry support. With restraint bars, we believe that shift is beginning.”
