What the hell is happening here? You’re not supposed to be lowered and rescued by harness. More so, you’re not supposed to be clinching onto whatever is dangling in front of you before literally plummeting to the Earth.
That headline is no exaggeration: skiers (and snowboarders) are actually dropping like flies. If we want to get all metaphorical, they were swatted by the literal embodiment of the most common fear when riding the chairlift — falling from said chairlift.
“You could just see complete chaos at the bottom,” Laurie Carrera of Barrington told local ABC affiliate WMUR.
Let us break it down for you and offer up a ticker: the King Pine Lift slid backwards 460 or so feet; seven hurt, four taken to hospital; hundreds lowered by winch; countless toddlers, parents, and overzealous twenty something women wearing lululemon leggings vowed to never again set buttocks to chairlift while 50 or so crusty old timers cursed the youth’s work ethic.
The worst “news” to come of this is that the chairlift did, in fact, pass its morning inspection. According to the report by WMUR: “If a malfunction happens, McIntyre has three breaking systems to stop the lift from rolling backward.” McIntyre is a nearby ski area. One would assume that the more popular and well-known Sugarloaf ski area would have similar if not more stringent systems in place. Whether they do or not, none responded this time around. Yep the safety precautions were neither precautionary nor did they provide any safety in the end. Talk about feeding the frenzy of fear already surrounding these things. In the mind’s eye of our overzealous and paranoid collective conscious, we’re at TSA levels of danger.
Ultimately, it was nothing more than a single story jump or longer-than-usual delay for the resort patrons. Obviously it could have been worse, much worse, but it wasn’t — even if the screams and mass hysteria that broke out sounds like it was some mental imagining of purgatory.
