DENVER—The family of a teen killed in an avalanche at Vail Mountain last year claims there is “substantial evidence” that resort employees have given misleading information, altered documents and failed to do slide mitigation work.
According to deposition records obtained by The Denver Post (), Vail Ski Patrol director Julie Rust wrongly led a state agency to believe that the resort had done avalanche mitigation on the Prima Cornice trail in the weeks before 13-year-old Taft Conlin was killed on Jan. 22, 2012. A ski patroller also didn’t think the times of mitigation work reportedly done the morning of the fatal slide were accurate either, according to the documents.
The timing of the work reported in company documents appears to be at odds with testimony from another skier and with footage from Conlin’s helmet camera, according to the depositions.
The lawyer for Conlins’ parents filed a motion Wednesday seeking punitive damages against Vail Resorts as a result of the testimony.
Vail Resorts spokeswoman Kelly Ladyga said the suggestion that anyone lied or deliberately misled anyone is “baseless and absolutely false.”
“This was a terrible tragedy that everyone at Vail is saddened by, but disparaging the men and women of ski patrol is both wrong and unfortunate,” she said.
The newspaper reported that Vail’s avalanche-mitigation reports don’t show any work was done at Prima Cornice until the day of the avalanche. However, Ethan Greene, the director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, asked Rust in an email whether it was “factually accurate” that ski patrol had “begun mitigating the avalanche hazard in the Prima Cornice area with several explosive and ski cutting missions in December and early January.” She responded “This is fine” but admitted that statement was false in her deposition.
The report for Jan. 22 notes that ski patrollers Paul Stumpf and David LaBelle skied on the run doing “ski cuts,” skiing and kicking snow down the run, between 9:30 and 9:45 a.m. on the day Conlin was killed. LaBelle testified that he didn’t see any tracks coming up from the trail’s lower gate. However, Ski Club Vail member Christian Nichols said in an affidavit that he arrived at 9 a.m., saw tracks sidestepping up the mountain and also sidestepped up himself.
When asked about this, LaBelle said he didn’t think the times listed on the ski report were accurate.
Screen shots from Conlin’s helmet camera didn’t indicate that the snow had been kicked down.
On the day of the avalanche, the upper gate entrance to the trail was closed, but the lower gate was open. Conlin and two friends accessed the trail through the open gate and sidestepped up the trail. Vail has argued that Conlin was negligent and either “knew or reasonably should have known that the slope uphill from the gate was closed.”
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Information from: The Denver Post,
