At 12:13 p.m. on Dec. 21 last year — a Saturday during peak holiday season — a part called an evener beam failed on a gondola tower near the loading zone at Winter Park. Lift operators reported hearing a loud bang as the beam bent and cracked, then a squeal as the gondola ground to a halt.
There were 182 passengers packed into more than a dozen 10-passenger gondola cars, dangling from the mile-long haul rope extending from the base to the top of the mountain at Sunspot. Sami O’Neill, who was one month into her new role as a supervisor after serving for years as a Winter Park patroller, was struck by how calm her colleagues appeared that day as they swung into action.
“It was like, we do this all the time, we’re comfortable with this gear. We weren’t expecting the gondola to break, but it happened, and we’re ready for it,” O’Neill said. “The guests — people on their Christmas break from all over the country — they’re like, ‘We have to just trust you guys to know how to use this (gear) and safely lower us down?’ We’re like, ‘Yes, we’ve got you, we know how to do this.’”
Related: Despite chairlift rescues, major mechanical malfunctions are rare in Colorado
They were well-prepared because patrollers at every Colorado ski resort practice lift evacuations annually, something mandated by the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board, a state agency responsible for licensing, regulating and inspecting gondolas, chairlifts and surface lifts.
At Winter Park, training took place on a mild November morning recently, where the team practiced procedures in advance of the 2025-26 ski season, something The Denver Post was allowed to observe.
Patrollers laden with heavy gear climbed lift tower ladders, always clipped into safety lines that would protect them from falling if they lost their footing. At the top of the lift tower, they attached a device called a cable glider to the haul rope. Hanging from the haul rope, the glider allowed the patrollers to slide down the rope to gondola cars, controlling their descent with a brake mechanism on the glider.
Standing on the roof of the gondola car, patrollers use massive wrenches to unlock and open the gondola doors before rappelling into the car. Part of the mission is calming and reassuring frightened passengers when they get there.
“We’re dealing with our own fear of heights a little bit and going through all the steps in your head like, ‘I can do this,’ also having to keep the guests calm as well,” O’Neill said. “That’s a big part of it — us staying calm for everyone else’s sake.”
When the ski patrol radio alerted patrollers to December’s gondola emergency, Trapper McManigle was deployed at the top of Parsenn Bowl far to the south of the gondola.
“I called our dispatch, ‘Hey, I’m hearing these calls, is this real?’” recalled McManigle, the patroller in charge of this month’s evacuation drill. “They’re like, ‘Oh, yes, you need to get here now.’ I rush as fast as I could, ski down to the (patrol) hut, got geared up, got myself a ground-crew person, and we came to this building (the upper gondola terminal) as fast as possible.”
McManigle, who is in his sixth season on the Winter Park patrol, evacuated four gondola cars that day.
“I got really lucky in that all my guests were extremely calm,” said McManigle, who grew up in Highlands Ranch. “We practice our speech that we give to people. ‘Hello, my name is Trapper with the Winter Park ski patrol, I’m here to rescue you.’ When people hear that, they’re just ecstatic. We really preach confidence. If we’re confident, they’re going to have confidence in us.”
To evacuate occupants from the gondola cars, patrollers set up rope belays to lower them to the ground. The procedures for evacuating chairlifts are similar, although the device the patroller rides while sliding down the haul rope is different.
One of the gondola cars McManigle evacuated during the December incident included a family with a baby.
“That was a fun twist,” he said. “We have baby harnesses. I got the baby attached into his harness, then got him and his dad belayed down at the same time so the baby and the dad were both comfortable on their way down. The look in the baby’s eyes when he was being lowered, it was amazing — just wide eyes, astonished, looking up at me like, ‘What?!?!’”
The evacuation last December took nearly six hours to complete, wrapping up as night fell on the mountain, but the patrollers had a hard time gearing down.
“That adrenaline didn’t wear off,” McManigle said. “I didn’t fall asleep until like 2:30 in the morning. I was up, just so jazzed. You know when you feel just electric? Thatap what you feel like afterwards. But when you’re in the moment, you feel so calm. All I was thinking about was, ‘Whatap my next step?’
“It wasn’t until afterwards that it hits you like a flood,” he added. “Then you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve been working on adrenaline for the last six hours.’ Luckily I had the day off the next day. I probably didn’t get up until 1 o’clock in the afternoon. All I did was eat and drink water and watch TV.”
Sky Foulkes, Winter Park’s president and chief operating officer, observed the patrol training exercise this month. It took him back to memories of that long day last December.
“You just watched them do what they do and they were so well-trained,” Foulkes said. “They did a phenomenal job. Immense pride, just very impressed with how calm they were. It sent a calm to everybody else.”
The Winter Park gondola incident became a major news event, but patrollers spend a lot of time reassuring frightened skiers and snowboarders after mishaps on the slopes, so they’re used to comforting others.
“You always have to stay in the mindset of, ‘This is this person’s first time experiencing this,’” O’Neill said. “You’ve got to be patient, like, ‘We’ve got you, trust us,’ walking through every step so itap comforting to them.”
O’Neill grew up in Denver, attending George Washington High School and Colorado State. After graduating from CSU, she told her parents she wanted to spend a winter working as a Winter Park lift operator.
“They were like, ‘OK, but then you’re going to get a job, right?’” O’Neill said. “Networking through lift operators, I found my way onto patrol. My first year on patrol, I actually didn’t know how to ski, so I drove the snowmobiles. That was like my foot in the door — learned how to ski that year.”
Her parents soon came to support what has become for her a career.
“My dad was a firefighter and EMT, so he gets this side of things,” O’Neill said. “He was like, ‘Thatap cool.’”
According to the , no injuries were reported as a result of the Winter Park gondola evacuation. Representatives of Leitner-Poma, which manufactured the gondola, rushed to the scene from the company’s Grand Junction factory with a replacement part that day, supervising its installation. In less than 48 hours, the gondola was repaired and back in service.
“It was actually running in about 21 hours,” Foulkes said, “but we couldn’t open it to the public until we put it through its paces and got approval from the tram board.”
The tramway board investigation found no fault with Winter Park’s maintenance of the gondola. “Upon reviewing the on-site maintenance records,” the report states, “it appears that Winter Park conducted all inspections required by the maintenance manual for Tower 1, and no anomalies were noted.”
As a result of the incident, though, the tramway board ordered all ski areas that had lifts with parts like the one that failed at Winter Park to inspect them. They included two lifts at Arapahoe Basin, a lift at Copper Mountain, a lift at Keystone, a chairlift at Winter Park and a sightseeing lift in Glenwood Springs. Since then, lifts with that part have been retrofitted with stiffener beams to prevent a recurrence, as ordered by the tramway board.
Meanwhile, ski patrols at every ski area in Colorado conduct evacuation drills annually, on all types of lifts, to remain in compliance with the tramway board.
“If you ask pretty much anyone at Winter Park ski patrol their favorite part of the job, 99% are going to say the camaraderie and the people you work with,” O’Neill said. “Itap camaraderie and the niche skill set you have on this job. You go from injuries to this (evacuation training) to avalanche mitigation — a really wide array of things. And, you do it for and with each other.”
