A father was left "helpless" and "devastated" after he watched his four-year-old son fall from a ski lift in western Montana.
Last Sunday at Montana Snowbowl, Nathan McLeod was forced to watch his son, Sawyer, slip through his fingers after their malfunctioning ski lift hit a tower and broke down.
McLeod, a Missoula resident, was riding the Snow Park chairlift up to the beginner and intermediate terrain alongside his young son who sat on the inside seat when the terrible incident occurred.
"This is a parent’s worst nightmare," McLeod recalled to local news outlet, the Missoulian. "I’m just watching him fall and he’s looking at me. There’s nothing I can do and he’s screaming. I just have this mental image of his whole body slipping out of my arms and it's terrible."
Prior to the accident, the father of two noted that the chair in front of him, which held his older son as well as a snowboarder, was swinging excessively when the lift assistant first helped the boys on.
"We’re going and I’m watching Cassidy’s chair in front of me and it’s just, like, huge, violent swings, and in my mind, I don’t know what to do about that, because I’m a chair behind him," McLeod continued. "I’m worried he’s gonna hit that next tower. And it’s like 40 feet off the ground at that point. As that’s going through my head, all of a sudden, our chair smashes into the tower, the first one, as it starts going up."
He described the impact as "super strong," before adding: "...I reach for my son and he just slips from my arms."
"I’m yelling like 'someone help us' and the lift stops a few seconds later," he explains. "But at the same time, as Sawyer is falling, the lift chair just breaks apart and it just flips backwards. Like the backrest just falls off the back and so I’m like clinging on to the center bar while the chair is swinging. My son is screaming and I don’t know what to do. I’m like, 'Do I jump right now?'"
McLeod, who stands at 6'3", was snapped dangling on the lift approximately 12-15 feet above the snow, which another witness at the scene confirmed.
As he's stranded in the air, he recalled the assistant coming up and giving Sawyer a hug without even letting him know if his son's hurt.
"There’s zero communication with me at this point. She starts walking back down to the lift terminal with my son and I still don’t know if he’s OK or not. Apparently he can walk so that’s good," the father told the outlet.
"So I shouted for someone in the lift line to get her attention and I’m like, 'So what’s your plan?' She kind of looks at me and she says, 'Oh, I’ll just load him in the next chair.' And then at that point she looks up and sees me and sees that the chair’s just mangled."
McLeod eventually jumps off the chair and runs up to his son to check on him, but the assistant's nonchalant attitude catches him off guard.
"First thing I do is run up to my son and give him a hug," he says. "And then the attendant is just like. 'Watch out, we’re gonna start the lift again.'
"Not a single person looks at the chair," he continues. "You don’t walk up to make sure the cable isn’t mangled? I would assume they would want to like, check it out? She just starts loading the next people in line. I’m just shaking because there’s so much adrenaline.
"And somebody makes an offhand comment like 'Yeah, that’s Snowbowl ha ha.'"
This is the point that the dad lost his cool, ranting about the accident.
"I was like, 'Hell, no. We have to stop making excuses for this place,'" he shouts. "We are so lucky that Sawyer didn’t just die and like someone is going to get seriously hurt if something isn’t done. We can’t have this attitude of like, 'Ha, this is funny, like Snowbowl’s a s*** show.' You can’t do that."
No one at the park, not even ski patrol, came over to get a statement. Instead, the distressed family was left confused and frustrated over the response to a potentially life-threatening situation.
The Missoulian later reported that they spoke with Andy Morris, the owner and operator of the Snowbowl branch, who assured the outlet that the lift operators are trained to respond to problems with the ski lift.
"There was an unbalanced load that caused the lift to swing," he said after getting an engineer to check the problem out. "One chair started swinging and then the next chair — the one the father and son were on — didn't get loaded correctly. If you're delaying the chair, it pushes back and causes it to swing. And the chair struck the tower and caused the back portion of the chair to bend back."
Morris also had no explanation for why the chair would fall apart after hitting the tower, adding that "We’re committed to making sure the lifts are safe."
Speaking of the incident afterward, McLeod said he was lucky that the snow was soft that day or things could have turned out much worse.
"I just want Snowbowl to be successful and safe," he concluded.
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