Any Ski lift horror/funny stories ??

[Dave7]

Reading through the Helvellyn thread reminded me of a time I was working in Switzerland. Export sales- so suit & tie on. Driving alongside the Jungfraujoch I passed a ski lift and for some crazy reason thought "I will try that" (don't ski and never been on one).
So..............in suit & tie...........I paid and got on a 2 man lift.
It got me so far and I had to transfer to a 12 man lift (remember I had absolutely no idea what to expect or how high it went.
It got me to another level where I transferred again to something like a 40 person carriage.........by which time all the people dressed to ski and carrying their skis were giving me funny looks.
Got out at the top...........amazing!! Beautiful views. So I wandered around in the dress shoes, suit & tie until deciding to return.
Only to find there were something like 5 or 6 different ski lifts going to massively different parts of the base. I had no idea of the name of the area where I had left my car. I spoke next to no French or Italian and the guy in the ticket office spoke little English.
The words "don't panic Mr Manwaring" came to mind
The ticket office guy eventually showed me some photos of the different base stations and (I think) some video links until I saw something I recognised............then with his help I found my way down.
It was a funny story to tell but really scary at the time.

 

[graham bowers]

Nevis range in diabolical conditions, stepped into path of a chair lift ready to alight, noticed at the very last moment the guard was down, we were the next thing to go down.

 

[Profpointy]

You know those signs telling you not to wear a rucksack on a ski-lift ?

Stuff-and-nonsense of course - until the string on your sack gets jammed between the slats of the seat, and when it "goes around the block" at the top, you are dangling from the lace used to close the top of your bag. Luckily it was Canada so everyone was kind and concerned, but in a few other places I'd doubtless have been shouted at for disobeying the rules. Hey in USA I'd not have been surprised to be fined !

I still do the rucksack thing, but much more carefully

 

[ScotiaLass]

I went skiing in Italy when I was about 14.
I was on a two person chair lift and my friend and I were the next to get off. The chairs didn't stop so you had to be ready, and jump to the side when it was your turn to get off. My friend decided that to be ready to go, we should lift the safety bar before we reached the landing platform. So we did.
Then all of a sudden we stopped. Dead. I shot forward and had to grab on to the side of the chair to stop myself plummeting god knows how many hundreds of feet! I watched as my new ski goggles flew down into the snow below.
When we did get off (I was rather wobbly!) we found out that something had happened with the people in chair in front, and they had to hit the emergency stop button.
I never did tell my parents about that - my mum would have banned me for life! I told her I lost my goggles on a fast run.

 

[Profpointy]

i went on a chair lift as a 10 year old on a school trip to Austria - not skiing, but up a mountain all the same. Me and my pal did the jump-on-whilst moving thing then realised we're a hundred foot up just sat on a plank. Not so much elf-n-safety in those days so fair enough. It was only afterwards we noticed that everone else had lowered a bar in front of them

 

[BrumJim]

Much snow had fallen overnight, and the lift operators were busy clearing piles and drifts as we arrived that morning.
On the first proper ski lift, I sat down and let my ski-tips dip a little. Within a second or two, they had dug themselves into a drift at the bottom, and both of them were very quickly ripped off my feet. Which meant that as I arrived at the top, I had to hit the ground running. Literally. In ski boots on soft and deep snow.
I survived (just about - when you fall over, your head dips below the level of the ski chair), and fortunately someone behind brought up my skis, otherwise I would have been walking a long way down the mountain to get them.