Chris Oxford and his friend Donovan Romero were having a good day. The pals since grade school were snowboarding Keystone on an uncrowded weekday in December. It was maybe their fifth or sixth run when they zoomed through the maze and loaded up the Ruby Express.
About 30 seconds into the ride, Oxford said he “felt a jolt” and looked over. His friend was hanging from the armrest on the opposite side of the six-person chair.
“It was like a rattle and when I looked over he was holding on, off the chair. He didn’t scream or even make a noise. It all happened so fast,” Oxford said.
Romero fell about 47 feet. He was airlifted to a hospital in Denver. The 32-year-old father of two was badly broken and remained in a vegetative state. He died in May.
An investigation by Keystone ski patrollers and the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board concluded that Romero was leaning over and adjusting his snowboard boots or bindings when he fell off the chair. Oxford did not see his friend leaning over. He did not tell any investigators or patrollers that he saw Romero doing anything. He didn’t see how his friend became unseated. But he helplessly saw his friend of more than 25 years fall and lay motionless in the snow as he rode to the top of the chair.
“It’s been really hard. I haven’t been able to get back up snowboarding. I didn’t have the mental or emotional strength, you know,” said Oxford in an interview with The Sun.
Romero was one of 18 chairlift falls reported to the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board in the 2024-25 ski season, a high point for the state’s resort industry. At least eight of those falls involved children.
Since the 2014-15 season, the tramway board has logged 149 reports of falls from chairlifts and at least 55 of those reports — more than a third of all reported falls — involved children or minors.
The Colorado ski resort industry does not track chairlift falls or injuries. It is unclear how many of those 149 falls in the past dozen years resulted in injuries. We do know that Romero’s death was the fourth fatality involving a Colorado chairlift since 2016, marking Colorado’s deadliest decade for chairlifts.
The tramway board’s reports on falls are brief. Most are explained with the note “skier error.” Several falls involved skiers improperly loading. Many involve falls as the restraining bar is being raised. There are several reports of parents holding onto their children before they slipped. There is only one report in the list of 149 chairlift falls of a skier — an 11-year-old girl at Vail — who slid off a chair under a lowered restraining bar.
Oxford and Romero lowered the restraining bar on about half the chairs they rode that day. The bar was not lowered when Romero fell. Oxford can’t really point to any reason why they did not lower the bar as they settled on the Ruby Express that Wednesday.
“The lift before we lowered the bar. A week earlier we had loaded a chairlift and this guy asked if he could lower the bar and we said of course and he told us about a run-in with some younger guys who were pissed when he lowered it,” Oxford said. “I really don’t know why we didn’t do it. We were a little winded. We were heading up to meet a friend. I really don’t know … believe me I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
Romero’s mother, Tonette Romero, has been thinking about it a lot too. Her son was safety minded, she said. He should have had that bar down but she can’t envision a scenario where he would be leaning so far over he would tumble off the chair. Oxford and Tonette Romero have asked to talk to the eyewitness cited in the tramway board report who told patrollers that Donovan was leaning over. That contact has not been facilitated by the resort.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “The investigation by Keystone is not accurate.”
Donovan Romero, a 32-year-old father of two girls, died in early March from injuries he sustained falling from a Keystone chairlift on Dec. 11, 2024. A state report suggested he was leaning over to adjust his snowboard bindings but a friend on the chairlift with him said he did not see him leaning over. (Courtesy photo)She’s growing increasingly frustrated with the ski area and its owner Vail Resorts for not being more forthcoming with information.
No one from Keystone has reached out in the months that Romero was immobilized from a brain injury, she said, saying the only information she can find about the accident is from Flight for Life nurses who flew her son from Keystone to St. Anthony’s Hospital on Dec. 11.
“Obviously they have to protect themselves and they got into a defensive position, which is why we saw in those initial reports that they immediately pointed to my son as this being his fault,” she said.
Donovan spent months in the hospital before living in his family’s home for three months.
“You gave them their first breath, and then you’re making the decision to take away their last,” Romero said. “That decision on a parent, both his dad and I are, you know, that’s something that you’ll never recover from, even though we know that that’s not how he would want to live.”
Romero’s frustration with resort operators is a similar sentiment shared by Victoria Sanko-Perucco.
Her husband, John, died after falling from the short, fixed-grip Zendo chair at Breckenridge on March 17, 2023. The 60-year-old expert skier who volunteered for 18 years as a ski patroller at the Grand Geneva ski area in Wisconsin taught safety to other skiers and volunteer patrollers, she said. Every year he took a three-day training course with the National Ski Patrol, including classes focused on chairlift safety. He once caught a 7-year-old girl as she fell from a chairlift.
“I feel he was in a situation that was not safe,” Sanko-Perucco said. “My family is trying to understand what happened and we have been very frustrated trying to get answers. So when I read he was cleaning snow from his seat, there are standards to open a chairlift and those standards include cleaning the chair. He fell before the first tower … right after he loaded. At the first tower is where you see the first sign where you see the sign lower the bar here. John always skied with the bar down.”
Sanko-Perucco and her family filed a lawsuit in Summit County District Court in March this year, arguing Breckenridge and its owner Vail Resorts were negligent in maintaining the safety of the Zendo chairlift on that Friday in March 2023. Perucco “had given up his freedom of movement and actions, and there was nothing he could do to cause or prevent this tragedy,” reads the lawsuit.
“The event that killed Mr. Perucco is the kind that ordinarily doesn’t occur in the absence of negligence,” reads the lawsuit.
Sanko-Perucco, like Tonette Romero, has struggled to get information from the resort operator.
John Perucco volunteered for 18 years as a ski patroller at the Grand Geneva ski area in Wisconsin and taught safety to other skiers and volunteer patrollers. (Courtesy)Vail Resorts declined to speak on the record about chairlift falls, citing the lawsuit and nuanced, private discussions with family members. The publicly traded company closely guards its public statements and directs media inquiries about chairlift falls to the tramway board.
The company requires all employees at its 42 ski areas in Australia, Europe and North America to lower the restraining bar when riding chairlifts to model safe skiing. The company also requires lift operators to hoist children onto chairlifts in loading zones.
“There is no higher priority to us than the safety of our guests and employees. We are fully committed to upholding the highest standards of safety, and proactively invest in safety measures and tactics, such as our leading Yellow Jacket safety program, signage in slow zones, and our Kids on Lifts safety program,” reads an emailed statement from Nadia Guerriero, the head of Vail Resorts’ six ski areas in Colorado and Utah, which include four of the busiest ski areas in North America.
The tramway board’s investigation into Perucco’s fall included a statement from the passenger next to him in the chair who said the man “twisted to brush something off of the chair seat and in twisting slid off of the chair.”
The tramway board investigates all chairlift fatalities to determine if there was a malfunction of the chairlift that led to the death.
The board’s reports noted Perucco’s death as “a tragic accident” but was not a result of any malfunction and concluded its investigation at that point.
35 chairlift fatalities at U.S. ski areas since 1956
Deaths involving chairlifts are rare.
A 2024 report by the National Ski Areas Association counted 35 chairlift fatalities at U.S. ski areas since 1956. Sixteen of those deaths involved a mechanical malfunction of the lift and of those, nine were from 1973 through the end of January 2024. The NSAA report showed that since 1973, 14 skiers have died in falls from chairlifts, including six people who fell due to medical emergencies. The remaining deaths involved employees in circumstances not common for visitors, according to the NSAA report. (That includes a December 2016 accident involving a Loveland ski area lift mechanic who died while working on a surface lift.)
Chairlift fatalities due to malfunctions are even more rare. And they often lead to lawsuits.
The family of Jason Varnish sued Vail ski area and its owner Vail Resorts in March 2023, more than three years after the 46-year-old father of three asphyxiated after slipping through a chairlift with its seat upright. The resort operator and the family settled the lawsuit. The Colorado Passenger Tramway Board did not conclude that a lift malfunction contributed to Varnish’s death, but after the incident Vail Resorts quietly installed straps on all its chairlifts at all its resorts to keep chairs from flipping up due to wind.
The family of a Texas mother sued Ski Granby Ranch in 2017, months after Kelly Huber and her two daughters were thrown from a chairlift, killing Huber and injuring her children. The tramway board’s investigation concluded the chairlift malfunctioned following electrical work to the drive system. That lawsuit was settled in 2022 before trial.
Ski Granby Ranch’s Quickdraw Express, seen here in December 2018. A malfunction in the lift’s electrical driver contributed to an accident that killed a Texas mother when she was thrown from the lift. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)The Colorado Ski Safety Act limits awards from people who sue ski areas to no more than $250,000 and the legislation traditionally has protected resorts from large payouts.
Before the December 2016 death of Huber, the last chairlift fatality in Colorado was in November 2002 when longtime Winter Park ski area manager Jack Mason suffered a medical event and fell from a lift. Before that, the last chairlift fatality in Colorado was when a bullwheel fell off Keystone’s Teller lift in 1985, killing two skiers and injuring 49.
Tonette Romero is hoping her son’s death can spur stricter rules around the restraining bar.
“No one else should have to go through this,” she said. “It’s mind blowing to me that resorts do not require riders to lower the safety restraint system. I mean it’s right there. They tell us that safety is our responsibility, and I understand that. I mean, we have rules for amusement parks and the construction industry for protecting people at heights. We have rules around seat belts. Why do we not have better protections for skiers on chairlifts?”
Changing a culture worked for helmets. Can it work for restraining bars?
There are some geographic influences on lowering restraining bars. Out East, it’s very common, and less so in the West. No one is quite sure why. Most ski areas require all employees to lower the restraining bar. Ski instructors across the country always lower the bar when riding with students. Most resorts, when discussing chairlift safety, fall back on individual skier responsibility, a foundation of safety on ski slopes that demands accountability by skiers.
Still, some states have tramway rules that require skiers to lower the restraining bar. But only Vermont has a prominent campaign warning skiers that lowering the bar is the law.
The Vermont law dates to the 1960s when the state first created its tramway board to oversee the state’s ski area chairlifts.
“There is a climate of people putting the bar down here,” said Molly Mahar, the head of the Ski Vermont trade group, who said it is common for lift attendants and even skiers below the chairlift to holler at lift riders who have not lowered the bar. “It’s kind of part of our ski culture here.”
A four-person high speed quad chairlift moves through low visibility at Steamboat ski area, Feb. 15, 2024, in Steamboat Springs. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)The Ski California trade group has crafted eight videos focused on safety and education, some highlighting chairlift safety. Colorado Ski Country also has animated videos to prepare first-time lift riders.
The National Ski Areas Association is in the process of gathering detailed information of reported falls from chairlifts from its member resorts across the country. The hope is the association can identify patterns and safety practices by resorts and skiers in different areas of the country and then possibly craft a new safety campaign around lift safety and getting more skiers to lower the restraining bar.
The association works with the American National Standards Institute to create specifications and performance objectives for safer chairlifts, which are then adopted by state tramway boards. For example, a new rule from 2018 requires all new chairlifts to have restraining bars.
Leitner Poma of North America in Grand Junction is making chairlifts with automatic or locking restraining bars. One system locks the bar when the passenger lowers it and unlocks it as it approaches the unload station. Another system automatically lowers and raises the bar. A spokesperson for the company said the automatic and locking restraining bars are popular among European resort operators but “because the codes and passenger use of restraint bars in North America is different than in Europe, locking and automatic systems currently have not gained traction in North America.”
A scientific study of skiers using the restraining bar published in 2023, analyzing 24 lifts at eight ski areas in four regions of the U.S. The researchers tracked 16,282 passengers on 6,343 chairs and counted only 41.6% lowering the restraining bar. In the Midwest, only 9% of skiers lowered the bar while in the Northeast — jibing with Mahar’s perspective that lift safety was part of Vermont’s culture — 80% of skiers lowered the bar. At resorts in the Rocky Mountains, the researchers counted 39.2% of skiers lowering the restraining bar.
The researchers found that use of the restraining bar mirrored helmet use in geographic regions from a decade earlier, as the resort industry began pushing harder to get more helmets on skiers.
The scientists suggested that “with continued education and promotion (as happened with helmet use campaigns) chairlift restraint bar use will ultimately reach high levels across the U.S. as happened with helmet use over time,” reads the research published in the online scientific Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport.
Ski racers ride the Excelerator chairlift – with the restraining bar raised – to the top of the training course at Copper Mountain on Nov. 15, 2023. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)The National Ski Areas Association says chairlifts are among the safest public transportation systems in the world. The association points to nearly 20 billion riders who have traveled close to 10 billion miles on chairlifts since the early 1970s — that’s more than 450 million lift rides a year — with a fatality rate of 0.1 for every 100 million miles traveled. One statistic the National Ski Areas Association once promoted in its chairlift safety discussions is that a person is five times more likely to be killed riding in an elevator than a chairlift. (The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported 41 deaths associated with elevators between 2018 and 2021.)
And remember, chairlifts are traveling through snowy mountains, said Mike Reitzell, the head of the National Ski Areas Association and former boss at Ski California, noting the industry largely focuses its lift safety work on helping resorts better convey safety messages with guests and online campaigns at skisafety.us/lift-safety.
Reitzell sees his association taking steps to get more skiers to lower the restraining bar with a long campaign not unlike the resort industry’s decadeslong efforts to get helmets on skiers. In the early 2000s, ski helmets were novel. Now, they are ubiquitous.
“In places like Canada, Europe and much of the Northeast, using a restraint bar is just part of the experience — and it’s time we normalize that across the rest of the U.S.,” Reitzell said. “We recognize that to increase the use of restraint bars — which exist for a reason — we need a cultural shift, much like the one we saw with helmets 20 years ago. That shift happened not through regulation, but through guest education and strong industry support. With restraint bars, we believe that shift is beginning.”
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