Dave Pires

I had a rare opportunity to ski some powder at Seymour yesterday. A solid crew of people were up riding and it was a super fun… until a lightning storm rolled through late in the afternoon.

Mystery Chair was struck three times, knocking out the power and stranding us in the air for almost half an hour. Now I don’t know about you, but sitting around a bunch of metal poles on top of a mountain as lightning strikes every couple of minutes is not my idea of fun times. Not to mention the worsening weather.

Seymour runs Whistler’s old Blue Chair, which preceded the Harmony Express, and was probably fabricated in 1859. In the back of my head I knew that all chairlifts have to be grounded for safety reasons, but I was still pretty nervous. Each time a new bolt would strike the third wire would spark, and that didn’t make me feel much better either.

Eventually mountain operations (probably someone in high school) managed to get the chair running at the slowest possible speed, and luckily I was close to a good spot to jump off (not as crazy as it seems) when hail the size of Corn Pops started blasting down.

Everyone eventually made it down safely, there was free hot chocolate, and we decided to call it a day. The moral of the story is, if you’re ever stuck on a chairlift during a lightning storm don’t loose your shit because a team of intrepid explorers have put their lives on the line to discover that you’ll be just fine.

This entry was posted on March 27, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Ride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.