#gondola-safety

#gondola-safety

"As we wrap up the season, I want to thank our loyal guests who showed up smiling day in and day out to support their local hill. I also want to thank our dedicated staff whose immense efforts and pride in their work kept Eldora running all season long. We hope everyone comes to celebrate the season with us this weekend." - Andrew Gast, Eldora's president and general manager.

The 2025-26 winter saw extreme weather, with the eastern half experiencing consistent cold and heavy snowfall, while the western half endured record warmth and a lack of snowfall.

Avalanches kill about 100 people in Europe each year, with vast masses of ice, snow and rock regularly crashing down on hikers and skiers who have been caught unawares. The structure of the snow, angle of the slope and variation of the weather can dictate whether a gentle disturbance like a gust of wind or the glide of a snowboard can trigger a deadly shift in the mountain.

Owl's Head has officially joined the Indy Pass, a fantastic news for Townships locals and travelers alike. It remains fiercely independent since Fred Korman opened it in 1965 with just three lifts.

AvalancheClarity makes Météo-France's daily avalanche bulletins accessible to non-French speakers for the first time, translating them into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Danish, and Polish. This is crucial for international visitors who ski the French Alps, as the bulletins contain essential safety information that was previously inaccessible due to language barriers.

Runaway snowboards were a cause of great concern in the early days of snowboarding as snowboards don't have breaks like skis. This concern was justified in many ways as proto snowboard bindings much less secure and reliable than modern systems using simple straps, rubber components, or basic buckles that could loosen or fail more easily during a crash.

The sport originated thousands of years ago in Europe by necessity when hunters used long skis to travel and explore over mountain passes, placing animal skins on the bottoms of their skis for traction when climbing. Military units used similar gear to patrol the Alps in the late 1800s, sometimes engaging in speed competitions, which were likely the prototypes for the format of the Olympic skimo debut this February.

A skier was killed in an avalanche in the Boss Basin area near Vail Pass in Colorado's backcountry, marking the first avalanche fatality of the 2025-26 winter season in the state. According to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC), the skier was reported missing on Saturday evening, March 7.

On Monday, February 23, Pierre Denambride, the 51-year-old head of slope safety at Flaine in Haute-Savoie, France, was killed while working on the mountain. One day later, on Tuesday night, a 41-year-old resort worker died in a separate quad accident in Flims, Switzerland, part of the Flims Laax ski area. The back-to-back tragedies have drawn attention to the use of quad bikes-often fitted with tracks or crawler systems-by ski patrol, slope safety teams, and mountain operations staff across Europe and North America.

This video from Alpental shows how they went about testing their new Chair 2. It doesn't seem like that complicated of a process to load test. You just put weight on the chairs to simulate a full lift and give it a whirl, taking a look vibration, tower movement, sheave alignment, and everything else required to make sure the chair is safe. Of course actually checking all those things requires some serious expertise.

The terrain park operates on different rules and guidelines than the rest of the ski resort. While the downhill skier always has the right of way on the rest of the mountain, skiers and snowboarders are responsible for clearing out of any landing zone as soon as they can. Hanging out in the landing zone or allowing your child to hang out in the landing zone, as we see in the video below, is absolutely unacceptable,

Cornice collapses can be incredibly dangerous, having the potential to crush people, pull them down mountains and potentially over rocky cliffs, and cause larger avalanches. Professional skier Josh Daiek doesn't seem to be impacted by cornices as much as a regular skier or snowboarder would be, though. This incredible line starts with a heart pounding moment as he looked over the edge.