DULUTH – Hanging 35 feet above the Hari Kari run at Lutsen Mountains, Andrew Schultz and four of his friends pulled hoods up over their helmets, passed around extra hand warmers and unbuckled their ski boots to improve their circulation.
It was going to be awhile before their skis touched snow again.
The crew was past the halfway point on the Raptor Express chairlift Saturday morning Jan. 17 when a mechanical failure brought them and nearly 40 other people to a stop in below-zero temperatures and wind gusting to more than 55 miles per hour.
A member of the ski patrol told them that maintenance staff was trying to repair the lift, but to be prepared for a possible evacuation.
“We just started trying to make the best of it,” said Schultz, 41, who has been skiing for almost as long as he could walk. The former racer from Maple Grove, who is a regular at Lutsen, said he had never before been stuck on a lift.
They FaceTimed family members and, as the hours passed, figured out how to go to the bathroom under the unusual circumstances. (Answer: It is possible, but the wind had to be taken into consideration.)
Some stranded skiers in low chairs were able to immediately hop off the lift. Schultz’s group was among the last to be evacuated, more than four hours after the lift stopped.
While they waited, they cheered on the Ski Patrol, lift operators and Lutsen and Tofte volunteer firefighters who methodically made rescues down the line of chairs. Some were helped off with a ladder truck parked on Ski Hill Road. And some, like Schultz and friends, were lowered from their chair one-by-one with a rope-pulley system that threaded between the lift cable and electrical wires and connected to their bodies.
