Boy, 10, falls nearly 20 feet from Mt. Bachelor lift

Tyler Russell is a 10-year-old Hillsboro boy who lives and breathes basketball. But on occasion, he also hits the slopes to snowboard, like on his family’s first Central Oregon Christmas vacation. It was his third such outing — and no doubt most memorable, though not in a way anyone would wish for.

But Saturday’s fun “Gravity School” lesson on Mt. Bachelor ended abruptly – and almost tragically – when he slipped out of a chairlift and dangled by one hand as he shouted for help, for several agonizing seconds. But there was no way for anyone to reach him before he fell about 20 feet to the snowy slopes below.

“I’m feeling better,” Tyler said Sunday after a lights-and-siren ambulance ride and a long night of tests at St. Charles Bend that fortunately turned up no signs of serious injuries, as his parents and those who had rushed to his side to help had feared.

But the boy’s upper back and body was still hurting as he rested at the Sunriver vacation home he’s sharing with mom and dad, Heather and Edward Russell, and his two triplet siblings, Ethan and Gabriel.

“They were worried about a compression fracture,” said Heather, who had been back in Sunriver with Gabriel when Saturday’s accident happened. “They (the hospital) did X-rays and ultrasounds, and then finally an MRI around 9 p.m., because he was still in more pain than they anticipated. He was unable to really walk or stand at that time.”

By Sunday, she said, “He’s doing pretty alright. They gave him some medication to ease the pain. He’s beginning to walk again. Luckily, he had his helmet on. He’s just really, really sore today.”

Edward took Tyler’s brother, Ethan, back to the slopes Sunday – “it was his call,” dad said later – not just to return Tyler’s helmet, but to have better memories of Christmas vacation than watching in fright and frustration from the Carrousel Lift chair beside his dangling brother, listening to him scream to him for help – but unable to reach him.

Hundreds of others on the lift and waiting in line on the ground watched it all unfold shortly before 3 p.m. Saturday, on one of the busiest days of the year for a resort that has been blessed with more snow than others so far this season.

The brothers were two of three youngsters in Saturday’s class. Tyler and Ethan were in one chair going up when the fall occurred, while the third boy was seated with the instructor in the chair behind them.

“I was trying to get my foot under my snowboard, ‘cause my foot fell asleep and it was getting tired,” Tyler recalled. “I slipped off (the chair), and I was hanging onto the side by my glove — and then I slipped off. I landed on my back and snowboard.”

His mom said she’d learned that Tyler was heading up for the last run of the day’s lesson – the lift closes at 3 p.m. – and was “trying to kind of lift (the snowboard) up, so it wasn’t dangling … He was trying to fix his snowboard and lost his balance.”

Many on the lift and in the crowd who saw what was happening shouted for operators to stop the lift. Resort officials are piecing together what took place and said it was stopped in seconds, but one onlooker, Kelly Strycharz of Bend, said it was more like 20 to 25 seconds.

“We don’t have complete information yet, but conceptually, the lift doesn’t immediately stop once the stop button is hit,” said Drew Jackson, the resort’s marketing and communications manager. “In a situation like this, it can seem like it took forever.”

Strycharz said, “The point is that he should not have traveled 150 feet and got to an elevation of about 25 feet before they stopped the lift … The kid was in trouble from the start of loading, and the operator loaded at least three or four chairs, with all of us screaming to stop the lift. I had time to run at least a football field-length up the hill to reach him, right before he fell. I cannot get that sound of him hitting the ground, or the image out of my mind.”

The resort’s Jackson said they have determined the boy was about 100 feet from the loading area when he fell 18.5 feet from the chair.

Strycharz said while she ran to the boy, her husband Bill called 911. After cradling the boy’s head for 45 minutes, she had harsh words for the resort’s response, and also claimed lift operators had been inattentive much of the day.

“The poor boy was saying, ‘I tried to hold on! It was slippery, wet!’ And I said, ‘Tyler, it’s not your fault.'”

Once the Ski Patrol arrived, she said. “They had no first aid, nothing there (at the lift). It was just appalling.”

Jackson said an operator in the “lift shack” immediately called to the Ski Patrol headquarters “pretty instantly that this incident had occurred,” and that they were on scene in seven minutes.

Strycharz said while a ski patrol member indeed was on scene in seven minutes, it took about 20 minutes for the snowmobile and ambu-sled to arrive. She also claimed the ski patroller had no blanket or emergency blanket to warm the boy as snow continued to fall, and another onlooker took off his own jacket to try to help keep him warm.

She also noted there is no “practice chair” near the Carrousel (beginner’s) lift or at the Sunrise school area for kids to practice loading/unloading on, as there is at West Village

The boy was taken on the toboggan pulled by snowmobile to the BMC clinic on the West Village side of the mountain, and once the extent of injuries was determined, by Bend Fire ambulance to the hospital.

Tyler’s dad also didn’t see his son try to hang on to the safety rail on the side of the chair, then fall. He came downhill minutes later, looking for his kids on the lift, then spotted Ethan crying on the chairlift, and a group surrounding someone on the ground.

“I say to myself, ‘Please, don’t let that be my son, don’t let that be my son,'” Edward Russell said. “I jumped off my board, went over there. There’s nothing I can do, I’m not a medical anything. I held his head, luckily he could move all his extremities, didn’t lose consciousness. … I just tell him I’m here, help is on the way.”

Heather Russell said Tyler’s brother Ethan already had fallen off a chair getting on the Carrousel lift about 40 minutes earlier.

“He was getting on the lift, and they weren’t slowing it down or stopping, so he fell off right at the beginning,” she said, dropping two to maybe five feet off the ground.

And Edward Russell said there were similar issues Sunday when they went back: “We’re getting off the chairlift, Ethan fell down and I’m trying to get him up and the chairlift operator hit me, knocked me over. I say, ‘You couldn’t stop it? C’mon, man! It’s a comedy of errors.”

The Russells say they are upset that the lift operators didn’t lower the safety, or restraining bar, saying it would have been hard if not impossible for the small boys to do so without risking losing their balance.

But resort officials say that’s not how it works.

“It’s actually standard procedure for the guests to lower the safety bar,” Jackson said. “Given the different heights and body types, it can actually be less safe for an operator to intervene. It’s designed for the guests to lower them by themselves. The operator is pretty busy doing the tasks” they oversee.

And he said it’s not hard for even kids to lower the bar, either. On the “triple chairs” like Carrousel, the safety bar is not spring-loaded, Jackson said, but “counter-balanced, so that it can easily move up and down.”

The lift operators, Jackson said, also do what’s called the “bump” – “they grab (the chair) and hold it back a little bit, to make it easier to sit down.”

As for the lowering the safety bar, Jackson said, “It’s part of the training for kids who learn lessons. It is a topic of instructors to instruct them to do that, and in all of our signs at the base of the lifts, it says it’s the guests’ responsibility to know how to ride the lift.”

Jackson said in some states — not Oregon — it’s a law that lifts have a safety bar and that they put it down. In Oregon, he said, it’s “purely a personal guest choice, and it’s a guest’s responsibility.”

Heather Russell said, “Neither of my boys said it (the safety bar) was covered in their lesson.”

But she called the accident “a great teaching opportunity for all involved — a reminder for instructors to cover it in the lesson, knowledge for parents of potential safety issues, and information for kids.”

Mt. Bachelor’s Jackson stressed, “We’re certainly relieved to hear the child is doing well, and our thoughts are with the family.”

But he also said statistics available through the National Ski Areas Association and sites like kidsonlifts.org show that the vast majority of accidents on chairlifts involve human error or medical conditions: “Only 2 percent of falls are due to operating error. Falls from chairlifts are exceedingly rare.”

In fact, he said, the resort’s records show this is just the third fall from a lift after the loading area in the last six years.

“Our lift operations team and ski patrols have very established protocol for these situations,” Jackson said. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened in this instance, but as far as we can tell, all the protocols we have in place were followed.”

As for Tyler, his mother said, “He’ll be sore for a few days. He’s not able to do much for the rest of this trip.”

And will he hit the slopes — more gently this time, all hope — and go snowboarding again?

“I imagine,” Tyler said.