Simon Balazs can’t quite find the words to describe the noise he heard while standing in line to take the Giant Steps Express lift to the top of Brian Head Resort on Sunday afternoon. It was loud, large.
“I thought the whole lift was going to collapse,” he said. “It wasn’t fun at all.”
The noise was the sound of the lift’s cables detaching from the tensioning system, also known as a deropement. Several chairs loaded with people bounced dramatically and one empty chair swung and twisted wildly in the aftermath.
Balazs said he saw a person he is certain was a ski patroller fall 20 feet to the ground. Footage from one of the resort’s webcams shows a skier lying on the ground under the lift and the swaying chair. The video shows the person standing up again without assistance.
The resort said in a news statement that no one was injured when the lift broke nor during evacuation. It took 2-3 hours to evacuate 106 skiers and snowboarders from the high-speed, four-person detachable lift, according to the resort and reports from guests. Carrying skiers and boarders from the Giant Steps Lodge to the resort’s highest point, the 10-year-old lift is nearly 5,000 feet long with a 1,161-foot vertical.
Peter Landsman, the man behind LiftBlog.com, first reported the incident. He said any number of malfunctions can cause a deropement.
“Deropements can occur for a variety of reasons,” he wrote in a text. “A misloaded chair, high winds, ground movement, component failure, [etc].”
(Simon Balazs | contributed) Brian Head Resort guests look at the area where the cable released from the tension system on the Giant Steps Express lift Sunday, Feb. 25, 2024. No one was hurt, but ski patrollers had to perform rope evacuations of numerous skiers and snowboarders.
Balazs said it appeared resort workers were attempting to load a rescue toboggan onto the lift. Combined with mostly full chairs of skiers, the weight may have been too much.
Brian Head closed Giant Steps Express after the deropement. It reopened on Tuesday.
Balazs, 41, grew up in the Alps but now lives in Las Vegas and considers Brian Head his “home mountain.” Over the past six years, he estimates he has gotten 100 days in at the ski area, which is located just south of Parowan and about 40 minutes from Cedar City.
Even after hearing that noise, he won’t have any qualms about going back to the resort, he said.
“I’ll just go there like normal,” he said. “I’m not afraid of anything. I’ve been skiing for 40 years, and it happens.”
