A trip to the ski resort sounds like a relaxing getaway, right? Well, not if you get stuck for hours and hours in the dead of night suspended in a ski gondola. Then it turns into a thing of nightmares.
A woman was stuck overnight in a gondola at a ski resort in Lake Tahoe, California. She told KCRA that she screamed with desperation until she lost her voice.
Monica Laso had spanned a ski trip with some friends and had no idea she would be stuck mid-air, hanging in a ski gondola in the middle of the night. Laso became too tired in the early evening to keep skiing on the hill. After she approached a worker about it, they guided her to the gondola. She got on at 4:58 pm, and the gondola stopped around 5:00 pm, just a couple of minutes after she got in.
Before she knew it, she was stranded. In the interview with KCRA, translated from Spanish, she added that she didn’t have a light, a phone, or anything else to illuminate these scary moments in the dark. After her friends couldn’t reach her, they reported her missing.
Only when the Heavenly Mountain Resort gondola started running again on Friday morning did the crews discover her and realize she had spent the night there. When Laso was found, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office got assistance from South Lake Tahoe Fire Rescue, who arrived around 8:30 a.m. on Friday morning.
The rescue initiative’s fire and rescue spokesperson, Marshal Kim George, said, “She was assessed and refused transport – we always recommend transport with every patient. The response was to the base of the gondola. This was really the extent of our involvement.”
Vice president and chief operating officerof Heavenly Mountain Resort Tom Fortune told CNN, “The safety and wellbeing of our guests is our top priority at Heavenly Mountain Resort. We are investigating this situation with the utmost seriousness.”
Fortunately, the individual only suffered from cold exposure (the area had a low temperature of 23 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday evening), but if they hadn’t found her in the morning, who knows what could have happened?
