Mount Sima opens with chairlift evacuation

What began as a perfect opening day at Mount Sima in Whitehorse was disrupted Saturday when the ski hill's chairlift stopped working, stranding about 100 people in mid-air for hours.

It took emergency crews about 3 hours to evacuate everyone from the chairlift, which shut down abruptly that afternoon due to mechanical problems, according to ski hill officials.

"At about 2:28 p.m. we had a standard stop to help one of our younger skiers get off the lift, but the lift failed to restart," Craig Hougen of the Great Northern Ski Society, the non-profit group that runs Mount Sima, told CBCRadio's A New Day program on Monday.

"They tried to restart the lift on electrical power and that didn't happen, so we went to our diesel backup, which always starts and always works and is tested once a week. That too failed to start."

The ski hill's operations manager called for an evacuation of the chairlift at 2:43 p.m. The process of getting all the skiers safely off the chairlift went smoothly, Hougen said.

Fire department called in

"We have an arrangement with the Whitehorse Fire Department; they were called. We have our own trained personnel on staff and very quickly the evacuation lines were put on the various towers," he said.

"It took us about 2 hours to evacuate 99 per cent of the people, and it took about another hour to get the last couple in one area where the cables are particularly high."

One of the downhill skiers and snowboarders to be rescued was Sebastian Bouquot, a longtime snowboarder.

"Once we saw emergency vehicles starting to pull up down on the bottom of the mountain, I started to get a little bit nervous," Bouquot told CBC News.

"Then I started to see Ski-Doos come up and [the] ski patrol came running out and started dropping lines on the towers."

1st evacuation in hill's history

Hougen said it's the first time in Mount Sima's 17-year history that people had to be evacuated from the chairlift.

"The evacuation was quite simple: a rope is put over the cable, you sit on a device that looks like a small T-bar with a strap to hold you in, and you simply slip off the chair and you're lowered slowly down to the ground," Hougen explained.

"It's quite uneventful, and I watched quite a number of our younger skiers [who] thought it was quite a thrill coming off the chair and being lowered down to the snow."

Hougen said it's "still a bit of a mystery" as to why the backup diesel power failed, and staff will investigate how that happened within the next couple of days.

The chairlift evacuation came as an unexpected twist to what Hougen said was a perfect opening day at Mount Sima. The temperature was just over 0 C on Saturday afternoon, and there was a solid base of snow at the hill.

Broke attendance record

More than 400 tickets were sold on opening day, breaking Mount Sima's attendance record for opening day.

Hougen said it's a good thing the chairlift problems surfaced on a day when the temperature was mild and there was no wind.

"It hasn't happened in the 17 years of Sima, and I think we're good now for another 17 years," he said.

"We're certainly going to put a lot of effort in determining what the issue was with the diesel backup, because had that started it would've been a non-issue."