Trial begins over Colorado resort's liability for paralyzing ski lift injury

BROOMFIELD, Colo. (CN) — A woman who was 16 years old when she suffered a life-changing accident at Colorado’s Crested Butte asked a jury on Monday to hold the Vail-owned resort liable after she fell 30 feet from a ski lift three years ago.

Annie Miller was on her second day of skiing Crested Butte with her youth church group from Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 2022 when she took her last run. Miller tried to board the Paradise Express Lift beside to her dad, Mike, but found the chair rising into the air before she was properly seated.

“Mike and Annie call for the lift to stop, but the chair did not stop. Instead it carried her up, and Annie fell 30 feet below, landing on her skis,” Miller’s attorney, Bruce Braley, said.

“As she was falling, she thought she was going to die,” he added.

Braley, who practices with Leventhal Puga in Denver, said that the ski resort was given instructions on how to prevent accidents like Miller’s when it purchased the Paradise Express Lift in 1994, thus rendering the case and his client’s $2 million pile of medical bills “a tragedy 28 years in the making.”

Named for the Colorado town of its location, Crested Butte is owned by Vail Resorts and operates on the Epic Pass. The resort’s attorney, Craig May, characterized the incident as a terrible accident, but a risk everyone accepts when they buy a lift ticket up the mountain.

“These are no amusement rides,” said Craig who practices with Wheeler Trigg in Denver. “When you hear the facts and the law, you will see this was an unfortunate accident with nobody to blame.”

12 seconds lapsed between Miller trying to board the chair and falling, during which the lift operator rushed to push the stop button. Even with the “lifty” responding as quickly as he could, May said, the four-person detachable chair lift requires 70 feet of movement to slow down to a stop.

“Riding chairlifts has inherent risks. Skiers know and accept those risks and are responsible for getting on and riding the lift,” May argued. “Crested Butte worked hard to reduce those risks.”

Miller sued in Broomfield County District Court in 2022, claiming violations of duty of care, negligence and gross negligence. Looking to the resort’s liability waiver, a state judge dismissed two of Miller’s three claims in April 2023, leaving intact only the highest bar of gross negligence.

The Colorado Supreme Court last year found Vail’s liability waiver did not absolve the ski resort from illegal acts of negligence, reviving a negligence per se claim against the company, which has a lower bar than the gross negligence claim.

While the high court found the ski resort’s liability waiver did not protect it from negligence per se violations as required by the law, the waiver did shield the resort from negligence of the highest duty, since the Epic Pass specifically disclosed the risk of ski lift injuries.

Colorado Ski Country USA estimates13.8 million people visited Colorado last season to ride down the snow-covered mountains. This, however, was the first case to pose the question to the state Supreme Court of whether a resort’s liability waiver protected it from negligence claims brought under the Ski Safety Act and the Passenger Tramway Safety Act. Miller’s suit represents a rare challenge to ski resorts’ near immunity for injuries on the mountain.

Seventeenth Judicial District Judge Jeffrey Smith presided over the trial. The jury of six and one alternate seated on Monday afternoon at the Broomfield Combined Court included skiers, snowboarders and some who prefer the lodge.

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