How to keep American skiers safe by throwing tantrums on chairlifts

Bar up or bar down? Skiers ride a chairlift at Deer Valley Ski Resort in Park City, Utah, December 2022 | AFP via Getty Images

“Woah there buddy! What are you doing?!” The first time I ever snowboarded in the USA, I was on a press trip to the heavenly resort of Heavenly, which straddles the California-Nevada border and looks out over the impossibly blue expanse of Lake Tahoe. After spending a morning lapping the double-black diamond moguls of the Gunbarrel with an enthusiastic posse of journo skiers (not to mention extreme skiing legend Glen Plake, mostly seen as a tiny speck rapidly disappearing into the distance), I decided to go in search of mellower, more snowboard-friendly terrain in the afternoon.

The Powderbowl area of the mountain sounded promising, so I hopped onto the Powderbowl Express chairlift alongside a couple of twenty-something skiers and reached up to pull down the safety bar – at which point one of the skiers looked at me as if I’d just spat on his goggles and asked what I was up to.

“I was just, er, putting the bar down,” I said, confused.

“Dude, nobody uses the bar,” came the reply. “Well, except for kids.”

A quick look at the chairs heading up the mountain in front of us confirmed that this was indeed the case: nobody else seemed to be using the bars either. Up to this point on the trip I’d been sharing chairlifts with the British ski journos, so we’d been doing things the European way; clearly, though, in the Western US, where safety bar use is not mandatory, skiers preferred to travel bar-free.

Why anyone would opt not to use this very simple bit of safety equipment was beyond me – after all, what’s not to love about a thing that prevents you from falling from a great height and severely injuring yourself and/or dying? Still, I reasoned, “when in Rome...”, so rather than get into an argument I simply shrugged and looped my right arm securely over the back of the seat.

Since then, I’ve always thought of the American no-bar thing as a harmless, slightly endearing foible – like the eccentric uncle who gets drunk at parties, puts his hand on the table and then starts rapidly stabbing a carving knife into the gaps between the fingers. Sure, it introduces an element of completely unnecessary risk, but nobody actually gets hurt, do they? Well, actually, turns out they do.

So far, this winter has been a fantastic advert for safety bar use on chairlifts. On 20 December, Colorado’s Summit Daily newspaper reported that two snowboarders had fallen almost 40 feet from the Beaver Run chairlift at Breckenridge ski resort within a week of each other – in one case, the safety bar wasn’t down; in the other it wasn’t clear if it was down or not. That made it three confirmed chairlift falls for the month in Colorado’s snow-rich Summit County, after another snowboarder fell 47 feet from the Ruby Express chair at Keystone. According to eyewitness accounts, he appeared to be adjusting his snowboard bindings before the fall and did not have the safety bar down.

Also in December, five people fell from the Comet Express chairlift at Heavenly, on the Nevada side of the resort. In this instance, the chairlift malfunctioned – one chair somehow rolled backwards and slammed into the chair behind, throwing people in both chairs to the ground. Again, according to eyewitnesses, the safety bars on the chairs weren’t down.

As you’d expect, these incidents have led to some spicy bar vs no bar exchanges on social media. One of the most telling involved Stuart Winchester, editor of respected ski industry website and podcast the Storm Skiing Journal, and Mat Lorelli, senior editor at leading US ski mag Powder.

“People keep falling off chairlifts,” Winchester posted on X. “That’s what the bar is there to prevent if you’re not too cool for it.”

“You’re not wrong,” Lorelli responded, “But you’re not going to get more people to use the bar by shaming them. Just a tip.”

Other replies to Winchester’s post ranged from “if you get on the lift with me, the bar is coming down, and I don’t ask if it’s OK!” to “Something like a thousand days riding lifts and I have not fallen off yet. I am too cool and manly to do so. Plus the damn bar keeps banging off my head.”

It’s Lorelli’s response that resonates though. Assertively telling groups of (probably mostly) young, (probably mostly) male skiers and snowboarders to deploy a safety precaution in a setting where their vision is already clouded by a fog of testosterone and adrenaline is surely doomed to fail. So, it’s up to us visiting European skiers and snowboarders to save our American brothers and sisters (but probably mostly brothers), both from themselves and from their ferociously expensive healthcare system.

If you’re on a US ski trip this winter, and you find yourself sharing a chairlift with a bunch of locals, don’t do what I did at Heavenly and meekly accept that the bar stays up – instead, do everything you possibly can to convince them you’re absolutely terrified of falling. Helpfully, most Americans think Europeans are wusses already, so lean into the stereotype. Shriek and wail and fake-cry until they get so uncomfortable that they put that bar down. Sure, it might be mildly embarrassing, but just think of all the injuries you’ll be preventing.

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