A 30-year-old skier was dangling from a Dillon, Colorado, ski lift chair after his backpack became tangled in the chair as he attempted to disembark from the lift during a Jan. 4, 2017, outing. As the lift continued and carried Richard Rattenbury downhill, before it came to a stop the chest strap choked him and he lost consciousness. Alerted to Rattenbury’s crisis, Mickey Wilson, a 28-year-old ski instructor of Golden, Colorado, with a hand injury, climbed the ladder to a nearby tower, straddled a 2-inch steel cable and pulled himself 30 feet along the cable until he was at a point over Rattenbury’s seat. Grasping the cable, he swung his body down and then dropped 2 feet into the seat where he tried to kick and break the plastic buckle that was caught in the chair. A ski patroller below the chair threw Wilson a knife, he caught it and used it to cut the strap, allowing Rattenbury to drop 10 feet to the ground, where others performed CPR and then took him by toboggan to a waiting ambulance. Rattenbury, who suffered a broken rib, was hospitalized overnight for observation; he fully recovered. Wilson rode the ski lift down to the mountain’s base station, where he stepped off. He was not injured.
