An Avalanche Hit Their Chairlift. He Said ‘On Three, We Jump’
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This chairlift avalanche story was filmed on the kind of day skiers wait all season for. A foot and a half of fresh powder had fallen overnight in the Colorado high country, the sky was a hard, perfect blue, and Megan Hall, 32, was recording a quick video for her sister from the chairlift with her fiance Andrew beside her. Thirty seconds later that video would show a mountain breaking apart, and the two of them hanging forty feet in the air with nowhere to go.
A Bluebird Powder Day
Megan and Andrew Pierce had driven up from Denver before dawn to beat the crowds. They were engaged in the spring and planning a summer wedding, and this trip was supposed to be their last big ski weekend before the planning took over everything. By ten in the morning they had already done three runs, and they were riding an old double chair that climbs toward a steep, open bowl near the top of the resort.
The bowl had been closed all morning while the ski patrol did avalanche control work. Every skier on the mountain had heard the booms of the explosives earlier, the sharp cracks echoing off the peaks. That is normal on a big snow day. The patrol triggers small slides on purpose so the big ones do not happen on their own.
“Say hi to Kelsey,” Megan says to Andrew at the start of the clip, pointing the phone at him. He grins and waves.
The Crack Across the Mountain
Then there is a different kind of boom. Deeper. It rolls across the valley and Andrew’s smile disappears. Megan turns the camera toward the bowl above the lift, and you can see it happen in real time: a long, dark line appears across the entire face of the snowfield, almost perfectly straight, from one rocky ridge to the other. For one strange, silent second, nothing moves.
Then the whole slope starts to slide as one piece.
Avalanche experts call it a slab avalanche, and it is the most dangerous kind. A whole layer of snow, hundreds of feet wide and several feet deep, breaks free and drops at once. It picks up speed fast. Within seconds it can be moving faster than a car on the freeway.
The Lift Stopped
In the video, the chairlift jerks to a stop. Every chair on the cable swings wildly back and forth, and Megan screams. Below them, the lift operator had hit the emergency stop, which is exactly what operators are trained to do. But it left a line of chairs full of people hanging motionless above the slope, directly in the slide’s path.
And the slide was growing. A white cloud boiled down the mountain ahead of the moving snow, taller with every second, swallowing a stand of pine trees whole. The roar on the recording starts as a rumble and builds into something like a freight train passing three feet away.
Below the lift, skiers scattered in every direction. A lift operator in a red jacket sprinted out of the hut at the bottom terminal, waving his arms and shouting at people to get clear.
"On Three, We Jump"
This is the part of the video millions of people have now watched over and over. Andrew reaches up and yanks the safety bar off their laps. He leans out, looks straight down at the drop beneath their chair, and then looks up at the wall of white coming at them. You can see him doing the math.
Their chair was roughly thirty-five feet above deep, soft powder. A fall like that can break legs. Staying on the chair could mean being swept off it at sixty miles an hour by a wall of snow and ice.
He grabs Megan’s gloved hand.
“On three,” he says, his voice surprisingly calm. “We jump.”
And at that exact moment, the powder cloud reaches the lift tower right in front of them, and the tower simply disappears. Steel, cable, chairs, everything, swallowed into white.
The video cuts.
What Happened When the Cloud Hit
Megan did not stop recording on purpose. The phone flew out of her hand. What she remembers is Andrew counting out loud, reaching “two,” and then being hit by a wall of air so cold and so hard that it felt like being slapped by the whole mountain.
They never jumped. That decision may have saved their lives.
What reached them was not the avalanche itself but the powder cloud racing ahead of it, a blast of air and fine snow that can be strong enough to snap trees. It slammed into the chair and spun it sideways. Andrew threw his arm across Megan and held them both against the seat. For about ten seconds they could not see anything, could not hear anything except the roar, and could not breathe without inhaling snow.
Then it was over. The air cleared. And the slide itself, the heavy wet slab of moving snow, had stopped less than a hundred feet below their chair, piled up against the base of the tower they thought had been destroyed. It was still standing.
The Rescue
The ski patrol reached the lift within twenty minutes. Two skiers who had been on the run below the bowl were partly buried, and both were dug out alive by other skiers before the patrol even arrived, using the avalanche beacons and shovels they carried. Every person on the stopped chairlift was evacuated by rope, one chair at a time, over the next two hours.
Megan and Andrew were the last chair down.
“If we had jumped, we would have landed right where the slide stopped,” Andrew told a local news station later. “Right in the deepest part of it. They told us we probably wouldn’t have been found for a long time.”
The Question Nobody Has Answered
The resort later said the slide was a natural release triggered by the weight of the new snow, and that the bowl had been properly closed. But skiers who watched Megan’s recovered video have pointed out the second, deeper boom right before the crack, which sounds nothing like the control charges from earlier in the morning. The resort has not explained it.
Megan found her phone that spring, when the snow melted. It was still in its case, sitting at the base of the tower, and it turned on. The video was still there.
She says she has watched it exactly once.
“People keep asking me what it felt like to almost die,” she said. “Honestly, the scariest part is not the avalanche. It’s watching Andrew’s face when he says ‘On three.’ Because he meant it. He was about to jump into that with me, holding my hand, and I was going to go with him.” They got married that June, at the bottom of the same mountain.
