After the fall: 50 years later, Vail gondola crash still harrowing for survivors
As the red gondola car suddenly bucked and shook on that morning 50 years ago, Greg Dietrich craned his neck, looked up, and realized the steel cable his life depended on had frayed and unraveled.
It was just after 9:15 a.m. on March 26, 1976, at Vail ski resort, and the 19-year-old knew something was desperately wrong – part of the cable looked like a Slinky, and a strand of wire dangled from the line. Despite the shocking image, he could not have fathomed the kind of catastrophic mechanical failure that was underway on Gondola II, known as the Lionshead. Within minutes, two of the six-person cars would plunge 12 stories to the mountainside, killing three people on impact and injuring nine others, some grievously. Two days later, the death toll would grow in what remains one of the deadliest ski lift accidents in U.S. history.
Gondola II climbed from Vail’s base at Lionshead up to a terminal at Eagle’s Nest, a distance of 1.8 miles and 2,200 vertical feet. Along the way, the gondola cars passed through seven steel towers, some of them 127 feet tall.
On that sunny Friday morning, the first sign of trouble came as the car reached a point just below Tower 4 – roughly three-quarters of the way to its destination. There, it rattled and banged over the damaged cable. Investigators would later determine that two of Car 25’s guide wheels jumped off the track cable, a braided steel line a little more than an inch-and-a-half in diameter.
“The car wasn’t running right and it – it wasn’t hanging right,” Dietrich said, sitting in the living room of his South Carolina home. “It was kind of cattywampus now.”
Dietrich and three buddies from his hometown of Wayland, Mass., had boarded the car, joined by two men from New York, in anticipation of the day’s first run on slopes powdered by several inches of overnight snow. Now the car skittered as it climbed toward Tower 5 another 1,000 feet up the mountain, dangling at an odd angle.
“We just slammed into the tower,” Dietrich said, “and we were just stuck there for a few seconds, and then we would slip back and then we’d slam into the tower again. And that happened maybe four or five times.”
The impacts blew out the car’s windows.
“We’re all going, why don’t they – why don’t they shut it down?” Dietrich said, his voice rising and quickening. “Shut it down.”
With its derailed wheels tangled in a wad of unraveled wire atop Tower 5, the car could go no farther. But the gondola’s second cable – the one that hauled it up the mountain at 8 miles an hour – continued its relentless uphill march. Moments later, that force shattered the steel jaws that clamped the car to the haul cable. Then the braided wire sawed into the steel post that connected that car’s cabin to the carriage and the wheels above it.
It would take less than three seconds for the car to smash into the snowy mountainside.
Battered, struggling to grab a breath, Dietrich crawled out a window and fought for air, looking up to see a second gondola car jump off the line and plunge to the ground.
Today, Dietrich and two of his hometown buddies – John “Skip” Coniaris and John “Jack” Manley – are the only remaining survivors of that sun-splashed, dark day in Vail.
Back then, they were all a year out of high school, young men seeking adventure and fun in the Vail Valley while they figured out what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Fifty years later, they are scattered around the country – Florida, South Carolina, Indiana – and eligible for Social Security. Each carries March 26, 1976, in a multitude of ways. Two carry physical reminders. All three carry grief for those who died – one of them a friend – and varying emotions about the experience.
For each, a kind of deafening silence enveloped the experience and its aftermath. They rarely talked about it – not even with each other. None of them has ever told the full story of that day – what happened on the side of Vail Mountain and all the ways it affected them, and affects them still – until now.
To read After the Fall, the complete report, please go to 9news.com/afterthefall