High winds force Mount Sima to close early Saturday
CBC
The chairlift at a popular Whitehorse ski hill closed early Saturday afternoon due to extreme wind conditions at the top of the mountain.
Jonathan Lindsay, the operations manager of Mount Sima, said this situation usually happens once a year.
"We did notice some high wind gusts in the morning and we checked our top weather reports hourly," Lindsay said.
At about 4 a.m. on Friday, Lindsay said the weather report marked 101 km/h wind gusts. Throughout the day, it was no less than 70 to 80 km/h.
On Saturday, the wind picked up around noon and it went almost instantly from 30 km/h to 80 km/h.
"At that time, we just can't safely put people on the chair," said Lindsay.
"When the chair starts swinging, we run the risk of chairs running into the towers or people not being able to offload safely."
At 2 p.m. the chairlift was shut down, closing access to mountain, but the bunny hill remained open until 4 p.m.
The closure was successful and no skiers needed to be evacuated, Lindsay said, contrary to several posts on social media.
However, staff are prepared for that possibility if need be, as Mount Sima employees were just trained on evacuations last week.
"We put members of the patrol and lift operations staff on the chair, and then we go through training scenario of having to take somebody off of the chair just in case. But we haven't had to take any members of the public off," said Lindsay.
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