A Vail Chairlift Accident Was Traced to a Part Installed Upside Down — in 2007

A Colorado state investigation found that a January 25, 2026 incident on Vail's Little Eagle Lift — a triple chairlift that threw two passengers from their chair — was caused by a component of the sheave train assembly that had been installed upside down when the lift was originally built in 2007. Neither passenger was injured, but the malfunction required Ski Patrol to evacuate about 40 other riders by rope while the lift remained suspended.

The Colorado Passenger Tramway Board's investigation, obtained by CBS News Colorado, is notable less for the incident itself than for how long the underlying defect went unnoticed. State inspectors said recognizing that the sheave train was not installed correctly proved extremely difficult to detect during routine visual inspections — meaning a manufacturing or construction error from nearly two decades earlier survived years of standard safety checks before finally causing a malfunction.

The lift remained out of service until the state completed its investigation on February 10. A defect that predates the incident by 19 years and evaded routine visual inspection the entire time is a different category of finding than an operational or maintenance lapse — it points to a construction-era quality issue rather than a failure of Vail's ongoing inspection regime, since the investigation specifically noted the flaw was not realistically catchable through the visual checks lifts of this type normally undergo.