According to local authorities, a woman spent 15 freezing hours inside a gondola on the snow-covered slopes of a ski resort in the Lake Tahoe area.
Monica Laso was on a snowboarding trip with friends at Heavenly Ski Resort on Thursday when she decided she was too tired to go back down the mountain. according to KCRA Newswho was the first to report the incident.
He then asked an employee if he could take a gondola back down and boarded it around 4:58 p.m. Two minutes later, the station reported, the lift stopped working and she was left alone, cold and without a phone or light.
Laso stayed inside the gondola all night, rubbing his hands and feet to keep warm as the temperature dropped to 20 degrees.
On Friday morning, a call came in to South Lake Tahoe Fire Rescue around 8:30 am. There was a woman at Heavenly Ski Resort suffering from cold exposure, the caller said, according to department spokeswoman Sallie Ross. She was found inside the gondola after workers began the day's lifting, sending her back to the base of the mountain.
An engine was dispatched and minutes later firefighters arrived at the complex, Ross said. Laso was treated at the scene and refused to be transferred to a hospital.
“They evaluated her and she decided not to be transported,” Ross said in a telephone interview Saturday. “She looks like she wasn't hurt or anything, but she definitely didn't have a great night, that's for sure.”
Laso said in a Spanish interview with KCRA that she screamed every time a worker passed below, but that she “felt very frustrated” because they couldn't hear her. The long, dark night was “very cold,” she said.
A media contact for Heavenly did not immediately return a call seeking comment Saturday night. KCRA reported that the resort provided a statement saying it was investigating the incident, which came just two weeks after one skier was killed and another injured in an avalanche at Palisades Tahoe, a ski resort about 40 miles northwest of Heavenly.
Ross said the fire department had “certainly never responded to anything like this,” and described the incident as “a total anomaly.”
“I don't know how something like that could have happened. It’s very strange,” she said. “She must have felt some kind of terror, really, knowing that she was there alone and not knowing if anyone was going to find her. “That must have been really scary for her.”
