Vail To Blame For Woman’s Ski Resort Fall, Seattle Jury Told 

Miroslava “Mirka” Lewis was trying to load onto a moving chairlift when she was knocked from the edge of a two-story platform and plummeted to the ground below.

Law360 (March 4, 2025) — A mother who fell 20 feet at a Washington ski resort told a Seattle federal jury Tuesday that the Vail Corp. caused her injuries by failing to address a clear hazard on the mountain and relying on untrained alpine club parents to run chairlifts amid a 2022 staffing shortage.

Miroslava “Mirka” Lewis, among the parents who agreed to work at Vail-owned Stevens Pass Ski Resort in the 2021-22 season, was trying to load onto a moving chairlift when she was knocked from the edge of a two-story platform and plummeted to the ground below, her attorney told jurors during opening arguments. Her counsel said years of safety failures at the corporate level ultimately caused her injuries, including head trauma, a punctured lung and broken bones.

“Safety on a ski mountain can mean life or death,” said Robert W. Zimmerman of Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky PC, representing Lewis. “And you will hear in this case evidence that safety was not a priority for the Vail Corporation at Stevens Pass.”

Zimmerman said Vail’s corporate inspectors had previously identified problems with the 55-year-old chairlift involved, an outdated model with no safety bar, but it was not replaced before the incident. While there was a safety net on one side of the elevated platform, corporate leadership had been warned that the other side lacked fall protection.

“You’ll hear that Vail knew about this 21-foot free fall,” Zimmerman said. “That it was a danger — and that others had gotten hurt or fell from that space in previous years.”

But Brian C. Augenthaler of Keating Bucklin & McCormack Inc. PS, representing Vail, attributed Lewis’ fall to a “miscommunication” between the plaintiff and the experienced lift operator who was then on duty on the upper platform of what’s known as Kehr’s Chair. Neither of them were employed by Vail, which owns more than 40 other ski areas, Augenthaler said. They were instead both employed by Stevens Pass, a local resort that Vail purchased in 2018.

“The Vail Corporation had nothing to do with Ms. Lewis’s accident, period.” Augenthaler said. “The Vail Corporation does not exist to micromanage the day-to-day operations of its 42 ski resorts.”

Lewis filed her lawsuit in May 2023 against parent company Vail Resorts Inc. and other unnamed defendants, court records show.

In a January summary judgment decision, U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik trimmed claims against the parent company and other affiliates while preserving the claims against the Vail Corp, a Vail Resorts subsidiary. Lasnik concluded that Lewis had shown that the Vail Corp. “had inserted itself into the safety, lift operations, and budgeting protocols at Stevens Pass Resort to such an extent that it had a duty to take reasonable steps — or to order Stevens Pass Resort to take reasonable steps — to address the risks associated with employee downloading on the Kehr’s chair.”

Kicking off a trial that’s expected to continue into next week, Lewis contended that her fall wasn’t the result of day-to-day decisions about the local resort’s operations, but instead was due to the Vail Corp.’s motives to keep season pass holders coming back and maximize profits.

With few runs open at Stevens Pass at the start of the 2021-22 season, lines began to form and customers who purchased seasonal passes from Vail’s Epic Pass line “couldn’t get their money’s worth,” Zimmerman said.

The Stevens Pass alpine club proposed having parents take on lift operating roles as a solution, and Vail “raced” them through a half-day orientation and put them to work on the mountain, despite training normally taking weeks, Zimmerman told jurors. Lewis, who had a child in the club, was allegedly among the first people to volunteer. She had just finished one of her first shifts when she fell.

Vail’s counsel countered that Lewis wasn’t a volunteer, since she received compensation and a season pass from the resort in return for her work. Lewis has said the operator on duty didn’t stop the lift as it approached the platform, even though she requested that he do so; the operator, meanwhile, said he tried to stop the lift, but Lewis attempted to get in the chair too early and was pushed from the platform, Augenthaler said.

“Evidence will show that she, for whatever reason, never got fully planted on the chair,” Augenthaler said, adding that she was apparently preoccupied with her backpack while trying to load.

“We do blame Ms. Lewis for this accident. There’s no way to sugarcoat it,” Augenthaler said. “You don’t need to be a Cirque du Soleil performer to plop down in a chairlift chair.”

The plaintiff is represented by Robert W. Zimmerman, Deborah Alexander, Larry Bendesky and Samuel A. Haaz of Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky PC.

The Vail Corp. is represented by Brian C. Augenthaler, Richard B. Jolley, Margot G. Cotter and Rakiah B. Adams of Keating Bucklin & McCormack Inc. PS.

The case is Lewis v. Vail Resorts Inc. et al., case number 2:23-cv-00812, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.