The initial lawsuit brought by the victim’s family in 2022 claimed that when Annie Miller, who was 16 at the time, and her father Mike went to load the Paradise Express—a detachable quad chairlift—Annie was not securely on the chair when it left the bottom terminal. Her father hung onto her while he and others yelled for someone to stop the lift. The suit claims there was not an attendant at the load line at the time. Eventually, Annie fell 30 feet onto hard-pack snow before the chair was stopped.
The suit claimed that CBMR violated its duty of care, negligence, and gross negligence. The first two claims were dismissed in 2023 by a district state judge, who cited the resort’s liability waiver, according to reporting by Courthouse News Service.
The Millers appealed to the State Supreme Court, asking it “to consider whether a ski area in Colorado can create contractual immunity from statutory duty of care [set forth in the Colorado Ski Safety Act] in a contract that is part of a ski lift pass.” A majority of the Supreme Court justices determined that the liability waiver did not absolve CBMR from the claim of illegal acts of negligence and instructed the district court to “reinstate plaintiff’s negligence per se claim for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” the court said.
In the subsequent trial, the jury found CBMR violated state regulations but was not grossly negligent. Since Miller signed the resort’s liability waiver, the jury said she accepted the risk, thus finding her 25 percent at fault and CBMR 75 percent.
According to Courthouse News, the Miller case was the “first time the Colorado Supreme Court considered whether a resort’s liability waiver shields it from negligence claims under the Ski Safety Act and the Passenger Tramway Safety Act.”
