Teens save 8-year-old boy dangling from ski lift

A group of teenagers came to the rescue of an 8-year-old boy who nearly fell from a chairlift onto the hard snow during a heart-stopping ordeal at a Vancouver ski resort.

According to CNN, the 8-year-old slipped and was left grasping and dangling from the side of a Grouse Mountain chairlift more than 25 feet in the air, while he held onto his father for dear life.

One of the teenagers, 14-year-old James Macdonald, told the station he didn’t think the boy could keep a grip for very long, so he asked a nearby man to get some orange netting, usually reserved to mark where the skiing boundaries are. He said he wanted to use that netting to catch the boy in case he fell.

“He was starting to flail about and get extremely panicked,” Macdonald told CNN.

Macdonald said his friends, Gabriel Neilson and 12-year-old Josh Ravensbergen, had just finished skiing down the mountain when they began to offer some help along with a man and a woman in the area.

Neilson attempted to calm the boy down, while Ravensbergen told CNN he stripped off some padding from a pole and inserted it in the netting to give it some more support.

CNN reported that once the makeshift net was completed, Neilson calmly advised the boy to remove his skis. He then told the father to release his grip on his young child.

The father released his grip and the boy dropped safely into the padding. The group of roughly 10 people who held up the net cheered loudly after saving the boy.

The boy was attended to by rescue control and sent to the hospital as a precaution, but suffered no injuries, said Julia Grant, the spokesperson for Grouse Mountain.

As a reward, the boys were each given a complimentary season pass from the president of Grouse Mountain, Michael Cameron, said Grant.