Jim Carroll

Review of Willard Mountain

Dangerous! I went snow tubing here for the first ...

Dangerous! I went snow tubing here for the first time with my wife and two children, ages 3 and 5. We ran into several unsafe conditions, including one that easily could have resulted in significant injury.

To get up the hill, you sit in your tube while it is is clipped to a guide rope - the guide rope pulls you up the hill. Our third or fourth time up the hill, when we were around halfway up, I noticed a child (roughly 8-10 years old) come careening down the "up" side of the hill in his tube. He slammed into my wife as she was ascending the hill clipped to her guide rope - she was blindsided since she was facing down the hill.

None of the staff noticed the accident or offered any sort of explanation as to how a rider ended up going down the wrong way. My wife was thrown out of her tube and left to escort the crying child down herself.

None of the staff noticed the accident or stopped the lift, and when I let the staff member at the top of the hill know about the collision, he shrugged his shoulders and just said "A bunch of kids just came through" as if that was an excuse for a safety violation. If you don't have enough people to monitor the slope and also assist with mounting/dismounting the tubes and doing traffic control on the slopes, maybe hire an additional staff member to oversee things?

While the above violation was the clearest and directly resulted in an injury, the slopes were also extremely slick and I hit the safety net at a pretty high rate of speed coming down. I also had a near miss on my second trip down when the ski guard decided to escort a child across my lane as I came down the slope.

We expressed our concerns to the supervisor and he gave us a refund and offered to have my wife checked out by the on site medical staff. She is a bit sore but we dont expect there will be any lasting damage. Still, we will definitely not be returning to Willard Mountain and we suggest you avoid it as well if you value your safety.