A Garfield County jury last week awarded a record-breaking $205 million to the family of a 6-year-old girl who died on an amusement park ride at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park in September 2021.
The family argued the operator of the Haunted Mine Drop did not properly secure Wongel Estifanos into her seat on the Haunted Mine Drop ride, which dropped more than 100 feet. The jury agreed with the girl’s family in their wrongful death lawsuit, awarding the family $205 million, including $123 million in punitive damages. The owner of the amusement park last week issued a statement saying the size of the Estifanos verdict places the park’s future “at serious risk” and blamed the accident on engineering and risk analysis failures by the manufacturer of the Haunted Mine Drop. The Estifanos family sued even though the claims of a woman injured at the park several years earlier were dismissed by a judge who cited a liability waiver signed by the woman before she accessed the park’s alpine slide.
The Estifanos award is the latest court case in Colorado that erodes the once unequivocal defense provided by liability waivers. Recent court decisions and jury awards have weakened the ubiquitous waivers used today by nearly all recreation providers. The recreation industry is warning that increased jury awards and lawsuits could threaten a growing industry as insurance providers balk at providing policies.
Earlier this month the Colorado Supreme Court announced it would hear the case of snowboarder injured in a collision with a snowmobile at Breckenridge ski area, marking the first case the high court will weigh since its industry-shaking 2024 ruling that ski resorts are not automatically immune from lawsuits because a skier signed a liability waiver.
And other injury lawsuits — including a negligence claim filed by the parents of a 7-year-old boy who was in a Purgatory ski area ski school class when he fell from a chairlift in March — are lining up after that historic Supreme Court decision and an equally unprecedented jury award against Vail Resorts earlier this month.
The lawsuits and jury awards are the first signs that recreational providers and resort operators could face increased legal challenges after unprecedented court rulings this year have weakened previously unassailable liability waivers. (While Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park largely argued that the accident was the fault of the manufacturer of the ride the operator purchased in 2017, the operator did initially argue in 2022 that the family’s lawsuit should be dismissed due to the family signing liability waivers, which are required for all park visitors.)
Colorado Supreme Court revives case dismissed by lower courts that cited liability waivers
John Litterer was injured in December 2020 when he was struck by a snowmobile driven by a Breckenridge employee heading uphill, against the flow of skier traffic on the Peak 8 Road cat track. Litterer sued the resort operator and the snowmobile driver in May 2022 in Summit County District Court, arguing negligence as well as “extreme and outrageous conduct” and “reckless endangerment.”
The Summit County court dismissed some of those claims in 2023 as Vail Resorts argued that Litterer signed liability waivers when he purchased his 2020-21 Epic Pass. Those pass sale contracts include wording that requires the user to assume “the risk of any injury … resulting from any of the inherent dangers and risks of skiing and may not recover from the ski area operator and its employees for any injury.”
The contract for the season pass sale — which is the same across all lift ticket and season pass sales in Colorado — lists inherent dangers that include “the negligence of ski area employees” and lists snowmobiles among the dangers that skiers must avoid.
Vail Resorts, like most ski area operators who are sued by injured skiers, argued that the liability waiver made the company immune from lawsuits. Litterer also bought an Epic Pass for the 2022-23 ski season, which, like most every season pass agreement in the country, required the buyer to “further release and give up any and all claims and rights that I may now have … and understand this releases all claims … resulting from anything which has happened up to now,” reads the Epic Pass waiver.
Summit County District Court Judge Reed Owens in January 2024 agreed with Vail Resorts, citing a similar case in 2018 where a skier sued Vail Resorts over an injury that occurred before they signed a liability waiver for a season pass.
“Plaintiff paid for his Epic Pass and agreed to waive past claims in exchange for access to Breckenridge Ski Area,” Owens wrote in his decision dismissing Litterer’s lawsuit. (Vail Resorts also asked the court to make Litterer pay $61,137.55 in court fees.)
In January 2025, the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court’s decision that liability waivers signed by Litterer were enough to dismiss his lawsuit. Litterer’s appeal cited the Colorado Supreme Court 2024 ruling in the case of Annie Miller, a teenager who was seriously injured in 2022 after falling from a Crested Butte Mountain Resort chairlift.
The state Supreme Court in May 2024 ruled that the standard liability agreements that are part of nearly every lift ticket and season pass sale do not shield ski areas from all negligence claims. Miller and her family won a $12.4 million award from a Colorado jury earlier this month.
Litterer’s appeal revolved around that Miller ruling, arguing that ski areas are not immune from all negligence claims just because a skier signed a liability waiver. The appeals court, however, ruled that Litterer’s liability waiver for the 2022-23 ski pass — signed nearly two years after he was injured by the collision with a snowmobile — released Vail Resorts from liability for “any injury.”
Litterer’s appeal argued that the 2022-23 contract for an Epic Pass lacked “mutual assent” because he did not clearly understand he was waiving all past claims when he purchased the pass. The appeals court ruled that a lack of understanding on the details of the ski pass, which Litterer used for a ski trip that season, did not automatically void the liability release.
“Absent an assertion of fraud, a party who signs a contract is presumed to know its contents and is bound by all the conditions within the contract, even if the party did not read the contract,” reads the appeals court’s January 2025 ruling written by Judge Pax L. Moultrie.
The Colorado Supreme Court earlier this month announced it would hear Litterer’s appeal of the ruling, saying it would weigh the negligence claims with consideration of the Miller ruling.
In July, the family of a 7-year-old boy from Texas who suffered “catastrophic, life-threatening injuries” in a 50-foot fall from Purgatory’s Village Express chairlift sued the ski area in La Plata County District Court. Like the family of Annie Miller, the Sorensen family argued the lift attendants were negligent when they failed to stop the chairlift after their son did not properly load the six-pack chairlift March 9.
A trainee ski instructor who was teaching the boy’s class held the young skier before he fell. The lawsuit argues the resort failed to have properly staffed lift operations and ski school classes as well as a lack of adequate ski patrol on duty. The boy fell around the time the resort operator slashed its workforce as part of a cost-cutting and refinancing plan.
The lawsuit says there was only one lift operator running the bottom terminal when the boy fell. Like the Miller case, the family is arguing that the lift attendants violated several rules and standards outlined by the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board.
“This just speaks to how overwhelmed all the employees are,” one employee told The Colorado Sun in March, asking not to be named for fear of being fired. The Purgatory chairlift fall was one of a record number of falls at Colorado resorts in the 2024-25 ski season. The Colorado tramway board has collected 149 reports of skiers falling from chairlifts since 2014 and at least one-third of those falls involved children. Since 2015, the tramway board has recorded eight skiers falling from the Purgatory Village Express chairlift and three of them were minors.