A snowboarder who was enjoying a resort in California with friends spent 15 hours stuck overnight in a ski gondola.
Monica Laso told KCRA 3 in an interview translated from Spanish that she was snowboarding before a worker there took her to the gondola at Heavenly Mountain Resort in Lake Tahoe around 5 p.m. Thursday after she told them she was too tired to snowboard down the mountain.
But after about two minutes of riding, the gondola stopped, leaving her stranded in the air. Laso didn’t have her phone or any light to draw attention to her.
All she could do was scream. “I was screaming desperately until I lost my voice,” she told KCRA 3.
Skiers and snowboarders ride the gondola to the top of the Sky Mountain.
George Rose/Getty
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None of her cries for help were heard. So while her worried friends below reported her missing, Laso said she rubbed her hands and feet together to help keep her body warm during the night in the sub-zero temperatures.
“I felt very frustrated,” she recalled. Las’s ordeal finally ended on Friday morning when the gondola was operational again.
A representative for the resort did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment. The resort told KCRA 3 it is investigating what happened.
“We did an evaluation just to gauge what her current status was, so she was treated and released,” South Lake Tahoe Fire and Rescue spokeswoman Kim George told KCRA 3.
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George noted that the Laso incident was the first time the organization had responded to an accident of this nature in more than 20 years.
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