When his four-year-old son fell 15 feet from a chairlift at a ski resort in Montana, his father was startled and worried while stuck in his damaged lift chair trying to figure out what to do.

On Sunday, March 19, Nathan McLeod and his two sons—the youngest of whom was four-year-old Sawyer—were on vacation at a ski resort in Montana. They were on a ride on the Montana Snowbowl chairlift in the Lolo National Forest when the incident happened.

The youngster, whose older brother, six-year-old Cassidy, rode in the chair in front of them with a snowboarder, was seated next to his dad.

McLeod claimed that as they were ascending, he observed his son in the chair in front of him and saw that the chair was making violent swings, but he was behind them and had no idea what to do.

As their journey continued, McLeod became increasingly worried that the older child’s chair would slam into the next tower, almost 40 feet off the ground, when suddenly the chair he and his younger son were on swung and smashed into the tower near them.

McLeod instinctively reached for his son’s hand, but Sawyer slipped out of his chair and fell to the snowy ground.

According to the father, he started yelling for help and the lift attendant immediately ran up to his son after the fall to assist him, but the boy was screaming and the dad didn’t know whether his child had sustained any injuries from the fall.

He said he was left hanging from the bar of the broken chair before he eventually jumped down into the snow to attend to his son, after removing his skis.

McLeod claimed he warned the lift attendant about the broken chair and was shocked when no one even looked at the broken chair and lift to ensure it was safe for the journey. The attendant loaded new people on the chairlift and started it up again.

The boy was fortunate that the afternoon snow was soft and that he had not been seriously hurt, said McLeod, who wasn’t happy with the resort’s response to the problem. He expressed concern that there might have been other unsafe chairs that had been overlooked, which could have led to a fatal accident.

The Montana Snowbowl said in a statement that one of their engineers had examined the chairlift and determined that an unbalanced load was most likely to blame for the chair swinging violently and the subsequent fall.

Because safety is always the top priority, the Lolo National Forest requested that the Snow Park lift be shut down while an investigation is conducted.