SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif., – Monica Laso spent the night in a Gondola dangling above the mountain face of Heavenly Ski Resort all alone, with no phone and no way to get a hold of anyone on the ground. 

Five friends from different countries traveled to South Lake Tahoe to ski and enjoy Heavenly Ski Resort. They all went up the hill in the morning and only four came back down on the evening of January 26, leaving one unaccounted and the rest of them scrambling for answers. 

“She was a little bit slow, and she was exhausted at one point and couldn’t continue,” Momo Shternhel, a friend of the exhausted Laso told the Tribune  “Her boyfriend contacted ski patrol and they took her down on a red bed to the gondola, but they lost her boyfriend so he kept going down to the California base lodge.” 

Reportedly the woman from Chile waited for a few minutes for her boyfriend and when she didn’t see him she got on the gondola. As she began her descent, the gondola froze keeping her suspended in thin air. 

She could see workers but failed to get their attention despite pounding on the windows. Time passed, the sunlight faded and a full moon became her only companion.

Meanwhile, her friends “went back and forth. We were going crazy, no one knew anything between the police and security, kept telling them she was at the gondola between 3:50 – 4:10 p.m.,” Laso’s friend said while officials searched camera feeds the four friends continued to search for their lost companion.

Shternhel told the Tribune “She wasn’t rescued.”

Ultimately the five are thankful they are safe, “We were super happy she could survive the night and thankful it happened on a soft night.”

Laso did not find the survival kit in the gondola.