$11.4 Million Verdict for Mountain Biker Paralyzed by Trail Sign

Gabriel B. Owens was 43 years old and a former professional cyclist when he rode the Cannonball Trail at Mt. Hood Ski Bowl on July 31, 2016. Cannonball is rated a double black diamond, the resort's most difficult designation, and Owens had the experience to be riding a trail at that level.

Partway down, Owens hit a rut in the trail surface. The impact was enough to throw off his line, and it put him into a wooden signpost the resort had installed directly next to the trail. He collided with it at speed. The crash fractured his spine and left him with T12 paraplegia, a complete loss of movement and sensation from roughly the waist down that does not resolve with treatment or time.

Owens sued Mt. Hood Ski Bowl, LLC, arguing the resort had built a hazard into its own trail. His attorneys, Rick Klingbeil and Gretchen Mandekor of Rosenbaum Law Group, told the jury that a rigid wooden post planted beside a downhill mountain bike trail, where riders travel fast and where a rut or a lost line is a foreseeable event, was a design choice the resort could have avoided. Mandekor's framing at trial compared the post to a speed bump placed without warning on a highway: something a rider had no way to anticipate and no way to avoid once a small deviation in the trail put them on a collision course with it. The plaintiffs argued that a breakaway or collapsible marker, standard in other trail-design contexts precisely because riders sometimes lose control near fixed signage, would have prevented the injury without changing how the trail rode.

The resort defended the trail as built and operated within the assumed risks of an advanced mountain bike course. The jury did not accept that defense. In the spring of 2022, it returned a verdict of $11.4 million, an amount the ski industry press described as unprecedented for a resort-operated bike trail, and the resort responded by suspending its mountain bike operations.

The verdict did not end the case. Mt. Hood Ski Bowl indicated it intended to appeal, a process that could have taken years and left the size of any final recovery uncertain in the meantime. Rather than litigate that appeal, the parties negotiated a resolution: the resort agreed to pay Owens $10.5 million, a reduction from the jury's figure but a number Owens could collect without the delay, cost, and risk of appellate litigation. The final recovery in the case is that negotiated $10.5 million, not the original $11.4 million jury verdict.