Thomas Lukken rode the zip line at Mt. Crescent Ski Area in Iowa in October 2016. The zip line ran 1,576 feet from a twenty-four-foot platform at the top of the ski hill to a landing platform at the bottom, reaching speeds up to forty miles per hour. When Lukken arrived at the bottom, the Mt. Crescent employee on the landing platform had forgotten to redeploy the braking system after the previous rider. By the time the employee realized his mistake, it was too late to stop Lukken. He slammed into a wooden pole at the base of the zip line and fractured his neck. Before riding, he had signed a pre-injury release waiving "any and all acts of negligence" by Mt. Crescent. He sued both Mt. Crescent (as operator) and Challenge Quest, LLC (the company that originally designed and installed the zip line). The district court dismissed both sets of claims on summary judgment. The Iowa Supreme Court took the case on appeal and reached different conclusions on each defendant.
Claims against Challenge Quest — dismissed. Challenge Quest had designed and installed the original braking system in 2014, provided four days of staff training, then turned control of the zip line over to Mt. Crescent. Two years later, Mt. Crescent decided to replace the original braking system with a different one — a "zipSTOP" magnetic-resistance system installed by a different contractor, Sky Line — without informing Challenge Quest. It was the zipSTOP system that the employee failed to redeploy when Lukken rode. The Supreme Court affirmed summary judgment for Challenge Quest: once a contractor transfers control to the owner and the owner later replaces the contractor's work with a different product from a different vendor, the original contractor owes no duty of care with respect to that replacement system. Challenge Quest neither designed nor installed the zipSTOP; it had no knowledge it had been installed; and the employee who forgot to redeploy it had not been trained by Challenge Quest. Liability follows control, and control had long since passed.
Claims against Mt. Crescent — split ruling. The district court had held that the pre-injury release covered everything, including gross negligence, and dismissed all claims. The Iowa Supreme Court partly agreed and partly did not. Iowa does not recognize "gross negligence" as a separate common-law tort — the state abolished degrees of negligence, so there is no standalone cause of action for gross negligence distinct from ordinary negligence. To that extent, the district court was correct: the release's language covering "any and all acts of negligence" validly waived Lukken's ordinary negligence claims regardless of how badly Mt. Crescent performed.
But Lukken's petition had also alleged willful, wanton, and reckless conduct — and the court held that is a different matter entirely. Wanton conduct involves a realization of imminent danger combined with reckless disregard for the probable consequences. Recklessness, under the Restatement formulation Iowa follows, requires knowing of a risk that injury is probable (not merely possible) and consciously failing to avoid it. Both the Restatement (Second) of Contracts and the Restatement (Third) of Torts provide that exculpatory clauses purporting to release liability for intentional or reckless conduct are unenforceable on public-policy grounds. The Iowa Supreme Court agreed, joining the great weight of authority from other jurisdictions: a pre-injury release cannot validly waive claims for willful, wanton, or reckless conduct. The waiver stood as to ordinary negligence; it fell as to the more culpable conduct alleged.
The court reversed the summary judgment for Mt. Crescent and remanded for further proceedings on the willful, wanton, and reckless conduct claims.
Lukken v. Fleischer, et al. (Mt. Crescent Ski Area), Supreme Court of Iowa, No. 20-0343. Decided June 30, 2021.