Whitefish, MT – A California man has died in a tree well at Whitefish Mountain Resort, the third such incident at the Montana ski resort in three years.

Douglas Spring, 54, was skiing with his son on Saturday in a wooded area between Whitefish’s Grey Wolf and Bighorn runs on the mountain’s North Side when he fell into a tree well. When Spring failed to appear at the base of the Big Creek Express (Chair 7), Spring’s son retraced their route and found his father.

This is the third death from suffocation in a tree well at Whitefish Mountain Resort within the past three years. In 2011 a 16-year-old German exchange student died in a tree well, prompting his family to recently file a lawsuit against the resort and the victim’s host family in Columbia Falls, Mont. Scott Allen Meyer, 29, of Kalispell, Mont., was snowboarding alone at Whitefish Mountain less than two weeks later when he suffocated in a tree well near the top of T-Bar 2, east of Big Mountain’s summit.