What Happened?
Thursday, February 28, 2019.
Aspen Highlands.
One of four ski areas in the Aspen-Snowmass network, deep in the heart of the Colorado Rockies.
Highlands is known for its challenging terrain. Check out this article for instance, where its upper-most bowl tops the list.
https://rootsrated.com/stories/9-steepest-inbounds-ski-runs-in-colorado
We weren't quite at the top of the bowl shown in the article (that is a long, up-hill hike), but we were up in that area, exploring. As shown below, it was the slope marked as "Y-12".
Y-12 is on the southern face of the Highlands Bowl, high and skier's right under the "Loge Peak" chair lift, shown approximately here:
Y-12 is about 11,500 feet above sea level, and about 3,500 vertical feet from the base of the resort.
Note the table indicating pitch. While not technically the steepest run at this gnarly mountain, it is right up there.
I have a video of Amelia going down this run like a champ. She cleared the roughest part. However, further down the hill, she made a turn and built up speed... too much speed as it would turn out, because she lost balance and fell forward.
The slope was too steep to fall to a stop, and she rolled further down hill, turning multiple rolls as I watched helplessly from above.
And here is the important detail: the ski's binding-to-boot release mechanism malfunctioned, and her right ski did not snap loose as designed.
For those unfamiliar with the mechanics of snow skis, there is a standard safety feature, the bindings (mechanism binding boot to ski) are designed to pop loose in the event of a fall. But in this case, on that right ski, for some reason, this mechanism malfunctioned.
The result was a torque that broke her leg in four locations. With heroic strength, she managed to get the ski off. I'll spare the details, but the cries of pain are forever etched into my memory.
A good Samaritan a few hundred yards away contacted ski patrol. Ashley arrived what seemed to me like a few minutes later, and several minutes after that, 3 others.
Ashley put me to work stomping in my skis to flatten an area where the stretcher could rest.
When the others arrived, they asked me to move out of the way, so I went further down hill, to the following vantage point:
They worked for what felt to me like about 15 minutes to get her onto the stretcher sled. It is not easy to load a fragile person onto a stretcher on a steep slope in 3+ feet of soft snow. They obviously had medical training, and were able to administer some pain medicine on the spot, although she says it barely touched the pain. I believe that.
They took off downhill in a triangle pattern. They moved quickly at this point, it was a challenge for me, on skis, to keep up. This was bumpy, ungroomed, challenging terrain, but they wasted no time.
They descended in this fashion to the bottom of the "Deep Temerity" chair lift, at the ski area boundary.
They loaded her behind a snowmobile to go slightly uphill, up the "Grand Reverse" trail to rejoin the main mountain. I was instructed to ride the lift up and ski back down.
I descended the 3500 vertical feet and arrived at the bottom just as they were reaching the ambulance. They held her in the ambulance for another 20 minutes or so, presumably as the first point of contact with proper medical care. The ordeal began about 10:30am, I estimate, and it was shortly after noon when the ambulance departed for Aspen Valley Hospital, a couple miles away.
So what happened? The root cause, the fundamental failure, was of the mechanical feature built into the design of modern snow skis.. the failure to break free.
Should we have been on a double-diamond run at such a brutal mountain? Hind sight being 20/20, it is easy to say no. But we've skied runs like this before, we are both qualified to enter such an area. But the area itself is not the issue. That is, at most, a secondary factor. The primary factor, and root cause failure, was the failure of the safety mechanism.
Why did that happen? I'm not sure. Maybe it was something about the angle. Perhaps the merchant who performed their annual tune-up missed something. The left ski did pop off, so there was clearly something wrong with that one piece of equipment. We may one day discover the mechanics of that happened, or we may not. One thing is for sure, if I'm to keep skiing in the future, I must make it my mission to learn everything there is to know about binding mechanisms, and be sure to stress test them and keep them in good repair.
In the future, we will certainly learn from this painful lesson. We will focus more on reaching leisurely and scenic terrain, and likely be less aggressive with the challenging terrain.
But despite all of this, Amelia is an extremely skilled and capable skier. I am continually impressed by, and proud of, the expert skier she has become in recent years. I am optimistic that I will get to ski with her again.
