I had what I’m pretty sure is the most spectacular crash of my skiing career on Tuesday of this week.
Skiing Mineral Basin at Snowbird with a few friends and a guide. Mineral had been closed the day before and it had snowed 20” since it was last open. We caught the rope drop for Powder Paradise and the rope drop for the Bookends. At the Bookends, we traversed out to a nice looking line and skied deep untracked pow for a long way. Pausing near the bottom of the pitch, the guide reminded us it was a long, slightly uphill run out to the lift and we needed to keep our speed up.
I took him at his word, and the Ikon app said I topped out somewhere in the lows 40s mph on the runout.
I didn’t see the transition from deep untracked pow to a cat track until it was too late. It was an abrupt transition - maybe a 5 foot steepish drop, with a slight depression before transitioning into the cat track.
The tips of my skis hit the depression in front of the cat track, and I double ejected. The first thing that hit the cat track was my head and the next thing I knew I was in deep powder on the other side of the cat track.
I’m not sure if I was knocked out for a few seconds, but it took me a bit to mentally get myself together and piece together what was going on. My head felt wet which I thought was weird. I reached up and it was wet because of snow - my helmet and goggles were gone. They were about 15 feet away separated from each other. I would later find out that the reason my helmet came off is because the strap stripped out of the buckle which was still attached to the other part of the buckle. That was the scariest thing to me. After threading it back through I tried pulling it out manually and couldn’t. I guess that is an indication of how much force was involved.
My poles were relatively close by, but I couldn’t see my skis. I decided to worry about that later and take a quick inventory of what hurt. My left ankle, right knee, right thumb, neck and tongue all hurt a bit. I spat out some blood - turns out I had bitten a small piece off the end of my tongue.
I finally felt ready to get up which wasn’t easy because of all the snow, but I made it back up to the cat track just in time to see one of my friends go down in the same spot (less violently than I did, fortunately). I checked he was ok and we unsuccessfully looked for my skis for about 10 minutes, during which time three more people went down in the same spot.
I made the quarter mile walk of shame back the lift and rode up with my buddies to rest and have some lunch. I was hurting, but it wasn’t terrible which I would later learn was probably adrenaline because it sure as hell all hurt that night.
At lunch, one of my friends figured out that while he was taking video of someone else, my crash was in the background. It was a really small part of the frame, but we could zoom in pretty closely and although it was heavily pixelated, he thought he could see where my skis wound up. We could also see that I rag dolled twice across the cat track before I hit the powder on the other side.
After lunch, my friends went back down to take another look for my skis based on what the video showed. I thought it was a long shot, but they texted photos of them holding up my skis about two minutes after they got to the site! I couldn’t believe it, and was pretty relieved to not have lost the skis and even more relieved not to have to take the tram down and rent skis for the rest of the trip.
I skied the rest of the day and took it pretty easy. By the end of the day I was hurting. My knee had swelled up and was pretty stiff, my thumb was like a balloon, and my neck was so stiff that I couldn’t really turn more than a couple of degrees.
Two days later, I’m still pretty sore, but I don’t think there’s any major damage. I took a lot of ibuprofen and applied lots of ice which mostly got the swelling under control. I took the next morning off, but was able to ski that afternoon with a compression sleeve on my knee and not much pain. I skied again today. While I didn’t go quite as hard as I usually would, I still skied 17k feet of steep off piste mostly bumped up softish snow, I mostly skied it pretty well and I don’t hurt any worse than I did at the start of the day.
So that’s the story of my biggest crash. I feel pretty lucky to have walked away from it as in tact as I am. At 52, I’m hoping there’s not going to be another one to top that.