By Steve Cohen
The longer you ski—or do pretty much any activity—the more complacent you become about equipment safety. Hundreds of ski days go by filled only with fun and excitement. And when you work in the industry and tend to get and dozens of ski demo opportunities each year, you tend to grow even more laissez faire. What, me worry?
Yeah, me. I should have worried a bit more. I hit the “sloppy about safety” reset button on my ski career last Sunday (March 4) at Northstar-at-Tahoe, CA and hope my story encourages all of you to do the same.
In my haste to make turns on the first morning of a planned six-day ski trip, I didn’t check that the bindings on my demo skis were properly set. I mean, why did I need to?
A friend had picked up three sets of different model demos for me and two others to use during our Tahoe ski trip. They were from a highly reputable shop—one that’s a customer of Masterfit’s and whose skills I trust implicitly. My friend had my boots in hand and knew my height, weight and skiing ability—and the shop properly set up the bindings to match. That’s standard procedure. Only the bindings on the skis they set to my boots weren’t the skis I eventually clicked into.
All looked good from where I stood, though. The DIN was clearly to my preferred 8 and the forward pressure was keeping my boots clamped to the skis—at least while standing and skiing easily. Let’s go skiing. Time is a-wasting.
On our very first run, I hockey-stopped sharply at a cat road to wait for a member of our group. And pre-released out of both bindings. I immediately knew something was wrong. The binding forward pressure was obviously off and I would have to stop at a tool bench to make an adjustment when we got down to the lift terminal, about 600 vertical feet below.
I never made it.
A bit further down the hill, I checked to dump speed at a line of control fences a few hundred feet above the Comstock lift maze. Again I pre-released from both skis. Only this time I was probably still going about 10 mph. I went airborne, the skis flipped under me bottom side up—and I slid across the razor-sharp edge with my left thigh. Serious bad luck.
A cutting price to pay for not carefully checking ski binding forward pressure
If I had landed on the ski binding side up, maybe I get a small bruise. Probably not even that. Instead I filleted open a five-inch wide, two-inch deep gash on my thigh and unleashed a gusher of type A+ blood all over the slope.
I was surprisingly composed when I realized what had happened. I immediately recalled my fire department first aid training and ran through a Man vs. Wild check list. I applied compression to the wound by hand as best as I could while lying in the snow. The young mountain safety employee, who had been working the fence line with a foam “SLOW DOWN” hand to encourage speed control, was first on scene. I instructed him to remove my jacket so I could knot it around the wound and get better compression. I also thought about separating both halves of my Leki adjustable poles so I could twist the jacket tight and create a make-shift tourniquet if necessary. At that point I didn’t know if I had severed an artery.
I was pretty proud of myself for thinking so clearly under pressure. The only problem was that the rattled safety host refused to help me remove my jacket. “I can’t, I can’t” he said repeatedly. Apparently it’s SOP not to touch a fallen slider without patrol on scene. I begged him three times to help my remove my jacket and told him I feared bleeding out. I could sense he was torn but he stuck to guideline—which make sense in cases where there’s a potential back, neck or joint injury but not where the greatest danger is from massive blood loss. I was the exception to the rule and was in danger of paying a great price for it. (I suggest Northstar and all resorts re-consider their directives to non-patrol employees in cases where extreme blood loss is evident. And provide ALL on-hill employees with basic first aid training as they can often be first on the scene.)
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Pants don't look too bad. A loan from Jim Schaffner at The Start Haus in Truckee, CA
Fortunately for me, a woman named Carol and her husband Ted skied by, heard me screaming at the safety employee and stopped to see what was wrong. I’m not a religious man but good Samaritan Carol turned out to be heaven-sent—she was a nurse! Carol took over compression and was able to do a much better job than I was pushing down from above. And I was able to remove my jacket just in case something more was needed.
First-year Northstar pro patroller Mike Tracey came on the scene just a few minutes later, cut away my pants and with Carol’s assistance, did a great job stemming the bleeding and bandaging me up for the sled ride down to the ambulance. Fortunately, the ski edge had missed my femoral artery.
The Truckee fire/ambulance crew members were also stellar professionals. Captain Donnie Akers and paramedic Chad Brock stabilized and sedated me for the 15 minute ride to Tahoe Forest Hospital. The docs at Tahoe Forest were first rate and Dr. David Dodd, who sewed me back up, did a quick and relatively painless job. His staple line is incredibly neat (see photo).
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Staples. Yeah, I got that. 20 of them, in fact.
Dr. Dodd estimates 4-6 weeks of recovery and rehab and I hope to be back on snow in time to help coordinate the Ski & Skiing Magazines Boot Test at Mt. Bachelor next month. All in all, not a long-term tragedy but certainly one of the freakier ski injuries I’ve ever heard of. And one that could have been completely avoided with just a cursory bow to safety.
I hope my misfortune provides an instructive lesson to all to double check binding settings YOURSELF whenever jumping on a new pair of skis. It’s worth the few seconds it takes.
So if I am Derek Jeter and this is my bandage I probably sign it and get $2k for it on eBay. But it's me so it's merely hazardous medical waste.
