Tele Injury Number Two!
10 December 2000 was a beautiful day. The meteorologists had forecast a nice dip in the jet stream, supposedly bringing us tons of cold air, and with a nice wet upstream flow we should've gotten slammed in the mountains. It's been quite a while since we've had a good, epic storm in the hills, and we were looking forward to huge pow-pow. There wasn't even frost on the car windows as I walked down to get a Summit Daily. In a tee shirt.
Oh well. Best just make the best of it. The snow conditions were terrific for early season, as good as they'd been in 5 years. Scott, Rick, and I decided to pack up the trusty Honda and play at Breckenridge on the way home; Crazy Jane was supposed to meet us, and I needed some tele people to ski with anyway. The knuckledragger (read, Snowboarding Scotty) is great to ride with, but no one not on tele's really appreciates the feeling. We ripped around on groomers, messy bumpers, and some fun natural-conditions terrain (all right, I got into some ugly places and no one followed me to all of them, but that's beside the point - they care more about their bases than I do) all morning, and headed back over to the base of 9 to meet up with Jane at 1300.
On the way down to the base Scotty and I bombed down some marginal terrain at quite unreasonable speeds, and I had the (wonderful) opportunity to pass a group of telemarkers standing just above a steep slope leading down to the mid-loading station for the Snowflake lift; I was feeling pretty good, ripping a nice air-tuck-turn past the stationary crowd. Scotty and I got to the runout catwalk and kept moving. Scott turned his head and said, "Hey, right on time!" as we came up on two more tele-ers. Scott turned his carving board hard out around the pair, just as we came under the Beaver Run lift, and I turned hard left to hug the natural edge. We passed the pair with a slight but not huge delta-V, and cruised down to the base; the pair skied up to us, and lo-and-behold, it was Jane and Bill! Sometimes these link-ups do work!
After waiting for Rick for a few minutes (he'd apparently made a wrong turn and had to hike back up a little to the correct one), we decided we wanted to head over and sample the natural steep stuff on chair 6. Jane and Bill had been over there earlier and sid it was worth the risk of coreshots, so there we headed. We got back to the top of 8 and headed down under a double chair in the bumps (showing off on teles, of course), and then cut out left to a closed run I'd bumped into through the trees several hours earlier. It had fantastic semi-natural conditions, and they were blowing manmade all over it. I started turning down, and then decided it was steep and fast enough to put my skis really on edge and start playing on our way down.
I made it about 200 meters, carving as hard as I could with sidecut Rossi's and my Krispi racing leather boots, and just as I unweighted to start a left-hand turn (fortunate, both my skis were balanced and basically together at this point) I passed the last snow gun. The gun had put down some wet, slow manmade right in my path, and at 40mph my skis stopped dead. On teles it's obvious what happened next. My face hit the snow and I did two full somersaults on the ground, skis and poles and helmet sill attached. The helmet saved me from a good concussion, and the goggles flew off to the back of the helmet, full of snow. Somewhere in the second flip my left pole went bye-bye. Finding it was my first concern when I stopped and turned my head back up the hill; then I remembered I'd done my PCL in a bad alpine crash two years ago, and checked to make sure it hadn't popped again. It hadn't. Jane and Bill came down to me, kind of surprised I was still moving, with my pole (eventually, I think; it was fuzzy for a few seconds). They'd both seen me go over. Scott and Rick were a hundred feet further down, back in-bounds, and both missed the spectacle. Too bad!
I tried to stand, and when that didn't work I realized my left ankle was not in great shape. I rolled to my right side and got up, and decided I couldn't weight my left leg. Or twist it. I tried a slide with just my right ski, then a slide each direction without my left ski on (in my hand). Neither worked, and it was just agonizing to have lateral acceleration on even the unclad boot. I loosened my left boot and stood there a minute, pushing my poles into the snow in disgust. I've never been taken off the hill, dammit. Even with a blown PCL I skied off on one leg. And with a broken big toe, I still lapped Palivicini (double black bumps at A-Basin) after a couple of beers.
(Basically, here's what happened: you're flying down at 40mph and suddenly your skis stop. Your body's momentum keeps you going for, oh, just a little bit. Double endo, mostly in the air (but with enough ground impact to make a good little cloud of hardpack), and when the left foot hit again it was straight up and down; the compression forces generated (thankfully it was a straight-on hit) caused a straight down compression of the fibula. It broke like a stick of chalk might under similar conditions; diagonally, sliding by the other part of the bone. Without pre-splinted legs I would've probably ended up with a multiple spiral fracture and torn muscles and cartilage.)
Well, not this time. A liftie with a snowmobile happened by and I flagged him down. He asked it I wanted a lift from ski patrol, and then I think realized I was OB and thought better of it. I just wanted a lift to the ER. He gave me a quick lift down to the Breck Med Clinic, and I hobbled inside. He dropped me off as close as the sled would go, I thanked him and he rode off to his job. Not all bad, those lifties. The nurse at the ER door was kind of surprised when I walked in, asking "What's wrong with you?" I answered that I might have broken my leg, and several of them converged on me, not-so-nicely telling me I shouldn't have walked in at all. They brought me a wheelchair and put me into a bed pretty quickly. But they wouldn't give me anything for the pain until after they'd spent two hours poking, photographing, prodding, and running my credit card when I was finally released.
Anyway, a nice compression diagonal fracture of the fibula (the little lower leg bone), a couple of inches above the foot. I figure it would've been tons worse except for the super-beefy boots I had on. And it was Sunday, so all the liquor stores were closed. 1600mg of ibuprofen and a nice ride home from Scott, and 4-6 weeks before I head back out. Maybe I can get some good time in on my thesis programming now that I can't play.
Follow on notes 8 weeks later: Just started hobbling around without crutches after 7 weeks and it'll probably be a full 3 months before I can play anything at full speed again. I worked 7 days a week for 6 weeks to keep from going crazy, then finished up my thesis in a 8-day rush of at least 11 hours a day. It kinda sucked, sitting around the new ski house (Phany and I got stiffed by everyone else and paid for our one-bedroom apartment alone, for the entire year) while everyone else (yeah, they still showed up even though they didn't want 'in' on the place) went skiing through December and January. New Years was pretty good - Jen got a place at Vail, and I drank while everyone else skied. That night, our crazy Polish friend Mick and I hopped the wall to the closed pool and hot tub and hung out with some nice-looking college girls - who, unfortunately for us, had already met the college guys who happened to have a room on the same side of the hotel as them. I'll never forget Micky falling over the wall and into the plastic-covered second hottub, me on the outside with a broken leg, wondering how I was going to get over the wall and get him out, a l� Lethal Weapon's pool scene.
I haven't been nearly as rabid about skiing for the past couple of years, since Phany and I gave up our ski house/apartment. It's difficult to get motivated to drive two or three hours for a day of skiing without someplace to stay, knowing that we'll have to drive home that night or find a (ugh) hotel. I learned later in the 2000/1 season that I really rode well with snowboarders, and was useful in pulling them around the traverses that Vail has so many of; I skied several times with Sheri before she up and moved to NYC, and quite a lot with my good friend Scotty.
The partnership of teleing and boarding seems to be pretty decent; I don't have to worry about a beginning skier not being able to keep up or not wanting to do harder stuff, or of an advanced skier (like Phany) trying to blow me away on semi-groomers by just pointing downhill. Not that that happens much - he's always surprised that I'm right on his butt when he turns to look uphill for me. Keeping a boarder stable on a t-bar is much easier with a skier, and I have the additional mobility to help out (lots) on traverses and catwalks. The way we carve turns, particularly in glades, trees, and off-fall line slots, is a lot more similar to 'board carving than the jump turns necessitated by downhill skis and rigid boots.
I spent the 2001-2 season working on teaching my (then) girlfriend how to tele, weight the edges, bend the knees, and trust the gear. I only skied about 7 days, though, and never really got to go pound it out until my college buddy Bill showed up for a few days. I just couldn't get excited about it.
The 2002-3 season has been a nice change; still I've only gotten about 15 days, but they've all been high-power days, mostly at Vail, ripping huge bowls and great bump lines in the best snow we've had since the 96-97 season. It's not really in my blood anymore to go for 50-plus day years, but it's still a nice change from the last two. I've finally, after 25 years, gotten to see myself ski through the wonders of miniature videocamera technology (see video link on the right), and I'm happy with how I've progressed. The most recent excursions have been with a lurk, the ancient single-pole technique that predates normal ski poles. It's giving me something challenging again, and a new set of goals for improving my skiing.
Follow on notes 8 weeks later: Just started hobbling around without crutches after 7 weeks and it'll probably be a full 3 months before I can play anything at full speed again. I worked 7 days a week for 6 weeks to keep from going crazy, then finished up my thesis in a 8-day rush of at least 11 hours a day. It kinda sucked, sitting around the new ski house (Phany and I got stiffed by everyone else and paid for our one-bedroom apartment alone, for the entire year) while everyone else (yeah, they still showed up even though they didn't want 'in' on the place) went skiing through December and January. New Years was pretty good - Jen got a place at Vail, and I drank while everyone else skied. That night, our crazy Polish friend Mick and I hopped the wall to the closed pool and hot tub and hung out with some nice-looking college girls - who, unfortunately for us, had already met the college guys who happened to have a room on the same side of the hotel as them. I'll never forget Micky falling over the wall and into the plastic-covered second hottub, me on the outside with a broken leg, wondering how I was going to get over the wall and get him out, a l� Lethal Weapon's pool scene.
The partnership of teleing and boarding seems to be pretty decent; I don't have to worry about a beginning skier not being able to keep up or not wanting to do harder stuff, or of an advanced skier (like Phany) trying to blow me away on semi-groomers by just pointing downhill. Not that that happens much - he's always surprised that I'm right on his butt when he turns to look uphill for me. Keeping a boarder stable on a t-bar is much easier with a skier, and I have the additional mobility to help out (lots) on traverses and catwalks. The way we carve turns, particularly in glades, trees, and off-fall line slots, is a lot more similar to 'board carving than the jump turns necessitated by downhill skis and rigid boots.