Kicking Horse ski bumming - Page 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by spknmike 

I was there too on Sunday (the 12th). Green jacket if you remember from the line drop on Feuz. I was about the 9th or 10th person over there.

 

Saw a guy bite it hard on those cliffs from Stairway base, but he seemed to ski out of it. Probably wasn't you? Later saw an ambulance racing up the hill, was it for you on Sunday? That sure sucks man! Get well soon. :(

No, I definitely didn't ski out of it. My skis are, to my knowledge, still up on that cliff. They were gonna send a guy out on ropes (as it's effing steep as hell before the cliff) to fetch them, but they're taking their time. Which I totally get, no point having somebody get injured/dead trying to get my skis.

So in short, I didn't ski out of it :p

The ambulance I took down had to head back to KH after dropping me off at Golden hospital, that was probably it.

Guess I might as well give you guys a run-down of the injuries.

So I came out of a chute (down an unmarked line between "runs") on CPR N ridge, and finally got to see what lay before me. It was ~60-70*, with rocks jutting out and a cliff of unknown size at the end. After much deliberation, I decided I didn't want to do it, and looked at my exit options. I could boot pack my way back up the chute, but I decided not to because a) there's backing down, and there's being a pussy, and that seemed a bit too close to the latter and b) slinging your skis over your shoulder makes my balance absolute crap, and being steep, a fall would carry me all the way down. The second option was to traverse off to skiiers right to see what was over that way (I knew there was a marked run that way, but couldn't see it because I was on a small ridge). So I chose to traverse, but I didn't take into account the steepness and instability of the snow. Within 5 feet, the snow under me just gave way (not causing an avalanche, mind you), and I was totally unprepared and never thought of this possibility, so I just plain tumbled sideways.

All I remember is the world spinning way too fast to make any sense of it, and thump, thump, thump, thump, .... ...  THUMP. When I finally got a sense of the situation, I was sliding down facefirst, but slowly. I had no intention of drowning in powder, so I righted myself so my feet were downhill, and on my back. Even though I wasn't sure what hurt, I knew I was in no shape to ski down the mountain. Then I saw my right wrist about an inch thicker than usual, so that started to hurt. A fellow skiier came within a few seconds of me righting myself, and stayed until ski patrol came. They started patting me down to see what hurt, and were very cautious about my neck and back (even though it didn't hurt). After a while, my right hip started to hurt, they patted it down and didn't find any blood so it was not of immediate concern. Then they noticed that there was a tear in the left knee of my snowpants, and lifted them up and found a nice pool of blood. A rock sliced through my kneecap, and left a 4" incision on my knee (the surgeon didn't even have to do any cutting to screw my kneecap). At this time, I knew I wasn't in any shape to so much as turn around to see what I just went off, so I asked the patrollers to take my camera out of my backpack and snap a shot of what it:

http://img861.imageshack.us/i/cliff.jpg/

This is the cliff that I saw before I started traversing, you can't see the steep rock studded stuff I tumbled down prior to this. Now, this may look big and gnarly, but remember, this only did my wrist in, the rest was tumbling which I unfortunately don't have any pictures of.

The patrollers put me on the backboard, loaded me on the meat wagon for a snowy ride down (it was a pow day), and took me to the ambulance. I went to the Golden hospital, then got transferred to Cranbrook as they had a bone specialist on site (and Golden doesn't have facilities for that). They asked me what hurt, I said right wrist, left knee, right ass cheek so they X-rayed those:

So, broken wrist, shattered knee cap, and fractured pelvis. Don't ask me to show what's wrong with the pelvis, I can't see it although it did hurt for a week or so. So I want into surgery that night, got a couple screws in my kneecap, and a nice big plate on my wrist

Then I rested up in the hospital for 4 days, learned to use my crutches and all that. My dad flew out to Calgary and got a shuttle to Golden, then picked up my car to come get me and drive me home. I went to the fracture clinic and mentioned that my right lower leg still hurt (a lot of stuff hurt, and I figured it would go away). So he X-rayed that, turns out I also broke my fibula:

It was staying in the correct position to heal, and had already started to do that, so no cast was needed.

So, yeah, now it's a month later and I'm just farting around on my computer, drinking lots of milk and waiting till the doctor says i can do stuff. My second visit to the doctor is next week, and physio starts the week after. Hopefully soon I'll be able to start bending my knee, so I can drive my car and get a job and start saving for next year so I can do it all over again.

edit: if somebody knows how the darn image embedder works, I would like to make it look a bit nicer. When did [img] tags go out of style?

I found some extra video on my hard drive from the day before I ate it hard, so I edited it up.

And I also forgot to show off my gorgeous knee x-ray. It might make your knee hurt just looking at it, you've been warned

Recovering really well, thanks for asking.

I got the wire removed from my knee ~6-8 weeks ago, it only took like a week till I felt as well as I had before the surgery. Since then, it's been up and up, very few aches and pains, complete movement, under load, with no pain. I'm still going to physio, I can get some good cardio there and keep on strengthening it up. I can only really tell my left leg is any different from my right when I climb stairs really slowly (ie 45-90* leg bend, ~165# load). So even though I am perfectly functioning, and am stronger in my lower body than most people I know, it's still not quite as strong as it needs to be.

Regarding my fibula, that's been good as new since march, as has my pelvis. My wrist works well enough, definitely not as much range of motion as my left, but I stopped bothering to improve it a few months back.

So, when winter decides to come to Ontario, I'm gonna be at the local hill both days of the weekend every week, hopefully sessioning with the instructors (I'm an ex-instructor there, have friends). Then I'm doing it all over again come January. Driving out with my bro, going to hit up a bunch of resorts in the BC interior for 1.5 weeks, then he will fly back and I will either decide on one of the places we skiied was awesome, or continue being a nomad. My hit list is Kicking Horse (obviously, gotta show my bro some awesome lines), Revy, Whitewater, Red and then cat skiing at Red Mountain Cats. I would really love to go check out Powder King and Shames Mountain and the other northern hills, but that will be a solo endeavor.

Season's just about wrapped up out here, for me at least. The corn junkies will have a really good go of it this season as we have had >10m of snowfall, the most ever recorded for KH or even Whitetooth. March and even April have been just crazy snowfall-wise, something like 5 or 10 twelve+ inch days in just over a month, and almost no rain.

Here's the best video from the season, all in-bounds: