BRECKENRIDGE — Silas Luckett doesn’t really remember the crash. The skiers behind him on the blue run at Breckenridge called ski patrol when they saw the 13-year-old skier veer into the trees at a high speed. When patrollers reached Silas, he was unconscious and breathing poorly.
The patrollers bundled him up in a sled behind a snowmobile and raced him down to the emergency clinic at the base of the ski area. There were nurses, technicians and two doctors waiting.
They were moving swiftly. Even before Silas arrived, Dr. Paul Leccese asked the head nurse to call an ambulance to ferry the skier to the St. Anthony Summit Hospital in Frisco, knowing that a head injury will certainly require more imaging than the Level 5 trauma clinic at the base could provide.
Leccese cut the ski jacket off Silas, something he very rarely does, but he was worried that maybe a blow to the chest was behind the boy’s struggle to breathe. Leccese had his team ready to intubate Silas because the call from ski patrol on the mountain “was really, really worrisome,” he says. The X-ray tech — one of two in the small clinic that sees as many as 100 patients a day on busy ski days — rolled in a portable X-ray machine. Robby Luckett was there, his hands trembling as he filled out paperwork while the team scrambled around his son.
Soon, Silas is talking. He’s shaking amid the commotion. EMTs switch him onto another gurney and roll him into a waiting ambulance. It’s been barely a half-hour since he arrived at the clinic.
A couple hours later at the medical center in Frisco, after more scans show no fractures or damage to internal organs, Silas is sitting up, chatting and sipping water. Emergency department Dr. Marc Doucette tells him he likely will be able to go home soon.
“I think you had them pretty scared over there,” says Doucette, a veteran of the Summit County emergency department that handles skiers transported from Level 5 trauma centers at the base of Breckenridge, Copper Mountain and Keystone, three of the busiest ski areas in the country.
“Holy cow you scared me, man,” says Robby, his hand on his boy’s shoulder. “When I finally saw him for the first time, he wasn’t conscious. It was terrifying. If he gets out of this with just a concussion, it will be a miracle.”
“I guess I have a hard head,” says Silas, drawing a laugh from his dad that resonates with relief.
The Lucketts, on the final day of a weeklong ski holiday with grandparents, are lucky. A couple weeks earlier a 14-year-old snowboarder at Keystone died after careening into trees, one of six ski resort deaths this winter in Summit County.
Silas is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the state’s ski hills posting record visitation in the past two seasons — reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 — it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with the rising number of visits. We say “appear” because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data.
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Inside the Summit County ERs that treat thousands of skiing injuries every season
At St. Anthony Summit Hospital in Frisco alone, nearly half of emergency room visits come from five nearby ski areas.
Read moreThe Colorado Sun has spent two years gathering trauma center admission data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment that detail skier and snowboarder emergency room visits in 25 Colorado ZIP codes from 2017 to 2022. We sent open records requests to five sheriffs, asking for details on 10 years of on-mountain hit-and-run investigations. The Sun analyzed ambulance trips transporting skiers and snowboarders from resorts to trauma centers. We visited two of the busiest emergency departments in the state this season — one at the base of Breckenridge, the busiest ski area in the country, and one in Frisco in Summit County, home to four ski areas that host close to 5 million visits a season.
We talked with industry officials about improved safety efforts and their challenges with reporting injury statistics. And we spoke with nearly a dozen skiers who have been involved in accidents and collisions. All the information gathered shows an increasing concern about safety on ski slopes as crowding and collisions increase.
“I’m done snowboarding”
Brendan Cunningham started snowboarding when he was 16. In early January last year the 32-year-old from Westminster was riding Peak 10 at Breckenridge when another snowboarder hit him on his blindside. Cunningham fell back and slammed his helmeted head. A ski instructor saw the collision and, after checking on Cunningham, chased the other snowboarder.
Cunningham got on his mobile phone and called for help. He was struggling to stand up. As patrollers arrived, he had a seizure. The patrollers rushed him to the slopeside emergency room and he ended up at St. Anthony Summit Hospital in Frisco.
He did not work for six weeks and struggled to shake off the concussion. A year later he’s still enduring memory loss and mood swings he suspects are related to his head injury. He’s still dealing with bills from the clinic and ambulance to the hospital.
He sent administrators at Breckenridge ski area several emails asking for the identity of the ski instructor who checked on him and said he would pursue the snowboarder.
“They said they couldn’t find the person. That’s it. I thought about filing a police report but I really didn’t see much point,” Cunningham says. “I would hope they would have an incident reporting system or something to be able to find eyewitnesses and share information with me to help me find the person who hit me. It just seems like there is not any protection or accountability in place.”
Cunningham has hung up his board.
“I’m done snowboarding. That was a career-ender for me,” he says. “Overall this has been a very emotional event. I’m thinking about maybe backcountry splitboarding, just to be able to do the activity again. I do know this: I will avoid resort skiing from now on.”
Vail Resorts, the largest ski area operator in North America with 37 resorts, including Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Keystone and Vail in Colorado, has mountain safety teams — known as Yellow Jackets — who help enforce rules and safety on the mountain and can suspend a skier’s pass, forcing them to attend safety classes before they can return to the hill. The company also has protocols for collisions that include patrollers taking care of injured skiers, contacting law enforcement and gathering witness statements and contact information, a spokeswoman said.
The company delivers whatever law enforcement requests — without the need for a subpoena — when a person has broken the law by leaving a collision without leaving their name and contact information. When an injured skier or their lawyer asks for information, the company does ask for a subpoena “to protect guest privacy,” the spokeswoman said.
“Safety is our top priority. We are incredibly proud of our committed and hard-working team members who do an incredible job assisting guests every day at our mountain resorts, as well as our significant investments in safety personnel, infrastructure, programming and guest education,” said Bill Rock, the president of Vail Resorts mountain division, in a statement. “We also appreciate our guests for their commitment to safety as it takes everyone’s support to create a safe environment on-mountain.”
“How bad do people have to be hurt to find the guy?”
MacKenzie Tyrrell was 12 when she was blasted by a man on a snowboard in November 2022 at Vail.
The Eagle River Valley local had a broken eye socket, a concussion and bruised knee and shoulder. She spent the night in the hospital in Vail before she was rushed to Children’s Hospital in Aurora. An eyewitness — an off-duty Vail Resorts employee — helped to identify the man who hit her, and her father, Clint Tyrrell, worked with an officer at the Vail Police Department to secure video of the man riding the gondola down to the base village, which is how skiers leave the ski area in the early season.
Working with police and safety people at Vail went nowhere. The eyewitness only saw the man leaving the accident site, not the actual collision “so the resort said they could not release any information about their customer,” Clint says.
“What gets me is how bad do people have to be hurt to find the guy and ask him some questions? I mean, maybe it wasn’t his fault but you certainly don’t leave a 12-year-old girl bleeding in the snow,” Clint says.
MacKenzie missed a season of volleyball. She was unable to participate in the final play at her middle school before heading to high school. She struggled to return to skiing as she healed last year.
“She had broken bones in her face, but the concussion took the longest. She missed a lot of activities and then mentally she was pretty hesitant to get back up there,” Clint says. “I think she could have quit skiing pretty easily, but she took her time and we eased her back into it.”
Many ski resorts are integrating technology — like video surveillance, radio-frequency ski passes and tracking apps — into operations to keep better watch on the slopes and improve communications with skiers.
Tracking injury numbers
Ski resorts do not release injury reports. The ski resort industry keeps a tight grasp on even national injury data. Since 1980, the National Ski Areas Association provides select researchers with injury data for peer-reviewed reports issued every 10 years by the National Ski Areas Association. The most recent 10-year review of ski injuries was published in 2014, looking at 13,145 injury reports from the 2010-11 ski season at resorts that reported 4.6 million visits.
The four 10-year reports showed a decline in skier injuries from 3.1 per 1,000 visitors in 1980-81 to 2.7 in 1990-91 to 2.6 in 2000-01 to 2.5 in 2010-11. Snowboarder injuries were 3.3 in 1990, 7.0 in 2000 and 6.1 in 2010.
For 1990-91, the nation’s ski areas reported 46.7 million skier visits, 2000-01 was 57.3 million and 2010-11 saw a then all–time high of 60.5 million visits.
(For comparison, a 2007 study of injuries among college athletes participating in 15 sports that did not include skiing showed 13.8 injuries per 1,000 athlete exposures in games — an athlete exposure is defined as one athlete participating in a game or practice — and 4 injuries per 1,000 athlete exposures for practices.)
A more recent clinical review of ski injuries was compiled in 2018 by Jasper Shealy, a retired professor from the Rochester Institute of Technology who has studied ski injuries for more than 50 years. His work shows a decline in ski injuries over the past several decades.
Shealy’s 2018 report gathered studies from 1996 to 2013 in the U.S. and Europe that looked at 64,667 skiing injuries. The research showed a shift in injuries since the 1970s, with more skiers enduring knee injuries. The 2018 report jibes with trends identified by the trauma center admission data in Colorado.
Most people injured on the slopes are male. The CDPHE trauma center admissions show 65% of resort-injured patients are male and 35% female. Shealy’s research shows women are more likely to injure their knees while men are more likely to break bones.
Most skiers and snowboarders who are injured in Colorado are between the ages of 20 and 29, followed by 30 to 39. Shealy’s research found the overall average age of injured skiers is 30.3 years.
The most common injuries in Colorado are to arms, legs and shoulders, which account for 63% of trauma center admissions from 2017-21. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment — or CDPHE — stats show 3,704 hospital admissions for fractures in those four seasons. Shealy’s research shows the most common injury is to the legs and about 14% of all injuries involve the upper extremities, led by the thumb and shoulder.
In Colorado about 12% of injuries in the CDPHE data involve the head. Shealy’s number for head injuries is 13%. A study of 753 skiing injuries at a busy resort in China showed about 14% of skiers and snowboarders suffered head injuries.
There are some disparities between Shealy’s two-continent statistics compiled in 2018 and Colorado’s injury admissions. When it comes to severe injuries, Colorado numbers are much higher.
Shealy’s research notes 2007-14 data from the U.S. National Trauma Data Bank showing 1,353 patients with severe skiing-related injuries, or about 170 per year. The U.S. ski industry averaged about 57 million visits a season in those years, so there were about three severe injuries per million skier visits in those eight seasons. The National Ski Areas Association reported 53 catastrophic injuries in 2022-23, which is higher than the 10-year average of 43 and equates to about one catastrophic injury per 1 million visits.
The difference is based on the term catastrophic, which the NSAA defined as “life-altering,” and results in paralysis, serious head injuries or the loss of a limb, and does not include medical events like on-slope heart attacks. Severe injuries in emergency room data are defined as scoring 15 or higher on the Injury Severity Score, or ISS, a standardized medical assessment. Injuries that rank 5 or higher on the ISS typically require hospitalization lasting more than a week.
The CDPHE trauma center admission data show 322 severe injuries in the four seasons, which translates to about six severe injuries per million skier visits, which is twice the national average for catastrophic injuries.
The NSAA’s once-a-decade review of injuries from 2020-21 was delayed during the pandemic and is expected to land later this year. But the association’s reports are not available to the public.
When Colorado state Sen. Jessie Danielson crafted a bill in 2021 that would have required ski areas to publish annual injury statistics, the industry blasted the plan, arguing it would be an administrative burden and confuse the skiing public. It died in committee.
“When we approached the ski areas to work on any of the details in the bill, they refused,” Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat, told The Sun in 2021. “It makes me wonder what it is that they are hiding. It seems to me that an industry that claims to have safety as a top priority would be interested in sharing the information about injuries on their mountains.”
The resort industry vehemently rebuffs the notion that ski areas do not take safety seriously.
Patricia Campbell, the then-president of Vail Resorts’ 37-resort mountain division and a 35-year veteran of the resort industry, told Colorado lawmakers considering the 2021 legislation that requiring ski resorts to publish safety reports was “not workable” and would create an “unnecessary burden, confusion and distraction.”
Requiring resorts to publish public safety plans, she said, would “trigger a massive administrative effort” that could redirect resort work from other safety measures.
“Publishing safety plans will not inform skiers about our work or create a safer ski area,” Campbell told the Colorado Senate’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in April 2021.
In 2022, marketing students at Fort Lewis College surveyed 4,320 skiers and snowboarders, most of them from Colorado, half of them experts and nearly all of them with more than 15 years of experience. The rare and large skiing injury database included insight from 2,600 skiers who reported involvement in an on-slope collision with other skiers.
Of those more than 2,600 skiers involved in a collision, 34% said they were involved in only one collision, 36% said two, 14% said three and 15% said four or more. More than 80% said the collisions did not require medical attention and 1.3% of respondents said the collisions required “legal involvement.”
When asked if their perception of reckless behavior on ski slopes has changed, 50% said it was “more of an issue” and 40% said it’s as much of an issue as it has been in the past.
The college suddenly killed the survey program in 2023, nixing the survey and removing the Slide with Respect website with its results. The professor who organized the class said he did not have the funding or bandwidth to keep the class going for a second year.
“We have a plan for how we will respond in a hit-and-run.”
Micki Amick skis with retired pals from Denver at Keystone. On Feb. 28, she was skiing in Keystone’s Outback when a snowboarder came out of the trees and ran into a man on the catwalk leading to the Wayback Express chair.
She and her friends already had a plan for what to do if one of them were hit by a person who does not stick around. The man who was hit was being cared for. Amick gave chase.
She caught up with the snowboarder, who was wearing a distinctive Florida Panthers hockey jersey at the lift.
“He knew what he had done and he felt absolutely no obligation to stop and check on the man,” Amick says.
She snapped a photo and brought it into the ski patrol headquarters at the top of the lift, wondering if maybe they would want to find the man and talk to him about the accident.
“They were completely indifferent,” she says. “I was like the weird old lady.”
Amick says the incident “was confirmation for something we all have sort of been feeling but were thinking it was just about crowds or snowboarders.”
“It made me think there’s a bigger problem here. There’s real danger on the slopes and no one seems to care about it,” she says. “I ski with mostly retired people and … there is a sense when we are out there that we are not safe. I mean we have a plan for how we will respond in a hit-and-run.”
Dharam Friedberg, a longtime nurse at the Breckenridge clinic, said the near-ubiquitous use of ski helmets has not changed the number of head injuries at the clinic, but the injuries are less debilitating.
“They have more function than if they had not had a helmet on,” she said.
Friedberg said the clinic sees more collision injuries on busy days at Breckenridge, “but I’m often surprised with as many people we have up there that we don’t have more.”
“It is definitely getting busier on the mountain, but I do not see a concurrent increase in things I would assume were related to increased volume,” she said. “Maybe that’s a direct reflection of Vail doing a better job of raising awareness and improving signage and getting people to be safer.”
“It’s absolutely terrifying what is happening at some of these ski areas.”
Ura Kim was skiing with her husband and friends at Breckenridge in early January 2019 when she was struck by a young skier and shoved into a tree. Stephen Kim saw the out-of-control skier hit his wife and chased him down.
“He was going too fast. He had no business skiing the terrain over there. If my wife had not been there, he would have hit the tree,” Stephen says. “I stopped the kid and then I hear our friends say ‘Steve, you need to get back here, she’s not breathing.’”
When Stephen turned and raced back to his wife he heard a woman ask him why he was yelling at her son. When he looked back, the boy was gone.
The Kims called Jim Chalat, a Denver attorney who has represented injured skiers for decades. Chalat filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ura Kim, against a yet-to-be-named skier dubbed John Doe.
The lawsuit was enough to get a judge to sign a subpoena for the ski area’s pass-scanning data. Stephen is a software and data engineer who has worked with statistics for more than 30 years. He took the pages of screen grabs of data from Breckenridge — the resort did not provide him a data sheet, only PDFs of screen grabs — showing skiers who had ridden the Peak 6 chairlift that day. (The Kim’s had reports from two eyewitnesses as well.)
He copied the information into a database and built software to search for a young skier and a parent who fit his profile and rode the chairlift shortly after his wife was hit. He narrowed it down to a 12-year-old boy and his parents, and Stephen hired a private investigator who went to a door and knocked. Stephen says the woman who answered the door replied to the investigator’s question about skiing that day at Breckenridge, saying, “My son did not hit that woman.”
The Kims settled with the family’s insurance company. After a couple years of recovery from a broken jaw and broken wrist, Ura Kim has already skied 82 days this winter. She and her husband no longer ski at Breckenridge.
When he called the Summit County Sheriff’s Office to file a report, he says a deputy told him “we have never caught a hit-and-run person.”
“Something has to change,” Stephen says. “It’s absolutely terrifying what is happening at some of these ski areas.”
Earlier this year the Summit County Sheriff’s Office did identify a snow biker involved in a hit-and-run that injured two skiers at Keystone. The 50-year-old man was charged with leaving the scene of a collision six days after he struck a man and his daughter, leaving them seriously injured.
Chalat says his personal injury law firm — Chalat Hatten and Banker — gets hundreds of calls a year from injured skiers.
Lately, he says, “we are seeing a significant increase in hit-and-run.”
“I find it really disturbing because the sheriff’s departments in ski counties either do not have the resources or they do not have the interest in locating these hit-and-run perpetrators,” Chalat says.
Police investigations of hit-and-runs
A survey of police departments that investigate hit-and-runs at ski areas shows they very rarely result in criminal charges. If there is an investigation, most are classified as unresolved.
Fraser/Winter Park Police Department officers have investigated five hit-and-run accidents since 2013 and they were unable to identify any skiers who fled the scene of a collision.
The Routt County Sheriff’s Office investigated 75 cases involving skiers colliding with other skiers at the Steamboat ski area between 2013 and 2023. The busiest season was 2022-23, when sheriff’s investigators fielded 13 reports involving skier-versus-skier collisions, including three hit-and-runs. Since 2013, 16 of the 75 collision reports filed with the Routt County sheriff have involved hit-and-runs at Steamboat ski area.
In Summit County, with its four ski areas hosting around 5 million skier visits every winter, sheriff’s deputies have logged 18 cases since 2013 involving a skier leaving the scene of an accident. Five of those cases were at Breckenridge, two were at Copper Mountain and 10 were at Keystone. Police with the town of Breckenridge fielded only three reports from skiers involved in collisions in the 2022-23 season — and zero for the previous nine seasons — and none of the three resulted in charges.
Eagle County Sheriff’s Office deputies have investigated 27 hit-and-run cases since 2016, 20 from Vail ski area and seven from Beaver Creek. In 19 of those cases, there were no charges filed. But in six cases in 2017 and 2020 charges were filed, but the Eagle County district attorney declined to prosecute or the case was dismissed. Two cases — in 2019 and 2022 — resulted in a deferred sentence and one skier entering a pretrial diversion program.
Jaime FitzSimons, the Summit County sheriff since 2016, has four deputies who actively work at the county’s ski areas, often skiing in uniform. They meet with ski patrol directors at all four Summit County ski areas to make sure everyone is on the same page for differentiating between an accident and a crime. When ski patrol reports that an incident — either an injury or a death — was not an accident, the deputies investigate.
“We really do take a lot of pride in trying to keep everybody safe not only in the community but also on the mountain,” FitzSimons say
Calls to his office are not necessarily climbing, he says, “even though there are definitely a lot more people on the mountains.”
He says there are “just so many challenges” to investigating on-mountain collisions. His team will often put out news releases asking for eyewitnesses to hit-and-runs or deaths with unknown causes. On each release, FitzSimons always urges skiers to know the Skier Responsibility Code, which requires skiers involved in an accident to stop and make sure everyone is OK. Fleeing an accident without leaving your name and contact information is a violation of Colorado criminal law.
“It’s almost like a hit-and-run crash in a vehicle,” FitzSimons says. “It’s not a crime until you run. You are turning a simple civil accident into a crime if you run. It’s always better to stick around.”
Renewed industry focus on safety
The NSAA, Ski California, the High Fives Foundation and the Snow Angel Foundation have launched safety campaigns in recent years. The NSAA’s Ride Another Day effort, which launched in 2017, uses videos, posters and other media to help resorts increase awareness around safety. The High Fives Foundation’s videos urge skiers to be more aware of their surroundings and plan ahead for blind spots and crowded areas. The Ride Another Day effort is spearheaded by Chauncy and Kelli Johnson.
The Johnsons were skiing with their daughter at a small hill outside Casper, Wyoming, on Christmas Eve 2010 when a snowboarder going 50 mph collided with Kelli and 5-year-old Elise. Both Elise and the snowboarder were killed.
The Johnsons’ Snow Angel Foundation has partnered with the NSAA to reach more skiers and raise awareness around safety. The Johnsons travel the country speaking with ski area employees, race teams and schools about the day their lives were changed by a split-second collision.
Adrienne Saia Isaac, the spokeswoman for the Lakewood-based NSAA, says the Ride Another Day and Snow Angel Foundation campaigns “are game-changers when it comes to understanding how collisions affect not just you but those around you.”
“Look, no one sits back and says, ‘Let’s cut some corners and make our operation less safe.’ And we don’t want to see folks get hurt. There are risks and rewards to outdoor recreation,” Saia Isaac said. “Ski area staff can mitigate risk of injury but we can’t eliminate it. Your seatbelt can only do so much when the guy in the car next to you is speeding and driving like a jackass. We could all stand to be more aware of the people around us and let them have a day worth repeating, too.”