Analyzing 5 years of injuries, crashes and hit-and-runs at Colorado ski areas
The Colorado Sun spent two years assembling hard-to-get data about the number and severity of crashes at the state’s most popular resorts
Hugh Carey/The Colorado Sun
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.
Read more from Jason Blevins at ColoradoSun.com
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