I was on a 3 day ski trip to Lutsen, MN with a bunch of co-workers and friends.  On the 2^nd ski day of the trip, my boss broke his wrist on the terrain park when he launched off a very icy angled jump (the last feature in the park), on what would have been one of our last runs of the day anyway.  He got a ride down on a snowmobile and we finished out our ski day, which mostly consisted of working our way all the way back across Moose Mountain toward the main Chalet area.  We got beers and watched the surprisingly heavy snowfall and waited ‘til he came back from emergency in a brace.  His x-rays showed that he at least had a clean break.

On the last ski day only Chuck and I decided to go skiing.  Everyone else was skied out or (possibly) hung over.  We were interested in seeing how much snow had accumulated overnight in some of the trees!  We worked our way over to the terrain park on Moose Mountain (again) and started doing laps.  We’d start out on the run; Chuck was taking the big table-tops and I was either taking them (much slower) or videoing him going over.  Then we’d dodge into a tree run (coyote) to skiers left.  It was fairly open in most places, big hard icy moguls under about 6” of nice new snow.  It was just enough to make it fun.  We were hitting a few natural features, including a fallen tree that made a small drop-off jump.

Well, on about our 6^th lap through there I did something wrong.  Chuck was videotaping me as I skied the top 1/3 of it.  When I got to the little drop off jump I recall thinking to myself “I should go around that, I don’t even like it that much” but I hit it anyway.  Somehow, when I landed my left knee hyper-extended backwards; I think I must have hit the back side of a mogul on landing.  I was still moving down the hill thinking “OH MY GOD MY KNEE IS GOING BACKWARDS”. At the same time I also felt an ominous ‘pop’ and a crunchy/excruciating pain.  As I fell my knee ‘popped’ back in but my bindings still didn’t release and I ended up in a very awkward position on the ground, skis pointed uphill.

Chuck was recording the whole time, but as I got a ways past him he started boarding down behind me and didn’t have the camera on me for the actual accident.  The audio is intact though and you can hear me cursing and yelling for help.  He had his music turned up loud and didn’t realize for several seconds that I was hurt…he was razzing me when he suddenly realized something wasn’t right.  Then he stuffed the camera in his pocket and rushed in to help me out of my skis.

The pain was awful but it was also short lived.  After 2 minutes it was clearly abating…After 3 minutes I carefully changed positions.  At about 5 minutes I started to kid myself that maybe I was OK…I gingerly stood up using poles and left leg, then tried to apply a bit of weight to my hurt knee, BAD IDEA…OUCH!  Instantly sick to my stomach and thought it was going to hyper-extend again.  That’s when I knew my ski day (if not season) was at an end.  Chuck went down and got two Ski patrols to come.  They had to leave the snowmobile and sled out on the main run and bush-whack to me in the trees.  They checked me out, splinted the bad leg, got me into one ski and one on each side, post-holing the whole way, slid me out to the main run.  Then they strapped me in to the sled, Chuck hopped on the back of the snowmobile and the ski patrol drove us up to the patrol hut.  I was glad to have my helmet and goggles on; the snowmobile kicked up quite a bit of snow on the ride.  I was also very glad that there wasn’t too much pain…it was quite a rough ride.  My only regret from that part of this experience is that I didn’t take a video of my point-of-view riding on the sled…

By the time we got there my knee looked like a big old grapefruit.  They replaced the splint with a different, cardboard, disposable one that was mostly packaging tape.  They got me out of my ski boots and Chuck took me to the Grand Marais Hospital emergency room.  At the hospital they took X-rays which they though didn’t show breaks…more on that later.  The exam they did led them to believe that I had torn or disrupted some ligament or tendon in my knee, so they put me in a leg immobilizer and sent me off with a Vicodin prescription, which we filled at the pharmacy down the street.

We spent one more night in our condo, during which I learned that my body really doesn’t want me to mix Vicodin and beer (yes just like the label says not to do).  It kept me from getting much sleep at all.  Next morning we made the trek back to Minneapolis.

In my next post I’ll describe the wait to find out how bad my injury was…

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Posted by Greg on May 27th, 2011 :: Filed under ACL Files
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