Snow sports: Tragedy unfortunately can occur on slopes anytime, anywhere
The death of John Lapato in a skiing accident at Wachusett Mountain was heartbreaking, and I and other skiers and snowboarders feel for his family and friends.
But the awful accident the morning of March 20 that killed the 67-year-old retired Raytheon engineer from Shrewsbury, an experienced skier, was almost certainly not preventable.
That's the reality in snow sports.
Skiing and riding offer numerous physical and mental health and fitness benefits that far outweigh the miniscule chances of dying or being catastrophically injured on the slopes.
And yet skiing and snowboarding also carry risk, risk that participants assume when they buy a lift pass or otherwise agree to assume that liability when they use a commercial ski area's slopes.
An average of about 40 people die each year at U.S. ski areas (57 during the 2021-22 season), at the rate of about .93 per 1 million annual skier visits in the 2021-22 season, according to the National Ski Area Association. The chances of dying on the slopes are miniscule.
In any event, most victims are males under age 30, and the accidents occur largely on intermediate-rated, or blue square, trails.
Terrible accident
"It's a tragedy," said Chris Brown, a professor of mechanical and materials engineering at WPI who teaches a course on skiing technology and has published frequently about skiing safety, performance and equipment. "It's a very unusual occurrence."
The accident that led to Lapato's death did not occur on a blue square trail, but rather on an expert-rated, or black diamond, run called Oxbow Chute.
I've skied Wachusett's Oxbow Chute many times, including two days after the incident. And I concede I've skied it, as have many of my skiing friends, at pretty high speeds that would likely have caused serious injury or death had I skied off the trail and hit a tree, as Lapato did after losing control.
I feel I have always been in control, but you don't know what can happen.
Oxbow Chute, renamed from Salamander Cutoff in 2014, is rated as a black diamond, but it isn't steep.
The trail, 741 feet long and almost perfectly straight, is of moderate pitch.
However, what makes this run an expert one is its narrowness. It's only about 15 feet wide, maybe 20, and it's lined with dense rows of trees on either side close to the trail's edges.
That's largely what makes it fun, and also what mandates that you pay close attention to how you're riding so as to stay away from those potentially lethal trees.
It may have been icy that Monday morning at about 9:30, as is often the case in spring skiing, when the snow surface often freezes overnight before warming and softening by mid-morning.
But icy conditions are often the norm in New England skiing, and experienced skiers and riders know how to deal with it. On the other hand, ice patches can sometimes throw you off balance and lead to a fall.
As for helmets, they don’t help protect your head from a tree much past the speed of 14 miles per hour. By the accounts I've heard, Lapato was skiing with a helmet, like the vast majority of skiers and riders these days.
We'll have to wait for those details because the investigative report on the incident is not complete yet and "is not available for release," according to Lindsay Corcoran, director of communications for Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early Jr.
So I talked with Brown to illuminate some of these issues.
Risks exist
"Skiing has inherent dangers. And you're going fast enough most of the time you're skiing that so that if you hit a fixed object … you could have more than one fatal injury, to the thorax or to the head," said Brown, a former All-American NCAA Division 1 ski racer and coach at the University of Vermont.
"Of course, the width of a trail, the wider it is, the harder it is going to be to find a tree to run in to," he added. "But trees on the sides of the trail are natural in the East in particular because we cut a trail through the trees."
What happened to Lapato could happen to any skier or rider.
"Occasional loss of control is part of the sport. People fall frequently in skiing. I don't think anybody skis without ever falling," Brown said. "And when you fall, where are you going to go? When you lose control you can end up catching and shooting across the trail."
Meanwhile, Wachusett and Pats Peak in Henniker, New Hampshire — where a 15-year-old skier from Boston was killed March 25 in a skiing accident — both are independently owned, professionally managed, safety conscious and financially successful ski areas.
They are also both quite busy ski areas, day and night with night skiing — seven days a week. They draw a lot of skier traffic, though it was not busy the morning of the Wachusett incident.
"There are so many good things at Wachusett. It's a great asset for us, and it's nice to have it so close," Brown said, expressing condolences to Lapato's family and friends.
"It should make us think. You can do everything right and still have something like this happen," he said.
A Vermont ski house
As it is the end of the season for this column, I'd like to thank Janice and Rich Helle of Princeton, my frequent hosts at their ski house in West Dover, Vermont, for their hospitality this season and over the years.
Their house has easy access to Mount Snow, Stratton, Bromley and Magic Mountain — the big Alpine ski magnets of southern Vermont — as well as to several backcountry zones in the region. It's also got great views of Mount Snow and the ski trails on Haystack Mountain, now run by the private Hermitage Club.
Remembering my late brother
I also want to note that this is the first ski season in 55 or so years that I have not skied with or talked and laughed a lot about skiing and the ski industry with my younger brother, Adam, who died at 61 of a heart attack on April 4, 2022, after shoveling snow in the parking lot at the Crystal Mountain ski area in Washington.
I skied with Adam a lot in Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey — yes, New Jersey has good skiing — New York, Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Canada and in Europe.
Adam had been vice president of business development, sales and marketing at Crystal, the iconic Pacific Northwest resort. In other notable stints in the ski business, he was chief marketing officer at Jackson Hole in Wyoming, and marketing director at Vail Mountain in Colorado.
He was a dynamic figure who influenced many people in the ski industry. So many loved him, and some tangled with him in this competitive and sometimes insular business. He could be a tough negotiator.
I miss him dearly. I also miss interviewing him. In fact, I interviewed him and wrote about Adam for this column less than two months before he died.
He was a witty commentator and authoritative source on the ski scene, for this column and other media outlets.
Deerfield Valley Ridge Trail
With sparse snow cover November through mid-February, I hadn't had a chance to ski the Ridge Trail, one of my favorite backcountry routes in southern Vermont.
That is, until I hit this quite beautiful rolling and arduous cross-ridge trail last Saturday in the company of two experienced alpine touring skiers, Kris Helle of Westminster and John Macaluso of Clifton, New Jersey, who was on telemark gear.
At about five miles, the track runs from the summit of Haystack Mountain in Wilmington to near the summit of Mount Snow in neighboring Dover, where it empties onto the resort's Big Dipper run.
Conditions, shall we say, were firm. Or as Macaluso, recently returned from a ski mountaineering training week in the alps at Chamonix, France, put it, "stiff."
As in the snow, which had been wind and cold blasted in weird directions and was mostly hard and unforgiving.
Meanwhile, it snowed steadily and the wind howled. And with temperatures in the 20s (colder with wind chill), it felt more like "Marchuary" than mid-March and its promise of sunny spring skiing.
Pretty brutal, but so rewarding when we reached the endpoint, skied down to the main Mount Snow base area and relaxed with cocktails while a reggae party band jammed and the dedicated Mount Snow regulars reveled despite being bombarded by now icy rain.
See you in the lift line next fall.
—Contact Shaun Sutner by e_mail at s_sutner@yahoo.com.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Snow sports: Tragedy unfortunately can occur on slopes anytime, anywhere
