Skier hopes helmet will save others, too

An expert skier with 44 years of experience, George Ackley really didn't think he needed to wear a helmet when he hit the slopes. But he wanted to set a good example for his children, so he bought one anyway.

On Thanksgiving Day at Crystal Mountain, the shiny gray brain-bucket very likely saved his life.

As he and a friend tried to ski out of a steep chute, Ackley hit a rock. His skis popped off and he launched like a missile — headfirst into another rock.

"I heard this horrible crunching sound," recalled Ackley, 50.

Today, Ackley is walking and talking, healing from surgery that patched up two crushed vertebrae. The rock punched a deep, 3-by-3-inch hole into his helmet — instead of into his head.

"There is no doubt that Mr. Ackley would have suffered a severe, even life-threatening injury without that helmet," said Dr. Jacob Young, a neurosurgeon at Bellevue's Overlake Hospital Medical Center who helped treat Ackley.

Young hopes Ackley's story shows the value of helmets in accidents, which can happen to anyone — even expert skiers. For the last several years, medical researchers have become ever more convinced that widespread helmet use would significantly reduce the risks of head injury to snowboarders and alpine skiers.

And finally, skiers and snowboarders are starting to catch on.

"I think helmets will continue to become more and more the norm," says Paul Baugher, director of Crystal Mountain's Ski Patrol. "The young athletes, the people who sort of set the style for coolness, most of them wear helmets."

"Look at his helmet!"

Ackley, a crane-maintenance electrician from Bellevue, didn't know anything about the statistics at the time of his accident, which he recalls in slow-motion detail.

He remembers being in the air, then coming to rest sitting up in the snow. Everything hurt and it was hard to breathe, but he was relieved to find he could wiggle his fingers and toes.

Because his helmet was stuffed with snow, nobody realized at first how hard he'd hit.

"Everything got really quiet," he recalled. "Then somebody said, 'Oh my God! Look at his helmet!' "

Ackley was taken down the mountain on a backboard, a neck collar firmly in place. He eventually underwent surgery for his two crushed vertebrae, now held together with eight screws and two titanium rods.

"As it was, the force was transferred largely to the helmet, and partially to the spine, which fractured," Young said. "It's far preferable to have a spinal injury than the kind of head injury he would have had."

Relatively rare injury

Compared with some other active sports, fatalities and serious head or paralyzing injuries are relatively rare in skiing or snowboarding. In the past decade, there have been an average of about 38 fatalities and 42 serious injuries a year, according to a national trade association of ski areas.

Among skiers and snowboarders in Norway, helmets reduced head injuries by 60 percent, according to research published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Those findings were echoed by a study of about 15,000 skiers in Washington and California done by the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center in Seattle.

At Crystal Mountain, Baugher warns that ski helmets — like motorcycle helmets — can't protect against "big trauma."

"You ski fast and you have a loss of control and impact with an object ... a helmet isn't designed to take those types of impacts," Baugher said.

"But for smaller-force traumas, they're very effective."

Baugher estimates that 30 percent of adults on the slopes are now wearing helmets, on par with national reports, which say helmet use has been increasing by about 5 percent per year.

Many kids wear them because their parents insist, Baugher said. Nowadays, it's mostly the older skiers, the ones who grew up with wool hats, who aren't hip to helmets, he said.

"I just fell in love"

As for Ackley, he says he didn't realize how warm and comfortable modern helmets were until he started wearing one. "I just fell in love with my helmet," he says.

Now, his beloved helmet is dented and ruined — for skiing, that is. As a teaching tool, it's become a coveted item.

A teacher at the school where Ackley's wife works said she would like to use it to talk to students about head injuries, he said.

Young has e-mailed photos of it to colleagues and vows to buy his own helmet before skiing again. And ski patrollers at Crystal said they'd like to display it.

Ackley himself figures he's "sold" at least a couple dozen helmets: The sight of the crushed helmet has convinced nearly every skier who has seen it to get one.

Ackley won't be skiing anytime soon, with or without a helmet. For the next several months, his only sporting activity will be "healing."

"This isn't a 'get up and walk away' story," he says. "It's an 'I'm going to be able to get up and go back to work someday' story."

Carol M. Ostrom: 206-464-2249