Annual Ski Trip January 20-23, 2012
Keystone and Breckenridge, Colorado
Second of two Trips

This trip we had five attendees: Tommy Trest, Jessie Patterson, Helen Keller, Mia Pham and myself.  Jessie drove up, with Helen, from Houston with our ski bikes.  Like the trip in December, we used Hero mini camcorders to record a lot of great videos, three of which were of accidents. Jessie did not ski as Jessie had injuries from our last ski trip and Helen stayed with Jessie.

On the previous trip, there was barely any snow fall for the whole State of Colorado.  On this trip there was a snow storm that lasted for several days, dumping 14 inches of snow, which made skiing a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, as noted we had skiing accidents for the first time in all of the years of skiing.

The first accident happened on the fist day when skiing at Breckenridge.  Tommy was doing spins in his snow ski blades and caught something underneath the snow which caused him to fall hard where he fell on his chest where possibly the Hero Camcorder pushed hard into his chest causing at least one cracked rib.  Tommy continued to ski that day along with the second day but by the third day it was too painful.

The second accident happened at Keystone on the next day.  At Breckenridge the day before there are a few ski runs that are marked as Black Diamonds which are more like Blues.  When riding a ski lift over a Black Diamond at Keystone, we saw that it was more like a Green run, so we took the run on our ski bikes.  Towards the end it dropped to a slope of somewhere in the vicinity up to 60 degrees which is very difficult on a ski bike because of the required turning needed.  Tommy was digging his hard soled boots deeply into the snow to stop himself for turns but I had soft sole boots which ended up being caked with ice that didn't fare so well.  About a quarter of the way down the severe slope, Tommy got off his ski bike to film me and Mia coming down.  I unfortunately was going to fast at probably 30 to 40 mph where Tommy filmed me headed into the trees off of the run where my bike was thrown around 30 yards, I ended up hitting head first on a log with my ski helmet being cracked in half and part of the helmet ended up rolling down the mountain like a bowling ball.   On the film, you can faintly hear Tommy yelling to me to jump off the ski bike to avoid the accident. This was the first year that I started wearing a ski helmet and God saved my life.  Incidentally, one of the ski pegs on my ski bike was bent around 20 degrees which testifies to the speed and impact. 

Unrelated to our group, there were three people that died this weekend: when skiing in back country areas.  One was impaled, one hit his head and another was skiing off terrain where he was covered up by avalanche.

Note: Movies were done with GoPro Hero camcorder. H1 is the first version and H2 is the new version.  There is no or little sound because we had them in water proof case to protect them.  Lastly, when you click on a Movie link, it may take a few minutes to download.

Friday, January 20th - Breckenridge
(we showed up with ski bikes but were not allowed to use them.  We returned with skis.)

Saturday, January 21st - Keystone

Sunday, January 22nd

The pain of Tommy's cracked ribs caught up to him, Mia was dead tired and I probably had a concussion so we took it easy.  Jessie and Helen took off in the morning for the long drive back, so it was just the three of us left in the huge house. We went into town and grab two movies to watch and did some shopping at the Columbia outlet mall getting some awesome deals on ski apparel. 

Monday, January 23rd.

We took the nice scenic drive around and bypassing Denver to go to Boulder where we walked the center of town's famous shopping area and arts area.