Sacramento, Calif. – In one week, most California ski resorts will shut down, marking the end of the deadliest ski and snowboard season on California slopes in recent memory.
In normal years, ski-association groups say, four to 12 people die, mostly in accidents. This season, 17 people have lost their lives in California.
Observers disagree whether the spike in deaths is a coincidence, the result of erratic weather or the culmination of years of rising danger on the slopes.
“It’s hard to look at it this soon after all the events that have taken place and say there’s a trend,” said Dick Penniman, a Truckee- based ski-accident investigator. “But it certainly is raising awareness that something’s going on, and it’s high time that’s happening.”
The deaths have been making headlines since mid-March, by which time 10 people had died on California slopes. Among them were a teenage snowboarder who fell 15 feet from a bridge into a shallow creek, another man who fell on a slope and fractured his spine and another who hit a tree.
Since then, seven more skiers or snowboarders have died. A skier and a snowboarder each hit trees and died at the Northstar-at-Tahoe resort in the last week of March. In the first week of April, two other skiers lost control and ran into trees on the Nevada slopes of the Heavenly Ski Resort (which straddles the California border).
Also that week, three ski patrollers at Mammoth Mountain in the eastern Sierra died after they fell into a volcanic vent and succumbed to toxic gases.
About 8 million visits have been logged at ski resorts in California this season, while 56.9 million visits and 45 deaths have been tallied nationwide, according to state and national ski associations.
Penniman said radical changes in the design and use of resorts during the past decade have created an environment ripe for disaster. He said terrain parks with ramps and rails cropped up with little attention to engineering or safety; snowboarders have increasingly populated slopes, riding sideways down mountains with a significant blind spot; and ski technology has led to higher speeds.
