It’s been a deadly winter on California’s slopes, but the state has no idea how bad it really is.
In February alone, a 21-year-old skier was found dead on a black diamond at Northstar California. Witnesses reported another skier trailed blood down a Mammoth Mountain run. A fatal collision at Northstar followed yet another death within less than two weeks — and that's before a catastrophic avalanche killed nine backcountry skiers near Lake Tahoe.
“There’s been no indication that there are more injuries this year than previous years — just more media coverage around serious ones,” said John Rice, president of Ski California, an industry association for ski areas in California and Nevada.
He may be right. The problem is that right now, nobody can tell.
California does not monitor ski injuries or deaths at resorts. It does not have a threshold for injuries on the slopes that triggers investigations or intervention. And legislative efforts to require ski accident reporting have met failure after failure.
CalMatters contacted more than two dozen ski resorts listed by Ski California or the U.S. Forest Service as operating in the state. Not one responded with accident, injury or fatality data.
CalMatters also filed a public records request to the U.S. Forest Service seeking five years of incident reports from at least 24 resorts the agency said operate on land it manages. A public records specialist said that a response could take at least six months to process, in part because resorts must first review the records to flag anything they consider proprietary.
Without these statistics, ski safety experts, personal injury lawyers and snow scientists couldn't tell CalMatters whether it's been a particularly dangerous year. Whether weather, climate change, terrain or visitor counts are increasing or decreasing risk. Skiers and snowboarders can't determine for themselves the relative safety of the slopes they're paying to visit.
The California Department of Public Health calls injury data “the foundation for action.”
An unclear bargain
Twenty years ago, Dan Gregorie flew from South Carolina, where he was living at the time, to California, where he’d planned to ski with his 24-year-old daughter Jessica. As he stepped off the plane, he learned she’d had an accident.
Carrying her snowboard across a steep traverse from one lift to another slope at Alpine Meadows ski resort near Lake Tahoe, Jessica slipped and slid down an icy slope — plummeting off a cliff, with no fences or guardrails to stop her. Her boyfriend later told Gregorie she slid backwards on her belly, looking up at him, the whole time.
Jessica Gregorie was an animal lover who’d started her own dog care business in San Francisco. An athlete who’d biked across the country from Maine to the tip of Washington state to raise money for a women’s shelter. She was her parents’ only child.
First, Dan and his wife Margaret lost Jessica. Then, they lost the lawsuit Gregorie had hoped would stop future accidents. The waiver she’d signed dealt a major blow to their case. The gist of the ruling: Jessica had accepted the risks.
Gregorie disagreed. Without transparency about accident rates on the slopes, how could anyone truly know what bargain they were making?
“They have a moral obligation to fully inform people as to what the risks are that they're taking,” Gregorie said. “Most people that go skiing on a weekend expect to come home at the end.”
Gregorie, a now-retired physician who spent his career in health care management, was shocked by the lack of detailed safety information.
He founded the SnowSport Safety Foundation in 2008. Personally hiring a lobbyist, he spent over a decade pushing for legislation in California to require that ski resorts make their safety plans and accident statistics public. He also lobbied in Colorado and Maine.
“Most of it came out of my pocket. But at that point, I’d lost my daughter, and my wife,” said Gregorie. Margaret Gregorie died after a battle with ovarian cancer, two years after Jessica’s accident. “I was more than willing to spend it.”
His goal, he said, wasn’t more regulation; it was more transparency.
It almost worked.
Unknown accidents
Ski resorts in California operate under a patchwork of oversight that leaves accidents on the slopes largely opaque.
California’s workplace safety agency, Cal/OSHA, oversees ski lifts via its Amusement Ride and Tramway Unit and requires incident reports for any injuries requiring more than first aid.
The slopes are another matter.
The ski resorts operating with permits on national forest system land are required to notify the U.S. Forest Service “as soon as practicable” after fatal incidents, catastrophic injuries, search and rescue operations, problems with ski lifts and anything with the potential for serious harm, such as avalanches.
If it’s serious enough, the agency may conduct its own review.
But these accident reports are difficult to access and slow to obtain. And not all resorts operate in national forests — Northstar California Resort, for example, is largely on private land.
In court, resorts are further shielded. Ravn Whitington, lead litigation partner at Porter Simon Sierra Injury Lawyers, said that waivers and decades of court decisions have established that skiing and snowboarding come with inherent risks.
But case law, he says, hasn’t caught up to the changing conditions of the sports — something he notices when he skis with his young daughter. “People are flying by, going through slow zones, skiing out of control,” he said. “I'm skiing with a 10 foot gap between my daughter and myself, and we have people shooting that gap.”
Ski safety expert Larry Heywood, who worked for the ski industry for decades and now serves as an expert witness in lawsuits, sees resorts differently.
“They’re conscientious, and they don’t want people to get hurt,” Heywood said. “It’s not good for the business. All that press just in the last week or so with these Heavenly and Northstar deaths — there’s people who decide not to go skiing because of that, right?”
‘Unnecessary burden’
Gregorie’s lobbying efforts paid off in 2010: California lawmakers passed a bill authored by then-Assemblymember Dave Jones requiring ski resorts to prepare publicly available safety plans and establish their own policies around signage and barriers for certain collision hazards.
It also called for releasing monthly reports upon request of any skiing, snowboarding or sledding fatalities — including the cause and the location of the accident, the age of the person involved, and where medical care was provided.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who broke his femur in a skiing accident the same year Jessica Gregorie died, vetoed it — saying the requirements duplicated those of the U.S. Forest Service and wouldn’t necessarily increase safety.
He said at the time that the bill “may place an unnecessary burden on resorts.” Last winter the ski and snowboard industry in California and Nevada added $1.8 billion to state GDP and $100 million to state and local tax revenue, according to Ski California.
The next year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed an almost identical measure, calling it “yet another exercise of the State's regulatory power for objectives that, in the ordinary course, are handled by private business or the people themselves.”
Another two-year effort to mandate that ski resorts must regularly send monthly accident reports for both serious injuries and deaths to the California Department of Public Health died in the Legislature. It never even made it to Brown’s desk.
Ski California says it has opposed legislation to increase reporting. “That legislation attempted to force untenable requirements on ski areas and didn’t find support from the industry, local legislators, or California Governors,” said Jess Weaver, spokesperson for the industry group.
Weaver blamed California’s legislative efforts on “a single individual who lacked knowledge about how ski areas operate,” and said that the industry’s present position is unchanged.
Gov. Brown declined to comment via a spokesperson, and a representative for Schwarzenegger did not respond to CalMatters' inquiry.
Jones, who later served as the state’s insurance commissioner, called the vetoes unfortunate.
“It’s disappointing that 16 years have gone by, and it continues to be the case that safety plans and reporting of fatalities or injuries is not required,” Jones said. “I don’t think sticking our head into the sand makes the risk or problem go away.”
‘Situational awareness’
Gregorie doesn’t know if his daughter Jessica would have checked Alpine Meadows’ safety statistics, had they been public.
“She was a 24-year-old woman, a young woman at that point in time. I'm not sure she would have definitively looked at it,” Gregorie said. “But I'm absolutely sure that parents who are taking their families skiing, particularly going skiing for the first time, would be doing that.”
He and other supporters of transparency aren’t necessarily arguing that, with more information, individual skiers would change their behavior. They're arguing that information can shape industries and drive competition around safety.
“Making the information public would allow consumer advocacy organizations to see what’s going on and to suggest appropriate changes, even if individuals themselves don’t change their behavior,” Jones said.
Ski California’s Weaver said that numbers without context could easily be misinterpreted. So many factors are involved in accidents, from equipment to individual behavior.
“Ski areas operate in very different environments — with varying terrain, weather conditions, visitation levels, and skier ability — so raw totals don’t accurately reflect safety performance,” Weaver said. “Furthermore, confidentiality and privacy laws prohibit us from disclosing details of any injuries reported or handled by ski patrol or other resort employees.”
The industry does collect nationwide totals. Last winter, 63 people suffered catastrophic injuries such as broken necks or backs at ski resorts, and 50 people died, according to the National Ski Areas Association’s report.
Analyses of a comprehensive state injury database by Gregorie and, later, the Los Angeles Times two years ago, suggests that the industry statistics miss thousands of serious accidents requiring emergency room visits or hospitalization.
Scientists agree that the absence of information is a problem. Without more detailed data, it’s nearly impossible to study how safety risks may change on crowded slopes or as the climate warms.
“The data is probably the biggest linchpin in really being able to say anything about it,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an earth systems scientist at Colorado State University.
An avid skier who grew up skiing around Tahoe – where he had his own share of accidents – Hatchett said such data wouldn’t deter him from one resort or another.
“You’re going to ski at the places that have the terrain, and the snow, and the ski culture and the experience that you’re looking for,” said Hatchett. But knowing where and when more injuries are occurring would fine-tune his decisionmaking. “It might change my situational awareness.”
Twenty years after his daughter’s death, Gregorie has given up on legislation. His SnowSport Safety Foundation is no longer active.
But Gregorie says he hasn’t given up the fight for transparency.
“When I talk people tell me they're going skiing, I say to them, ‘Do you know this? Do you know what you're going into?’”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
