To describe skiers as a resilient lot wouldn’t be wrong, just woefully insufficient.
Skiers are determined to ski no matter how many battles with gravity they have lost. Many have been brutally mauled, patched back together and hustled back into the fray while their most recent wounds are still healing.
Take a good look at the x-ray decorating this page. Supplementing the efforts of what was once a normal human spinal column is a spiral staircase of what appear to be 4-inch wood screws. As repairs go, it’s not what one would consider subtle or sophisticated.
It belongs, of course, to a lifelong skier, one who until recently still suited up and sallied forth, not just to ski, but to teach skiing to the general public. This level of determination derives from a place beyond obsession, somewhere in the neighborhood of insanity.
By the way, this isn’t the only hardware that’s been welded to skeletal remains in this skier’s mortal coil. There’s a nifty metal plate anchoring the left wrist, as well. Based on the testimony I’ve received from Realskiers’ membership, any skier past the age of 50 who has had one traumatic skiing injury has most likely had several. None that I know of has ever even considered leaving the sport simply due to a concatenation of injuries.
Among the miracles of modern medicine that have made it possible for skiers to carry on are the improvements made in the field of joint replacement. It’s become a standard element in the brief autobiographies that serve as necessary prelude to any discussion about ski selection. For example, “I ski mostly in the East but take at least one trip to a western resort every winter, like to ski fast in all conditions, stand 6”1”, weigh 190 pounds, am reasonably fit and have had 3 joints replaced: two knees and a shoulder.”
The details of joint replacement are Civil-War era gruesome, but the results are usually brilliant, as in skiing without pain for the first time in decades. If there is a lesson about the advisability of joint replacement to be extracted from my correspondence, it is to stop dithering and do it.
Believe it or not, the following snapshots of injury (and recovery) are typical. The first vignette comes from an industry insider whose back “went completely south end of last winter…couldn’t walk more than 20 feet without keeling over, always hunched over, shuffling everywhere in agony. I really related to not being able to lay still in an MRI…my MRI images were shit because I just couldn’t do it even on heavy pain and muscle relaxer meds. One of the most miserable experiences in my plentiful health history.”
The fix for all this skeletal havoc was a “triple level fusion (L5-L3…probably also should have been S1, but didn’t for now), 4 discectomies and 5 laminectomies all in 1 shot.” The accumulated damage wasn’t due to “any one big incident that I recall, just years of being an idiot. I guess racing motorcycles, snowmobiling and skiing finally took its toll… Still recovering 5 months later, but I’ll be back on snow for the first time next week for some product testing.” You just can’t keep a good man down.
Another Realskiers correspondent who confessed to three spinal fusions hastened to note that these were “in addition to 5 shoulder surgeries along with 2 joint replacements and last year’s ACL replacement.” It took another Realskiers subscriber seventy years to log this litany of woe:
four knee surgeries prior to two total knee replacements, a broken neck (C7), herniated disc (L4-L5), and a separated shoulder repair, but otherwise fine.” I love the “otherwise fine,” as though all the surgeries were minor inconveniences.
As I look back on my own history of skeletal re-assembly, I consider myself lucky to have escaped with an ACL reconstruction, four laminectomies, two epidurals on C2/C3 and the lumbar fusion (L3 – L5) that I’m still nursing (PT is probably 6 weeks away). That may sound like a lot of time in the repair shop, but considering where and how I have chosen to ski over the past seven decades, I got off light.
Here’s the thing about skiing: once you experience the exhilaration and joy that skiing makes possible, you will do anything in your power to keep doing it. If all skiing had going for it was a high rate of traumatic injury, we wouldn’t be any better at recruiting fresh blood than the Amish. But properly practiced, skiing is as much about spiritual nourishment as it is technical proficiency. Skiing offers a portal to another side of ourselves, a chance to disappear into the moment, to be one with the mountain and our movements. This is why we must keep coming back. This is why we ski.
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The Making of a Skier, Part IX: The ASTM, Carl Ettlinger and I
One of the many hats I wore as North American binding product manager for Salomon in the early 1980’s was that of delegate to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). I believe the first meeting of F8.14 – the sub-committee on ski safety – that I attended was in Pennsylvania. I was flying under the wings of Salomon’s seer of all standards and patents, Gilbert Delouche, and the binding product manager for the North American zone at that time (and my mentor), Joe Campisi.
I was a babe in the woods, but I soon caught on to the game under Delouche’s patience guidance. I recall a debate on the binding specification then being batted around in the technical committee chaired by Carl Ettlinger. Ettlinger wanted language that would require any release/retention setting of 10 or above to be “visually distinctive” from the rest of the scale.
In Memorium, Carl Ettlinger
Carl was a giant of a man whose outsized voice roiled every conversation like a burst dam and whose expansive vision reached across the mixed milieus of research, journalism, risk management and education. I knew him when he was at the peak of his powers, as he explained to me when I interviewed him for a “where are they now?” profile in Skiing History. He was able to conduct long-term research on injury patterns as well as analyze the particulars of the current binding market, turn around and package this knowledge into articles for Skiing and Skiing Trade News, followed up by a workshop tour that would bring enlightenment to the grassroots level. No one but Carl could have pulled this off, and Lord knows no one has had the requisite talent, energy and will power since.
But time and tide wait for no man, and Carl’s finely spun web of influence was eventually plucked apart. The loss of his pivotal positions in the press allowed him to slip from public view before we, the skiers of the world, realized we hadn’t taken the time to thank him.
We have the time to thank him now.
So thanks, Carl, for being first and foremost a teacher, for teaching is at the heart of the evangel’s mission.
Thanks for being so damn stubborn. Your insistence on improving skier safety wore through a wall of resistance as tough as Vermont marble.
Thanks for having a heart as big as that melon-sized head of yours. The fuel to your tireless mind was a caring heart that tried to embrace the world.
Thanks for all the stories once the Mount Gay flowed. Who knew we would have won the Vietnam War if only his superiors had listened? I can’t remember exactly how – he wasn’t the only one drinking Mount Gay – but I recall the light in his eyes as he relayed his twisted tales, taking us down successive rabbit-holes of digression that I lost track of at the seventh level.
That’s what I remember most vividly about my many interactions with Carl: his brain so teemed with thoughts he rushed to get them out in a verbal jailbreak that would travel around the cosmos until returning, many lost minutes later, to the subject that had inspired them. That was Carl: too many words for one sentence, too many tasks to tend to and all of it, every erg of his endless energy, devoted to a cause he never ceased to serve.
Fare thee well, Carl Ettlinger. The world misses you already for it will never see another quite like you, whose every moment seemed larger than life itself.
I raise my glass to you, old friend. Mount Gay, of course.
Jackson Hogen
June 23, 2020
Why This Buyer’s Guide?
Don’t read the 2021 Masterfit Buyer’s Guide in Partnership with Realskiers.com for its 62 ski reviews. I should know. I wrote or edited all of them.
Not that the ski reviews aren’t worth the read. But ski reviews on the web are as common as rice, while the Buyer’s Guide contains something no other publication, whether in digital, print or video format, can claim: the most respected, thorough and dependable boot reviews in the world.
This isn’t mere puffery. The Masterfit Boot Test is so well regarded by the supplier community that nearly every brand not only sends its following year’s line-up in four men’s sizes plus three for women, it also dispatches its top designers and/or product managers to a distant North American site for most of the test’s five-day duration.
