this is probably why you cant rent toboggans, crazy carpets or inner tubes at ski resorts

>The teens reportedly were riding tandem down the halfpipe and went airborne off a large snowbank at the bottom.

>“The two individuals came down hard on the hard ice below, causing blunt force trauma”

Being near the bottom might have meant they landed on a relatively flat surface too, making the impact even harder.

They basically shot a ramp to a 30-40 foot drop to a completely flat landing. That's without getting any air.

You can't control them. You can actually stop while skiing or snowboarding.

They have a huge berm at the bottom in most photos of how it's built. If they straight lined it down, that is probably a 3-4 story tall drop off the end to the flat by the lodge.

> Two teens on spring break were killed Sunday night in a sledding accident in a closed area of Copper Mountain Ski Resort in central Colorado.

They took an unapproved device to an unapproved route and experienced the reality of what "the worst" that can happen was. Their poor parents. Snow sports are already so dangerous, this was really bone-headed.

Dear kids who will go on future excursions unchaperoned: you are your brother's keeper. If you see/hear friends about to go do something extremely dangerous and stupid, try to stop them. Peer pressure works both ways. I sure hope there weren't a pile of teenagers waiting on them at the bottom, or at the top for their turns.

Maybe you can

Haha that's why they have bunny hills. You got this!

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Really? I was able to go tubing in at PA resort... But the "mountains" there are MUCH smaller

Pizza. French Fries. Pizza. French Fries. Got it.

You gotta pizza

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I’ve been to copper 30+ times this year:

The mountain is closed after 4, there is a sledding/tubing hill but it’s not close to where the half pipe is.

This is extremely sad but it’s a case of 2 people breaking the rules of the resort that are in place for the safety of everyone.

Now that I’m comfortably into adulthood, the immortality complex of youth is totally incomprehensible. I hate that so many learn the hard way.

Yeah, not sure how much experience this guy has with ski resorts. Lots of them rent tubes and sleds. Copper, where this happened, does in fact rent tubes.

But then they only allow you to ride them in specifically-designed courses under supervision of staff and during regular business hours.

The problem isn’t sleds per se, it’s that they used one in a place they weren’t supposed to after hours.

Was it on a dedicated tubing hill? Much different than taking a tube on a ski run

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Only if you look at it through the lens of our humanity. If you look at it dispassionately, it makes sense as a species. We produce many offspring and they go act, many times for our benefits, even though they may not think of it as such, other times idiotically. Nature is cool with the outcomes, plenty of humans make it to old age, who cares if some die, got to make sure things get done, especially by the young who have the capacity, if not necessarily the common sense or experience, to do whatever it is.

Half pipes are scary on skis. I can't imagine going down one on a sled.

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If you French fry when you're supposed to pizza you're gonna have a bad time

I have friends that frequent this area and they told me this spot that the 2 boys fell from is hundreds of feet. Onto ice.

Many ski resorts have tubing hills. The tubing hills are separate from the skiing hills, there is no shared space for both activities.

Every resort I have worked for with a tubing hill has had entirely separate departments dedicated to running their operations. The only connection with the ski resorts is where the profits ultimately goes - for all customer facing purposes they should be looked at as two separate entities.

If you’re going tubing at one of these places, you’re not tubing at a ski resort. You’re tubing at a tubing hill that just happens to be adjacent to and owned by the ski resort.

Tubing hills have areas designed to slow you to a stop.

The amount of times I dodged death as a kid was too high. There were/are sure to be many who aren't as lucky or a tad bit less wise.

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Three decades ago I spent every weekend of the winter and spring skiing out of bounds in the Colorado mountains every year. It baffles me how stupid I was and that I'm somehow still alive.

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Ya, exactly. I straight up fell off of roofs, drunk, without a scratch or bruise. Yea, plural. Not in the same night, but still.

The level of shit kids can get up to is beyond stratospheric. And, then you add booze or other inebriation and it’s that much worse.

Groups of kids (I’m using kids loosely at this point, for people under 25) can be a double edged sword too. I was at a music festival and saw a wook climbing a piece of art. Before I even processed the view ahead of me I said “it’s time for another good idea, bad idea” and then the guy fell from a height and I saw him break (probably shatter) his femur. It took the ambulance an awful long time to arrive.

My first thought once I processed was “where were his friends?” Because at the end of the day, the people you’re out partying with are the same ones you have to be able to rely on, and well, so much of the time…. What if someone said “hey Kyle, don’t”? Maybe they did, but I bet the odds are lower than they didn’t.

Statistically, something will happen to someone, but there’s no need to increase your own odds too much.

I used to live in IL, and am now in CO.

Bringing sleds on a ski hill after hours is pretty common, and it’s crazy how quickly it can get out of control.

I did it a small handful of times my first year here when I was younger and much more stupid. We were on the bottom third of a very mellow green run with probably 100 yards of clearance to bail when or if necessary. I had been sledding my whole life and snowboarding that whole season. And it still scared the shit out of me. I can’t wrap my head around taking a sled on a half pipe.

Midwest sledding is generally pretty chill. But it’s mind blowing how quickly you pick up speed with no way to stop or control yourself out here on these big runs.

If you’re ever out here, leave the sleds at home (or take them to a park in town with a normal sized hill. We have those too).

Yep.

I'm a rather good snowboarder. I stay on valid and legit tracks. No way I'm offroading.

Knowing where that half pipe is, I doubt it was hundreds. But easily 50+.

5 stories or 20, it doesn't make a ton of difference.

When I worked at an East Coast resort, we had way more trauma deaths from tubing than from the skiing/snowboarding side.

Most mountain deaths on the ski resort side were heart attacks, the tubing hill on the other hand would have 1 or more per year of conditions getting a bit too slick and a tube flying over/crashing into the barrier at the end or into a person at high speed.

You can here in Colorado. They have specific areas set aside for it.

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Gwyneth Paltrow strikes again

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I was in Springville Ca in February and lady died in hitting a tree on an inter tube.

No, down the center of the pipe and off the snow bank at the bottom.

Sometimes I’ll have a drink with some old high school friends and we’ll reminisce about all the times we nearly died that our parents never heard about.

Yea, and the tubing PARKS are specifically designed for tubes and rigorously tested to ensure safety.

They also have walls that prevent the tubes from exiting the designated areas.

Is this true for all resorts? Is it not private property?

That sounds like a nightmare of an insurance policy.

If they went down a half pipe in a sled or tube, that's pretty insane. It wouldn't have been a question of being there at the appropriate time as any time would be inappropriate to do so.

You can zig-zag to slow your travel downhill, even while still going fast across the hill, on skies and a snowboard. You can't really do that very easily on a sled or tube.

Yeah, that’s true, there’s no safe time to do that. I was more thinking that during regular hours there might have been someone to stop them.

It blows my mind how I was so stupid that I would get behind my car fucked up. I would never, ever do that now. And it was a normal thing for me/my friends back then. We didn't even think twice.

You still have to have an uphill access pass and must be skiing/snowboarding. The uphill access closes after 10 as well.

Lift ticket only covers lifts, not access to the publicly owned land, which a lot of resorts are built on.

I think this is ASTERISK the property has to be on public land, which quite a few of Colorado's resorts are.

A large amount of ski resorts in the US operate on public land and lease it from the federal government.

I definitely got a trespassing ticket in my youth for trying to dig a quarter pipe / hip into a bank on the side of a run after the mountain had closed for the year.

Fortunately, I was employed by that mountain a couple years later, so when we build that jump again we got snowmobile tow ins.

I recall driving a moped home, 8 miles away down busy roads, while both—drunk on gas station cans of energy drink / alcohol, and high on more weed than I’d ever smoked in my life prior to that moment, at the ripe age of 14. I don’t remember the drive at all, except for a small insignificant moment where headlights from another car glimmered on the asphalt in front of me.

Depends. Some resorts do require you to have an uphill pass

You can very safely go off piste and even venture into the backcountry if you have the appropriate skills and preparation. Not really at all relevant to this

I think it's even further. Dunno, I've skied passed it many times, just never with a tape measure. But here's a picture that illustrates it.

https://imgur.com/a/zDf4rT1

My buddy’s and I used to get crazy excited to be able to surf during hurricanes in Florida when we were teenagers in the 2000s. I look back now and wonder how tf any of us are still alive

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That is not true. They can, and do, restrict access. It is completely up to the lease holder whether or not they allow uphill access. And that's USFS land. Some areas allow it, some do not. And typically those that do have some restrictions. For very good reasons too. They do not want anyone climbing up at night while they are trying to groom the slopes, for example.

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It's not, that's why it works. The lift to access federal public land is what you are paying for. It's just like going on a hike in a national forest.

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A tubing hill and half pipe have very different forms and function despite how similar they might look.

I used to spend all winter snowboarding when I was a teenager and I took a break for a few years while I was in the Navy because I wasn't stationed within 1000 miles of snow. I gave it a shot the winter after I left active duty and didn't even spend a whole day on the mountain. My skills had degraded to the point where I wasn't comfortable anymore. Shortly thereafter, I met a woman who had been a high level skier when she was a teenager and was expecting to go to the Olympics before she got in a serious accident that damaged the nerves in her neck. She had full function of her extremities, but she said she couldn't feel very much below her neck and a lot of what she did feel was that painful stinging you get when your leg falls asleep or something. Her story made me give up winter sports for good. She was one of the best and she had a life changing injury; what the hell am I doing up there? I haven't been in the slopes in almost 20 years now, and I can literally see the resort I used to go to most often from my bedroom window.

They definitely landed on a flat surface. It’s right at the bottom of the hill between two lifts. No one should take a sled into a super half pipe - these two trespassed and did it at night.

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I think most resorts do. I'm fairly sure a decent amount of Winter Park is located on National Forest lands and they require an uphill pass for riders that want to "skip" the lift line and hike up the mountain instead.

Yes, unless they are private.

I don’t know anything about skiing, never seen snow either. What does it mean riding tandem? Like two of them on a sled? Or skis designed for two people? Please help me understand what happened kind Redditor.

When I was 15, my two friends and I hopped a plane to visit the 4th friend who had recently moved to Arizona. I'm not telling tall tales, but we were good girls: honor roll, etc. Well, this 4th friend had become part of the "cool kids" clique in her new school, and the coolest thing for high schoolers to do was cross the border into Mexico where the drinking age was 16 at the time, and they barely checked ID. So off we went (this was way pre-9/11, border was open to Mexico and Canada back then) to a really fun little bar in Mexico that played great rock music. Things were going great until the music came to a screeching halt, the lights came on, and a bunch of armed men came in. I had never even seen a gun in person, and here's this group of men with guns pointed. They brusquely checked the bathrooms, talked to the manager, then left.

Now me, as a 15 year old girl WHOSE PARENTS DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I WAS IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY, where I was drinking, for the first time, underage (I was a month away from turning 16) was about shit my damn pants.

Apparently it was a fairly common thing for bars to be checked that way for drugs, etc, but holy shit. All I could think was I'd have to call my parents from a Mexican prison, to tell them I had been busted drinking (i had all of 2 beers).

My girls are 16 and 19 now, and I don't even know how I would react if I found out they did something so stupid. lol. I mean, I'm sure they have, I guess they were also just smart enough to not get caught.

I use to get high and "hood surf". The one time I fell of at any real speed, my lucky ass landed in some thick bushes.

What's the wood ramp at the bottom of the picture at the end of the red arrow?

Are you supposed to jump the ramp at the end of the pipe?

How are they gonna stop their friends when they're already filming for the Gram

That's actually not on the snow. It's part of the roof of the building that the photo was taken from.

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A kid at my high school died doing this.

There's tubing run by Copper maybe 200 yards from the half pipe. It's obviously a very different slope, but you can rent tubes and use them on their course.

Two people sitting in one sled.

It’s not a skiing term. It just means that the two of them shared a sled. To be clear, their deaths have nothing to do with the act of skiing or snowboarding. It’s incredibly dangerous to sled on any ski course (even just an easy run). They snuck in at night and took a sled down a terrain piece that is only for experts with special training.

I went sledding when I was in middle school and I crashed hard enough to knee my sunglasses into my forehead. I never went sledding again. Poor kids.

Thought that said 2 million teens for a second

Not if you interrupt operations necessary to their business. Even if they're on public lands. For example, if you're trying to ski down slopes and they're out there doing avalanche control work or grooming, you don't have the right to be there.

This shows what it looks like from the top. Not an ideal sledding location.

https://www.summitdaily.com/news/copper-mountain-resort-opens-superpipe-to-public/

Also sounds like the ground was hard ice. Makes a huge difference what you are falling onto. And how. I’m guessing their tandem sled ride was a “dare us” gone tragically wrong.

Sometimes I'm happy I was too poor growing up to be able to get into any shit like this. Playing on the railroad tracks and in abandoned industrial yards was dangerous enough

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For the most part I think it is. I learned this in the fall when I was running some trails and ended up coming up on the top of a lift in Park City and thought I was trespassing. But apparently if you can get up there whether on skis or on foot you can do it all. I guess what you’re paying for is the lift and all other transportation services.

Damn, was it Nogales ??

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ok thanks for sharing that

Glad you made it, but this is the biggest reason I hate driving lol

Not true.

For many years I thought there could never be a Copper Mountain tragedy as awful as that movie with Jim Carrey. Lo and behold, this tops it.

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Bro! That’s the only time we get really kill waves in Fl!!! Just Kidding but not kidding :/ Had some pretty nice tubes on the west coast as a kid, of course hurricane driven.

Gotta be one of the more stupid ways to die. Those parents are probably so devastated

i went snowboarding once, stayed on the bunny hill all day and holy shit that thing got fuckin deadly towards the end of the night! started off nice and kinda fluffy, but at the end after a bazillion falls and slides from everyone it was like solid ice mixed with a frankenstein lovechild of vibranium and adamantium with a bedrock base.

still cant feel a spot on my knee after falling on that shit hahah

Wait til you hear about all the professional drivers who have crashed and died. You'll never want to drive a car again! /s

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Jesus Christ those kids fuckin SENT it down that hill.

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They would have gained a tremendous amount of speed on the center of the pipe, i really wonder how they saw it going. I think most of us are lucky to be alive after the insanely stupid shit you do at 17/18. I came very close to death a few times doing dumb stuff at that age. I do feel horrible for the parents.

Tandem usually refers to one being behind another, like a tandem parking spot where the head car is blocked in by someone parking directly behind them, like in a driveway. Or a tandem bicycle where two people with two seats and two sets of pedals on a bike, one behind the other. But tandem is how people usually ride on sleds together if they're going to share a sled at all so it's weird they called it out especially

Makes sense it is called a "lift" ticket I suppose haha. I can't imagine trekking uphill that long must be an insane workout. Cool though at the same time.

Edit: where do you put your board/skis?

When I was a teenager I went to Stowe or Snow (can't remember, its been like 18 years) to see a winter xgames type event and someone in the big air event popped his bindings off the jump and landed HARD.

Just laid there, no moving. Ambulance came, took him away. Dunno what happened.

> Snow sports are already so dangerous, this was really bone-headed.

Everyone thinks they'll be fine until they aren't.

We had a highschool girl die at Gunstock in NH this year and Gunstock is a casual family / you can just straight-line most trails type mountain.

Vermont? Stowe

I’m don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but holy shit, what the fuck did they think was going to happen? Why didn’t they bail?

I think X Games was at both Stowe and Snow on different years.

Well shit haha

Yup to both, but none of the dates for either line up with my memory.

I thought it was the winter x games and Sean White was there but the list on Wikipedia doesn't match up. Maybe it was my friend over-exaggerating or me misremembering the actual event. There was definitely a huge halfpipe and a big air event.

I was like 16-17 (I'm 33 now) so it was like 2006?

I remember we printed mapquest directions and it didn't account for road closures and we got my friend's car stuck in a closed-for-the-winter pass and had to dig / push him out lol.

I don't think the guy you were replying to was skiing, he was just hiking. But generally speaking, if you are hiking to ski, you put regular boots on, and if the hike is any significant distance, you get a backpack to put your ski boots in and lash your skis to them. For really short hikes (like a few hundred feet) you can just throw everything over your shoulder, and even hike in your ski boots, but for anything longer a backpack is highly recommended. Depending on the terrain, snow shoes or spikes can be useful.

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Honestly, I think the beginner slopes can be one of the most dangerous places at a lot of resorts. Especially during the peak season. So many people with no control, and no spatial awareness. All it takes is one dude losing control and smack.

Honorable mention to groomed blues/blue-blacks in the sun in the morning and shadow in the afternoon. People just fly down those, hit ice patches, and will go sliding down the hill sideways at like 40 miles an hour.

Do they still have the Darwin Awards? Seems like a busy year for them so far.

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Doing dumb stuff is a universal experience. Rich, poor, in the middle- everyone finds their own creative ways to feel death's breath on their neck.

This reminds me of when the statement “YOLO” became a thing lol

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Paula Crane, superintendent of Prairie Central Community Unit School District Number 8. “They were role models for all who knew them” — this quote is insane given their chosen actions led to their deaths. Maybe they were role models before their untimely demises but they lose that recognition when committing suicide by stupidity.

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> “Both were great students, talented athletes, and most importantly amazing people,” said Paula Crane, superintendent of Prairie Central Community Unit School District Number 8. “They were role models for all who knew them, especially our young athletes throughout the district.

Great role models breaking in after hours there

I talked once to a veteran of the Balkan wars, he was 17. Same mentality they had as soldiers

Some believe they did or had to bail (fell off sled on way down), but they continued to slide down the hill on their own. Super sad.

Always worth a shot but in my experience nobody ever listens to the one dissenting voice in the group.

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Too poor for sledding.

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Wow, we have almost identical music festival traumas. In my case I overheard people saying the guy fell out of a tree, but by the time I saw him he was unconscious on a stretcher, with his leg bent the wrong way at the knee. Definitely not the vibe I wanted to start out on that day…

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Copper’s trails are located in a national forest. Last time I was there they made it pretty clear that you could get in trouble for smoking weed while skiing since it is still illegal federally and you were on federal land.

SUMMER OF 1992 COCOA FLORIDA

I was 18 and I had an argument (with my then 33 year old stripper) girlfriend. I packed my beat up and rusty 1975 Chrysler Córdoba with furniture and hauled my drunk ass, speeding down U.S. #1 (jamming out to Guns N Roses with my Pioneer tape/radio )from Cocoa to Titusville. I was feeling freedom and great. So great that I waved to a cop that was sitting in the median.

About a mile down the road, I see blue lights flashing. I pulled over and he and he walks up to the side of my car and asks, "Do I know you?" I replied, 'No, why?'

His reply, "Because you waved to me back there. I thought I knew you." Nope! Just happy to be getting out of an abusive relationship.

Officer: "What's all that stuff in the back of your trunk?" Me: "I moved out"

Officer: "You been drinking?" Me: 'Yes sir'

Officer: "About how much?' Me: "About a fifth of Jack Daniels"

Officer: "Wow!" You seem pretty sober for drinking that much alcohol. How much further you gotta go and where you going?" Me: 'My parents house, which is about 3 more miles.'

Officer: "Ok, be safe and slow it down. I'm not going to arrest you because your speech is normal and honest and had the guts to be straight with me. Me: "Ok, thank you" (heart racing, thinking; damn I'm going to the slammer and no one's gonna bail me out.)

Similar incidents happened a few times in my late teens and early 20's. Thankfully never got locked up for it. I finally smartened up and realized it was frikken selfish of me and that I could hurt or kill someone.

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Too poor to travel a few states over for a mountain vacation, yes

I grew up sledding Illinois.

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[shrug] They were sledding in Colorado

You can hurt yourself just fine sledding down a hill into a tree next to a corn field.

No it's not true. This is some kind of urban legend that Texans tell each other after they get back from a ski trip.

There was some kind of sled that got brought to Copper about 20 years ago. If I remember, it had runners that allowed some form of control based on how you lean, like a flexible skeleton sled kinda, and they also had a leash. They were trying to see if they could get approved to allow them on the mountain.

So a few of the LiftOps supervisors took them up Flyer, which was the lift I worked. I was at the top when they got off. I thought it was the stupidest idea ever but lifties are often psychotic.

I remember just seeing them launch off the lip of the road and then disappeared. Never heard anything else about them. I think one of them got hurt.

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We don't get snow on the hill next to a corn field here, so going sledding is a vacation, like something that someone of means does

I remember when my dad first told me the story of when some of his friends from his high school actually did die.

Near my city, there's a very fast flowing river, called the Willow River. An "average" river flows at about 5 km per hour. The Willow River flows at about 30 km per hour.

About 50 years ago, 7 teenagers wanted to take a canoe / kayak trip down the Willow River to celebrate their high school graduation.

Unfortunately, the waters of the river are too tough and impassable, so they all drowned.

You can see a photo of the river in the article here, and also a video of what the water flowing through the canyon looks like too.

The Willow River is very rough in spring (when the boys took their trip), because all the water melts from the ice and snow on the mountains, and greatly increases the flow downstream.

https://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/local-news/forty-years-after-river-tragedy-3699978

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VyBo6SVlog0

Shut the fuck up. You think kids having fun after hours sledding down hills makes them shitty people? They were kids being kids and unfortunately it ended in tragedy. Your comment shows how much of a piece of shit you are. Would you say this to their parents?

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Broke my tailbone when I was 14 due to my sister hitting the back of my sled with hers, causing me to spin out and go ass-first against a tree. Some of the worst pain of my life, and it wasn't until my late 20s when I could sit on hard surfaces without pain jolting up my back again.

We did some dangerous crap when we were growing up in the mountains. Looking back, I'm honestly surprised the broken tailbone was the worst injury any of us sustained with all the stunts we pulled. I can comprehend the teens thinking that this was going to be a fun experiment --it's awful it ended this way for them.

These stories make me feel so boring. As a teen the craziest thing I did was staying up until 2 AM reading Phantom of the Opera fan fiction.