Jake Shealy didn’t used to wear a ski helmet. When he started researching them in the early 1990s, almost no one did. At that time, there were a lot of questions about how effective helmets were at preventing injuries. Some argued that they actually made falls more dangerous, but no one really knew for sure. There wasn’t any data to support wearing them or not — so Shealy started collecting it.
“That’s how I got started in 1990,” Shealy told GearJunkie. “It was a beautiful, unplanned experiment … from 1990 through the next 20 years to 2010, helmet usage went from less than 5% to about 95%.”
As more people started wearing helmets, Shealy’s data started getting better and more quantifiable. It didn’t take long before he became convinced himself and bought his first ski helmet. Today, the 83-year-old retired researcher wouldn’t hit the slopes without one.
Ski helmets have been a primary focus of Shealy’s career. But, he has over 50 years of research on ski area injuries and more than 100 published studies. He got into this as a ski-obsessed engineering student looking for a master’s thesis topic. In the decades since, he’s explored the relationship between takeoff speeds and distances traveled on terrain park jumps, the reaction times of skiers and snowboarders, gender differences in ski injuries, and much more.
GearJunkie connected with the life-long researcher to learn who is most likely to be involved in fatal collisions, where accidents most often occur at ski resorts, how effective ski helmets and other safety tools are, and more.
A Lifetime of Research: Jake Shealey’s Surprises & Takeaways
Higher Fatality Rates Among Skiers Than Snowboarders
One of Shealey’s studies looked at the differences in rates and modalities of death between skiers and snowboarders. It found that skiers have a statistically higher mortality rate than snowboarders. According to the research, the overall rate of snowboarding deaths was 35% lower than for alpine skiing, whereas the alpine skiing fatality rate was 54% higher than for snowboarding.
Other research by the National Ski Areas Association has backed this up. It found that snowboarders are 50% to 70% more likely to get injured in a crash but 33% less likely to be killed in one than skiers. One explanation offered by Shealy’s team is that skis can detach in a crash, and skiers often slide some distance after falling. That increases the likelihood of colliding with a stationary object.
The types of fatality were different between skiers and boarders, too. According to the study, collision deaths are more common among skiers, while jumping and tree-well-related deaths were more common among snowboarders.
Men More Likely to Die in a Ski Accident Than Women
Part of Shealy’s research also looked at gender differences in ski injuries. And he made some notable observations.
“In the early days, it was 85% of all fatalities were males. Now, it’s well over 90% males. And a frightening number of the female fatalities occur as a result of high-speed males hitting them,” Shealy said.
So if resorts wanted to really reduce injuries and deaths on the slopes, they’d put a No Dudes Allowed policy in place, he joked.
“That would reduce the fatality rate by 85%, 90%, maybe even more, because it would save some females as well,” Shealy said. It’s a macabre observation, he admits, but one he believes is true.
Most Fatalities Don’t Happen on Black Diamonds
Even as Shealy observed that helmets reduce head injury rates, fatality rates on the slopes seemed to remain unchanged. The fatality rate at resorts was around 0.7 fatalities per million skier visits, Shealy explained. That number plateaued even after helmet use reached what Shealy called the “effective utilization rate.”
“So we did a study on how fast people ski, where we did a Smoky The Bear kind of thing. We hid behind trees, bushes, lift towers, with a radar gun,” he said. “And blue square trails that are groomed and relatively straight, that’s where you see the highest speeds.”
Not coincidentally, he adds, those runs also saw the highest rate of fatalities.
“27 miles an hour is the median peak speed we saw across the board on these [blue] trails,” he said, and the speed required for a fatal collision is less than 19 mph.
“You don’t see lots of fatalities on true black diamond trails because people generally can’t go fast enough.”
Padding Is Better for Visibility Than Impact Mitigation
You know those brightly colored pads that ski resorts wrap around lift poles and signage posts? In 2020, Shealy authored a paper titled “Examining Ski Area Padding for Head and Neck Injury Mitigation.”
He found that those pads do very little to reduce the likelihood of head and spinal injuries in a collision faster than 9.8 mph (below the average beginner skier speed of 10.1 mph).
The study looked at headfirst collisions, so the findings don’t necessarily apply to all types of collisions with padded objects. However, Shealy and his fellow researchers found that padding and foam used by ski resorts barely mitigated injury to the head and spine under almost any circumstances.
They are great for making hard, stationary objects more visible — less so for cushioning your body.
Helmets Won’t Always Save You
In one of Shealey’s studies, researchers simulated a skier colliding with a tree and found that at 19 mph, the helmet would reduce the impact by about 75%. However, as noted, that’s still fast enough to kill you. With a tree collision on a blue run, “it was about a 99.9% probability of death,” he said.
“In the typical fatality scenario, somebody is going like a bat out of hell and usually they’re on the edge of the trail,” Shealy said. They might catch an edge, or someone might ski in front of them, and they crash into the trees.
By comparison, if you’re helmeted and you fall on a hard, icy surface, it’s a probable concussion instead of a fairly serious or fatal head injury, he said. On softer snow surfaces, it goes from a probable concussion to almost nothing.
“That reinforced our conclusions that at the [median peak] speeds that we observed if you hit a tree, you’re a goner.”
To Helmet, or Not to Helmet? It’s Not Even a Question …
So, should you wear a helmet when you ski? Shealy says absolutely.
“By all means, you should wear a helmet,” he said. “Just don’t expect it to save you if you hit a fixed object.”
Before 2000, Shealy said he wasn’t sure how much of a difference helmets made in accidents on the slopes. But the data that he’s seen in the years since has made him a true advocate for wearing them. Now, he says, just like he wouldn’t get in a car without a seatbelt, he wouldn’t get on skis without his helmet.
If you’re looking for a new ski or snowboard helmet, check out GearJunkie’s guide to the Best Ski Helmets.
Making Skiing Safer
There are several ways that skiers could improve their safety, and resorts could reduce risk on their slopes. Wearing a helmet is an obvious one. But there is other protective ski gear out there as well, like back protectors, mouthguards, and even padded shorts. Wearing bright colors improves your visibility to other skiers and/or rescuers. Following resort rules and respecting closures generally keeps you out of harm’s way, too.
However, the number one thing people can do to be safer on the slopes is to stay aware. Be vigilant of your surroundings. According to the National Ski Areas Association, around 18% of fatal ski accidents involve collisions with another skier or rider.
On the ski resort side, adding more brightly colored markers to obstacles can be helpful. Increasing safety messaging and awareness is also a huge step that some ski resorts like Eldora have emphasized in recent years (pictured above).
Collecting Ski Injury Data at Sugarbush Mountain
Much of Shealey’s research was made possible by a study at Sugarbush Mountain. The “Sugarbush Study” started in 1971 and is today one of the largest studies ever done on ski and snowboard injuries. In Shealy’s words, “It was only by the use of the Sugarbush Study that both the medical and mechanical aspects of the injury equipment could be observed simultaneously.”
Shealy worked on the study from its outset. For years, he operated in a medical clinic at the resort’s base with ski patrol, keeping tabs on every injury that came off the mountain. From that research, Shealy was able to start gathering data on helmets, and the Sugarbush Study continued to be a valuable resource for much of his career.
“It is an ongoing prospective epidemiological study where we have a large control group, and we look at the equipment that people are using,” Shealy explained. “It was a nice case-control opportunity.”
You can read more about the history of the Sugarbush Study and some of the impacts it’s had on the ski industry on the Sugarbush blog. To read more of Shealy’s research, check out his author page on Research Gate.
