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

Most Fatalities Don’t Happen on Black Diamonds

Padding Is Better for Visibility Than Impact Mitigation

Helmets Won’t Always Save You

To Helmet, or Not to Helmet? It’s Not Even a Question …
Making Skiing Safer
Collecting Ski Injury Data at Sugarbush Mountain
