Ski collision courses

About 10 years ago, I wrote something about a ski collision I witnessed while skiing Deer Valley. This past Sunday, I happened to see another one in Park City Mountain, in the small waiting area of Super Condor Lift. 

This incident in which no one was hurt, was different from the one I reported in 2015, in that, instead of happening on concentric trajectories, it occurred on tangential paths. 

Let me explain: As shown (Fig. 1), when skiers are engaged in a turn they look into the inside of the radius, very rarely outside, which isn’t the direction they’re headed towards. So now, let’s picture two skiers positioned at similar levels on a slope and coming towards each other, but planning to turn each in opposite directions (Fig 2).

They could see each other, but where they are on the slope, they aren’t in danger of colliding, even less as each one intend to turn away from each other, but no one can guess what their respective intentions are. 

So they engaged their turn apparently away from each other and looked, as we’ve seen before, inside their respective turn. Depending on the size of their turning radius they could now be on a collision course, and that’s exactly what I witnessed that day. 

The male skier didn’t fall, but the lady did, without hurting herself. She was mad at the guy, but he remained the “adult in the room”, stayed composed, apologized and that was the end of the incident, but it stood as an illustration that given the complexities of everyone trajectories on a slope all can happen and sometimes, without being anybody’s fault!