Cool heads tout ‘brain buckets’

George Ackley’s been skiing since he was 6 years old, but it was only having his own children and wanting to set a good example that prompted him to start wearing a helmet on the slopes.

Now, that helmet – complete with a 3-inch-by-3-inch dent from a bad crash at Crystal Mountain on Thanksgiving – is convincing other skiers that wearing a brain-bucket is a pretty good idea.

“There is no doubt that Mr. Ackley would have suffered a severe, even life-threatening injury without that helmet,” said his neurosurgeon, Dr. Jacob Young at Overlake Hospital Medical Center, who has vowed to buy his own helmet before skiing again.

Ackley, a 50-year-old crane-maintenance electrician from Bellevue, hit a rock and lost his skis as he tried to negotiate a steep chute at Crystal, near Mount Rainier. The accident propelled him headlong into another rock.

“I heard this horrible crunching sound,” he recalled. “Everything got really quiet. Then somebody said, ‘Oh my God! Look at his helmet!’ “

Ackley was taken down the mountain on a backboard, a neck collar firmly in place. Surgery repaired his two crushed vertebrae, now held together with eight screws and two titanium rods, and he is walking again – though he still faces several months of recovery.

“As it was, the force was transferred largely to the helmet, and partially to the spine, which fractured,” Young said. “It’s far preferable to have a spinal injury than the kind of head injury he would have had.”

Though his helmet isn’t much use anymore, it’s become a coveted teaching tool.

A teacher at the school where Ackley’s wife works said she would like to use it to talk to students about head injuries. Young has e-mailed photos of it to colleagues. Ski patrollers at Crystal said they’d like to display it, and virtually all the skiers Ackley showed the helmet to said they’d buy one.

“I think helmets will continue to become more and more the norm,” says Paul Baugher, director of Crystal Mountain’s Ski Patrol. “The young athletes, the people who sort of set the style for coolness, most of them wear helmets.”

It’s mostly older skiers and snowboarders, the ones who have always skied in warm winter hats, who are reluctant to don helmets, he said.