Etthan Mañon was ready to tackle the main run at Echo Mountain after skiing several laps on the beginner hill.

The 18-year-old was with a bunch of family, in town from the Dominican Republic for the Christmas holidays and skiing for the first time in his life.

“He was doing great. Controlled turns and stopping. He was eager to try the main hill. I didn’t know how dangerous it was,” said his uncle, Scott Streeb, a longtime Colorado skier who said he brought his nephew and other family members to Echo – the closest resort to Denver, just a few miles above Evergreen – “thinking it was a good place for beginners.”

“I didn’t know,” Streeb said.

Mañon struggled to stop on the run. He smashed through fencing at the bottom of the run and flew into dense trees. It took more than 45 minutes for ski patrollers to extricate him from the forest. In an ambulance at the base of the 60-acre ski area, paramedics treated Mañon for a badly injured arm. More than an hour after the crash, Streeb sat with his nephew in the ambulance as it navigated a snowy, slow road en route to a Denver metro-area trauma center.

After 15 minutes, the paramedic in the back asked the driver to stop and help. Mañon, who dreamed of some day opening a restaurant with robot servers, died in the back of the ambulance on Christmas Eve.

His family, including his mother and grandmother, who are doctors, have so many questions. Why wasn’t a helicopter called, like they asked? Could an emergency helicopter even land at Echo Mountain? How were the patrollers who treated Mañon for a broken arm trained? Did they check for other injuries? Why did the paramedic report not include any information shared by Echo Mountain patrollers? How many other skiers have been injured or killed at Echo?

If the family was not speaking publicly, Mañon’s death may have gone unnoticed, like many ski resort deaths. That could change with legislation introduced at the Colorado statehouse last week that would require resorts to share safety strategies as well as statistics revealing injuries and fatalities.

Senate Bill 184, “Ski Area Safety Plans and Accident Reporting,” also would require resorts to publish safety plans outlining “roles, responsibilities and practices of the ski area” to reduce accidents. The legislation’s prime sponsors are Democratic Sens. Tammy Story of Conifer and Jessie Danielson of Wheat Ridge.

The bill, which does not yet have a sponsor in the Colorado House, requires all Colorado resorts to issue seasonal reports on accidents and deaths. The reports should include details about where and when the accident occurred, conditions at the time, the nature of the resulting injuries and other “non-private” information about the injured skier.

The bill also requires resorts to report injuries that occur when a skier is loading or unloading from a chairlift. (Those injuries do not have to be reported to the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board, which only tracks injuries sustained while riding the chair, not loading or unloading.)

At the start of the 2020-21 ski season, a group calling itself Safe Slopes Colorado released Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment statistics showing that as many as 55 skiers and snowboarders arrive in high country emergency rooms every day.

The reports, with details of trauma center admissions and ambulance transports from ski areas in 2018, 2019 and 2020, showed the number of skiers and snowboarders visiting ERs in ski towns grew by more than 80% from 2016 to 2019.

One report showed 4,151 skiers rushed from resorts in ambulances in the last three ski seasons, which amounts to about 10 a day. Many of the injuries are serious, with CDPHE statistics showing more than one third of the 1,426 skiers admitted to Colorado’s trauma centers in the 2017-18 ski season required immediate surgery.

Chad Miller, the lead flight paramedic for Flight for Life Colorado, which operates critical transport helicopters from five bases, including one in Summit County, said helicopters rush injured resort skiers to trauma centers “at least once a day.”

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