“I’ve Had My Fun”: Former extreme skier receives new total hip replacement from Dr. Daniel O’Connor

Garret Bartelt’s ski crash at the 1992 World Extreme Skiing Championships in Valdez, Alaska, is the stuff of legend. He was 27 years old, and had made it to the semifinals, sitting in a top 10 position. In a film viewed online more than 66,000 times, we see Garret standing at the top of a 50-degree chute wearing a bright red, Atomic ski suit and black goggles, but no helmet (indicative of the time). “He’s away,” the announcer says. The film captures Garret entering the chute only to quickly fall and begin cartwheeling 800 feet down a 3,000-foot mountain face, bouncing off of cliff bands, his body flipping high into the air. The commentators don’t hold back their fear that Garret was seriously injured. “Oh my god,” they say, over and over and over.

As Garret explained to Ski magazine, “As I was about to make the first jump turn, my ski got caught in a hole. I tumbled through tight sections and over rocks. With every rotation I was fighting to get back on my feet. But I was going too fast, and it was a 50-degree slope. I hit the final rock sideways and backwards. That’s where I broke my femur — about 600 feet down from where I fell. It broke in three places, and the force was huge. The heel of my right boot kicked me in the left temple. I ragdolled the last 200 feet. I felt the impact but I didn’t know my leg was broken until the Denali high-angle rescue team got to me. The entire fall took 37 seconds.”

More than 30 years later, Garret reflects on the crash and the resulting broken femur. “That was a pretty bad crash.”

Garret was put on a heli from Valdez and flown into town where he had surgery, inserting a rod into his broken femur. He was back in the competition three years later in 1995, at the U.S. Championships in Crested Butte, again reaching the semifinals, but he was tentative, he says.

The right femur injury Garret suffered in Valdez set his body “off kilter.” Years later in 2002 Garret broke his left femur while skiing in Chile, which required more hardware (a plate and pin). “That didn’t help my hip at all. Beginning with the accident in 1992, I lost three-quarters of an inch on my right side and then with Portillo, nothing was aligned.”

Because of the shorter right leg, Garret was forced to wear a heal lift, his left hip developed arthritis, and the left femur was rubbing bone on bone. Garret, also a surfer who spends his winters in Baja, reached out to Dr. Daniel O’Connor, a total joint specialist at ValleyOrtho, on a return trip to the Roaring Fork Valley.

Dr. O’Connor recommended a full hip replacement.

“Dr. O’Connor fixed it up,” says Garret. “He took out all the left broken femur rod and shortened the femur to it get close to the other side.”

Recovery from his hip replacement was going so well Garret was back to surfing within two months of surgery and a short time later he was back on the Aspen slopes.

“I was feeling really good and skiing fast,” he says. “I was heading down Sam’s Knob on my super G skis and the roll jump extended more than I anticipated. I landed off camber and my tibial plateau exploded. It was the same leg as new hip, but the new hip hung in there. I just had a tibial plateau break.”

Emergency surgery and two plates later, Garret, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, is back to backcountry skiing and will soon be back to Baja, sailing, diving and surfing.

“I’ve had my string of fun over the years and paid for my fun,” says Garret, “which only means I’ve had a lot of fun experiences that eventually caught up with me, but I really haven’t slowed down that much. Still lots of fun to be had!”