For those who knew her directly, and for those who love adventures in mountains in winter, it is a difficult death. When avalanches kill, it is terrible, but the circumstances are relatively clear. When Shane McConkey died, it was awful but not completely shocking, considering the extent of his extremities - skiing down radically steep faces, jumping off cliffs, then parachuting to the ground. It was amazing, until some equipment malfunctioned in Italy and he died, plummeting from the sky to the ground.
Burke’s crash wasn’t a particularly harsh one but it ruptured a vertebral artery, one of four that supply blood to brain. There was a brain hemorrhage, which caused cardiac arrest, which cut off oxygen to the brain and caused severe and irreversible brain damage. She died Thursday morning. She was 29.
After Burke and I spoke, she pulled some tricks in the pipe for the lens of my colleague, photographer John Lehmann. The story and picture ran Saturday, July 16, the photograph splashed big on the page, the image of Burke flying above the lip of the pipe, a pioneer in her prime, a halo of clouds in the sky.
She was the star of a niche sport. Few people had heard of her before her crash. My story about the summer camps was only the sixth time her name had ever been in The Globe and Mail. It is a testament to the extent of her accomplishments, and her quality as a human being, that her story has resonated so much in the past ten days.
A report released on Tuesday reported that skiing and snowboarding are the most hazardous of winter sports. Some 2,300 people were sent to hospital last winter in Canada with injuries bad enough to require at least a night’s stay. The numbers are double those of hockey, which had about 1,100 hospitalizations, about the same as snowmobiling.
Thankfully, most people on mountains now wear helmets. Of skiers and snowboarders 18 and younger, four out of five wear a helmet, double the rate of a decade ago. And there is a new push to make it mandatory, at least for kids.
Still, there is no absolute safety. And, despite risks, some people love to race down mountains and pull impossible-looking flipping, spinning tricks, because it’s rad, a jolt of joy. The rush is often described by adherents as drug-like, an addiction.
But death lurks. It may be rare, but it lurks, in the halfpipe, in the backcountry, or on any ordinary intermediate-rated run on any ski hill anywhere.
