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JPH
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JPH
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PostSun Mar 30, 2014 8:30 pm 
treeswarper wrote:
I ski in control. I expect other people to do so too.
Me too! and I have the same expectation of everyone else out there. On days that I'm going to just cruise around with my nephews on groomers I could probably forgo the helmet, but at this point I find it more comfortable than a hat with goggles. On days that I'm skiing with other folks, we usually ski fast, through trees and around features that could have a bad result if you just caught an edge or hit something beneath the snow that took you down. I've seen someone take a slide on hard snow after losing an edge on a slow traverse that probably would have been the end for him if he wasn't wearing a helmet. Kids in the terrain park (definitely not me!) are wise to wear helmets while they learn new skills.
treeswarper wrote:
Fast enough that they are not able to stop.
There's a difference between being able to stop on a dime and being out of control. You can ski fast and in control. Obviously you shouldn't be going mach 5 through a group of beginners in school... Your perception that they are out of control does not mean that they actually are actually out of control.
treeswarper wrote:
Perhaps they only know that they are safe because they have a helmet on their head?
I'd guess the many advancements in ski technology through the years has more to do with more people going fast than helmets. Also, there's just more people skiing... My roots are in Wisconsin, including some areas way north. Comparing riding your bike there to riding around an urban area is apples and oranges. The bottom line is that I don't think helmets are overprotective. I see them more like car seats. Now the parents that stand under their kids the whole time they are at the playground, or run to pick their kids up every time they fall down, they probably need to give a little more slack.

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sarbar
Living The Dream



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sarbar
Living The Dream
PostMon Mar 31, 2014 9:05 am 
I have 3 boys. Two of who have zero concept of how "X leads to Y", or in other words, visits to the Doctors......they play hard and rough and I have to not look or I will bite all my nails off/have a gut ache that never ends. Having said that, yes, I do protect them to a point. I don't leave them in cars alone (2 and 4? No. It isn't legal in Washington State!), I don't let them play in our front yard alone - people drive too fast! We also live half a block from a lake, and frankly I do not trust them. As I said...they love to play hard and don't pay attention to details. I take them hiking, they have bunkbeds (which many wouldn't let little ones have) and yes, they were walking stairs at a year old (I kid you not....their Dr. mentioned that many parents don't let kids walk up and down stairs till they are 4-5...yeesh). Yes, I have had my youngest fall and hit his head on my desk, and we ended up in Children's Hospital with a CT Scan due to his swelling up. While I grew up feral mostly, and lived in the country - and survived (like that time I stepped on a rusty nail and never told my parents.....) I also know that my boys are waaayyy too active to let them play unsupervised yet. Will it change? Sure, as they get older. But they will also still have some fear put into them - a little fear isn't bad. Not everyone is good, and they must know that.

https://trailcooking.com/ Eat well on the trail.
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Bedivere
Why Do Witches Burn?



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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 9:38 am 
JPH wrote:
Your perception that they are out of control does not mean that they actually are actually out of control.
This, actually. wink.gif I ski fast most of the time, but I know my limits and the only time I've even come close to hitting someone else in recent memory was when I hit a big bump wrong, one ski came off and I went sailing through the air into the middle of the run I was skiing next to and landed right in front of another skier who then crashed into me. A helmet probably would've been a good idea there. A friend and member of this site got taken out by an out of control skier last winter. Broke his collar bone and concussed him despite his having a helmet on. Put a mighty big dent in that helmet. I'd hate to think what would've happened had he not been wearing it. I was the baby of the family and my mom was pretty protective of me. At the time I felt it was "overprotective" because I wasn't afforded all the freedoms of some of my friendsf (why can't I ride a skateboard down the big hill that's an arterial and bus route?), but compared to modern "helicopter parents" it was really nothing. My best friend and I still roamed the neighborhood far and wide with "swords" made from old golf clubs and bicycle handgrips, climbed the cliffs and bluffs above the water, went to the beach, built fires and roasted hotdogs, made rafts and spearfished flounders, climbed trees, made bike jumps, rode our bikes to the shopping mall a couple miles away to play video games, built our own go-carts from scrap lumber and old wagon wheels, and built a really big tree house with lumber and nails pilfered from construction sites or purchased with money earned by doing landscaping/yard work or sawing up downed trees and selling it as firewood. We alternately played with, or made war on the brothers from down the street who had a competing tree house. My buddy's dad was rich and bought him lots of toys so when we got to early teen-hood he had a motorized go-cart, mini-bikes, and on his 16th birthday (I was two years younger) he got a 250cc dirt bike that we rode all over the place and somehow never got caught by the police. By first grade I was walking to and from school every day, which was about a mile away. My mom taught me to never accept a ride from or go anywhere with strangers and that sufficed. And that was all in West Seattle. Don't know how I survived...

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touron
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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 7:31 pm 
Well CW, I beat you buy a year, as I had to walk a mile to kindergarten. hmmm.gif I think the most dangerous thing about it was that there wasn't a leash law then, and dogs would sometimes roam around the neighborhood in packs. I particularly remember trudging home from kindergarten on my birthday. I still had half a bag of tootsie pops that I had shared with the rest of the class for my birthday. A few blocks from school, this German shepherd comes up to me and starts barking. I was pretty scared, and I was sure it was the bag of candy that it wanted. And I was too far from school to return, and too far from home to get there. How could I survive? Bear Grylls Survival Academy did not exist yet. Fortunately a car that was driving by saw what was going on, and started honking the horn until the dog went away. up.gif up.gif My childhood friend was the best tree climber in the neighborhood. His mom was worried he would crack his skull, so she bought him a hockey helmet, which he never wore. And I never saw him fall out of a tree once, except when we were up in a large apple tree picking apples, stuffing them in our sweatshirt pockets, and some bees attacked him, and then it wasn't so much a fall as quasi-controlled rapid descent which I think resulted in a sprained ankle. Once my Mom sent us over to what we called "the orchard" to pick some apples for apple crisp dessert. We were picking the apples into pails. As we picked, my friend noticed a smaller nearby tree that had extremely large apples on it. They were incredibly large, in fact larger than I had ever seen, or seen since. And you didn't have to climb the tree to pick them. However, the tree did not appear to be in the orchard itself, but rather bordering the orchard. Hmm...it was in someone else's yard, but close to the edge. Perhaps they just mowed around the tree but it wasn't really in their yard? I think that was how the rationalization went. It only took about five or six of those apples to fill a pail, which was extraordinary. When I gave the two pails to my Mom, the one pail, small and runty, the other, humungous, she immediately asked where they came from. Apples like this had never graced our home. Gulp. Minutes later I was walking the apples back across the street to give them to their true owner.

Touron is a nougat of Arabic origin made with almonds and honey or sugar, without which it would just not be Christmas in Spain.
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JPH
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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 7:40 pm 
We had a big pine tree in our front yard that we referred to simply as "the climbing tree". One day my dad brought us all out to the tree, pulled a milk jug full of water to the top with a string, said "remember, if you fall out of the tree, this is your head, so be careful", then let the string go and we all watched the jug fall and explode. That was the safety talk and we went back to climbing the tree. up.gif

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DigitalJanitor
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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 8:09 pm 
JPH wrote:
We had a big pine tree in our front yard that we referred to simply as "the climbing tree". One day my dad brought us all out to the tree, pulled a milk jug full of water to the top with a string, said "remember, if you fall out of the tree, this is your head, so be careful", then let the string go and we all watched the jug fall and explode. That was the safety talk and we went back to climbing the tree. up.gif
HA! Love it! We only had gravel to ride on around the house where I grew up, so when we inherited The Old Blue Bike (almost all my cousins started on that beautiful beaster Schwinn, and it's still going strong!!) dad took the pedals off and let me coast around inside the garage on the only available smooth pavement until I got the hang of balancing and steering a bit. Then one wonderful weekend dad put the pedals back on, took it up to the gravel road above the back yard that went back through a little neighborhood, and announced: "Here's your bike. Don't ride it on the paved road or I'll take it away. If you fall, I don't want to hear a bunch of whining or I'll take it away." Then he silently lumbered back into the house. These were no idle threats. Dad came from a perennially broke Irish Catholic family of 10, a kid had better be d**n grateful the old man could get him or her food and enough clothing to prevent nudity and hypothermia... much their own BIKE. So I rolled around on the dirt and gravel with some other kids hanging around, fell down a few times, got back up and back on, and taught myself how to ride a bike in the space of an afternoon. My parents finally admitted when I was an adult that they were watching my progress through the window, lol. The whole bike thing really went to hades in a handbasket later on in life though, so maybe this is a cautionary tale. dizzy.gif winksmile.gif

~Mom jeans on wheels
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Badger
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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 9:37 pm 
iron wrote:
nuclear_eggset wrote:
Helmets are an easily documented safety improvement with little to no downside.
helmets IMV, helmets, like with many other pieces of "safety equipment" we use (avi beacon, ice tools, avalanche course, etc), actually increase the risk tolerance we take.
Helmets...sigh. I was riding my bike one day- age 8, learning all the possibilities of fun that a bike could provide. My bother was ahead of me and had ridden to the bottom of a steep hill. I started to coast down with no hands! So cool! Then I yelled -'Watch this - I'm doing this with my eye's shut'! Yeah, this is where things take a bad turn. I suddenly felt my body become weightless. Curious I opened my eyes- just in time to see my head collide with a boulder at a high rate of speed. It was also the last thing I saw that day. I woke up from a coma 5 days later. Wear a helmet.

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Badger
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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 9:58 pm 
Badger wrote:
iron wrote:
nuclear_eggset wrote:
Helmets are an easily documented safety improvement with little to no downside.
helmets IMV, helmets, like with many other pieces of "safety equipment" we use (avi beacon, ice tools, avalanche course, etc), actually increase the risk tolerance we take.
Helmets...sigh. I was riding my bike one day- age 8, learning all the possibilities of fun that a bike could provide. My bother was ahead of me and had ridden to the bottom of a steep hill. I started to coast down with no hands! So cool! Then I yelled -'Watch this - I'm doing this with my eye's shut'! Yeah, this is where things take a bad turn. I suddenly felt my body become weightless. Curious I opened my eyes- just in time to see my head collide with a boulder at a high rate of speed. It was also the last thing I saw that day. I woke up from a coma 5 days later. Wear a helmet.
Lesson learned pays off - Fast forward 40 + years. I was riding my motorcycle up Pike street when some guy decided to speed across 5 lanes to beat traffic. I lost. He T-boned me. I ricocheted off the front of his car and was thrown about 35-40 feet where I impacted the pavement. When I woke up I wiggled my toes and knew I had a main line connection so anything else could be made out of plastic/steel. I digress. After all was said and done I inspected my helmet. The damage said it all. Wear a helmet.

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boot up
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boot up
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PostMon Mar 31, 2014 9:59 pm 
I worked in a bike shop before real helmets were invented. I was always surprised at how many customers HAD to ride bikes, because they could not get a drivers license due to getting seizures caused by head injuries from bicycle crashes. That convinced me to be in the first wave of "marshmallow heads" after years of riding without helmets, including several headers where the "tuck and roll" practice from the tumbling program at the grade school I went to really paid off. My daughters were trained from the start....you get on anything with wheels, you put on a helmet. Period. Total ingrained habit. The only time that was put to the test was my oldest daughter getting ahead on a neighborhood walk, with her on her tricycle. I rounded the corner and saw at the bottom of the hill a group of neighborhood kids clustered around my daughter. Not a good sign. Tricycles are LESS stable than bicycles, especially in turns. She walked away with a few scrapes, instead of a coma. That was worth the helmet habit right there. Teach them to be safe and you don't have to be overly protective.

friluftsliv
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JPH
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PostTue Apr 01, 2014 6:31 am 
boot up wrote:
My daughters were trained from the start....you get on anything with wheels, you put on a helmet. Period. Total ingrained habit.
I wonder if there is less of the increased risk tolerance issue when it's just part of your kit from day 1 vs a guy that starts wearing a helmet when he's 30.

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Bedivere
Why Do Witches Burn?



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PostTue Apr 01, 2014 12:35 pm 
boot up wrote:
including several headers where the "tuck and roll" practice from the tumbling program at the grade school I went to really paid off.
No argument against helmets here, but learning how to fall is equally important and is hopefully the kind of thing you pick up when you're little and don't have as much mass that falls as far. As an early teen I was riding my ten-speed as fast as I could down a steep hill and aimed for the banked edge of a driveway, intending to use the "ramp" as a small jump up onto the sidewalk before reaching the busy cross-street at the bottom. I overshot the edge of the driveway and the front wheel hit the curb, changing the bike's direction rather dramatically. Physics being what it is, my body didn't change direction at all at that speed and I sailed over the grass parking strip before hitting the sidewalk. Fortunately a lifetime of skiing, bike riding, and being thrown down flights of stairs by a much older/larger brother had given me the muscle memory to react appropriately and I rolled multiple times into someone's front yard. Torn skin on my shoulder, a deeply skinned knee, two skinned palms and a couple of bruises summed up the damage to me. The bike had a bent crank and front wheel but I managed to ride it home, bleeding into my shoe the whole way. A helmet would probably have been a good idea in that scenario too, but fortunately it wasn't needed. In all the falls I've ever taken, I've only hit my head once and that was when I slipped on the wet floor of the showers the very first day we were all required to take showers in gym class in 7th grade. Knocked myself clean out. Talk about mortal embarrassment for a 13yo kid... I don't know if they'd let you wear a helmet there.

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coldrain108
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coldrain108
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PostTue Apr 01, 2014 12:56 pm 
I see folks riding bikes in traffic w/o helmets. That is crazy. The driver of the car is surrounded by 2500lbs of steel, no way they are going to be paying enough attention - they don't have to - yeah they might feel bad for a while if they crush you, but unless they were drunk or speeding that is about all that will happen to them. You on the other hand will, if lucky, need a drool cup for the remainder of your life. Always remember, the laws of physics trump the laws of man. Self righteousness doesn't help. Should rock climbers stop wearing helmets? - they look really dorky.
and most certainly increase the risk tolerance, along with ropes and pro. I remember my first experience with hot things - I touched a metal can that was in a fire - I never did that again! One of my earliest childhood memories. Experience is a good teacher...if you survive it. I played football as a kid, learned how to take a hit and how to fall - sports are about more than just winning and losing. Can I buy some insurance to cover _______?

Since I have no expectations of forgiveness, I don't do it in the first place. That loop hole needs to be closed to everyone.
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herdingcats
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PostTue Apr 01, 2014 2:02 pm 
Boy, are we covering some mileage in this post or what?! Let's see... Helmets: I remember this conversation on a ski lift 9 or 10 years ago. I get a giggle to this day. I was one of the first adults to start wearing a ski helmet in this area around that time. I was on a three seat lift with a couple who were laughing out-loud at how silly they thought I looked. I had to turn down the super-awesome stereo system wired into my helmet to respond... I had to explain to them that we in the Pac NW were behind the curve on this. In CO and UT the big ski areas were peppered with helmets to the tune of 70-80% by that point, and that it was because of recent events (high-profile injuries / deaths including Michael Kennedy in 1997 and Sonny Bono a year later in 1998) that so many folks were finally paying attention. I then also explained how their 1980's skis likely needed a refresh too, along with their apparent lack of understanding that sometimes the new thing comes into existence because of a need. In this case, a need to reduce head injuries on the slopes was the culprit. Sometimes progress is good. Seems obvious. The male in that pair got injured that day. I hope he was OK, but I can't help but see some Karma at work there. As for me, I've been in two accidents where the helmet likely saved me. One was a poorly timed move on my part, the other was a crashing boarder slamming into me in my blind spot. I don't think it was her fault, but my little safety measure worked for me that day. Oh, and I wear a seat belt while driving too. I am crystal clear that one saved my life at least once. That also seems obvious. CPS: Man, if hiking 6 miles with your kids is CPS-worthy, I'm in bad shape. Last year I took the bunch on a 10 mile day hike. The then-3yo had a tough time of it, but he was carried by me most of the time anyway. Everyone else did great. Overprotective parents: my wife and I have three boys. I have a real hard time telling them no when they want to have neighborhood adventures. But alas, I've seen one too many speeders zoom around our corner (right in front of our driveway), so I just can't put them in harms-way unless I've had some time to educate them. My two oldest are 11 and 14, and they're allowed to roam to local parks, schools and the local grocery store that's about a mile away. Past that, I have a hard time letting the 11yo go much further. The 14yo hears me ask him why he needs a ride so often... after all, he has a bike. smile.gif I try to make it up through grand Scouting adventures where I more or less let them go. So, I really don't think of myself as the overprotective version... just mindfully aware and cautious. My brother and I had it pretty good. My boys have it pretty good too, but my wife and I are a bit more protective than our parents were. On the other hand, my parents had us ride in the back of the pick-up...

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contour5
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PostTue Apr 01, 2014 2:14 pm 
My dad tossed us off the end of the dock and yelled: "Sink or Swim!" We swam like dolphins. True story.

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sarbar
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PostTue Apr 01, 2014 2:24 pm 
When I was in high school my Aunt's husband drifted off the road when he took his eyes off the road. It was a no shoulder/deep ditch. Him and his employee went over and kept going till they hit a power pole. They both lived, freakishly due to his not wearing a seat belt and the other guy had one on. But before you think this is a tale saying you shouldn't, it isn't. My now ex-Uncle was never the brightest bulb and a few years back wrecked his motorcycle, and he wasn't wearing a helmet. He has a permanent brain injury now. The state tried to get my brother to let him move in while he was in rehab (even though he had been divorced from our Aunt for years!). He is a changed man and angry a lot now. No way. Point being is, there will always be lucky moments but there are also plenty of bad ones that could be prevented. Yeah, I grew up rising bikes without helmets. I also have scars all over my head (I know because I shaved my head when I was 15 tongue.gif). I was lucky though, I was a timid bike rider. When I think about how I rode in college years though...yeah, not good. I rode in traffic, flying over train track crossings as the gates went down. Stupid, stupid. I was lucky I never got hit. (Which is sad as I knew 2 people personally who were hit by trains in Sedro Wooley in their cars, at different times!)

https://trailcooking.com/ Eat well on the trail.
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