June 23, 2026
It will forever be a Christmas Colin Metz will never forget. In 2024, he was skiing with his dad at Winter Park Resort, a family holiday tradition, but this time something happened that changed his life.
"I was going up, and there's this little cliff that I always jump off of and I've been very comfortable with," Metz said. "I hit the jump and from what my dad said, I landed and then I overcorrected myself and I kind of went in a power slide and my ski got caught on another tree and then it was like a whiplash sort of thing. I went right into the other tree."
"We're trained to deal with anything and everything out on the mountain," said Mike Cravens, a member of the Winter Park Ski Patrol. Patrollers brought Metz down to the Denver Health Winter Park Medical Center, at the base of the mountain, with its Level V trauma team and Emergency Department, in addition to Urgent Care, Primary Care and Sports Medicine services. The Ski Patrol always has a clear line of communication into the Medical Center for any emergencies that might come up.
"I don't remember much of what happened, but I remember waking up and not being able to breathe and feeling almost like my shoulder blade was shattered," Metz recalled.
"He was hurting so badly," said Kim Birdseye, a registered nurse at the Winter Park Medical Center who cared for Metz that day. "He had some chest wall pain and rib pain."
An X-ray showed his lung had collapsed, an emergent issue. The team at Winter Park Medical Center rushed into action to get Metz stabilized.
"Having the ability to do that right at the bottom of the mountain is huge," said Michelle Metz, Colin's mother and a registered nurse at Denver Health's main hospital in Denver. Winter Park Medical Center is among a handful of ski resorts in the United States with a full emergency room on the mountain.
"That's the beautiful thing about being an ER like we are," said Birdseye. "We have the doctors, we have the splinting, we have everything we need to help (our patients)."
"We have gone the extra mile to get Level V trauma designation," said Darcy Selenke, MD, medical director of the Winter Park Medical Center. "We don't change our expectations of excellent care, no matter if you're a visitor or you're a longtime community member. Every person who walks through our door matters, and we want them to feel like they're being cared for in the best way possible."
Seamless care from Winter Park to Denver
The Winter Park team quickly determined that Metz would need further treatment, so once he was stabilized, they wanted to fly him down to Denver Health, which has one of the nation's leading Level I trauma centers and Denver's only full-service, American College of Surgeons-verified Level II Pediatric Trauma Center in Denver. Because the weather was so bad that day, Metz was not able to be flown out but was driven down in an ambulance instead. He made it just in time.
"I'll never forget Colin looking at me and the first thing he asked was, 'Am I going to be able to play baseball?'" Michelle Metz remembered her son saying when she met him in Denver. Colin Metz had received a scholarship to play in college in Kansas, something that was now in jeopardy due to his injuries.
He went into the operating room with two lung lacerations and his chest filled with blood. "They had to cut a little chunk of lung away to be able to appropriately sew up one of his lung lacerations," Michelle Metz said. "They pulled a liter of blood out of his chest cavity."
One month later, Colin Metz was back on the baseball diamond, feeling good and able to swing a bat again.
"I don't think any of that was possible without what everyone at Denver Health did for me," Colin Metz said. "The care is top tier. They saved my life."
