The first break is the deepest

I've broken a bone.  The first one for me, and this one hurts real bad.  Probably all of them hurt bad.  I broke my number 9 rib, which if you count on a friend from the top down, you'll get to it.  It is a few up from the floating ribs and I'm not quite sure the size, but I think I've eaten enough pig ribs to get a feel for the dimensions.  But probably smaller than a pigs.  Sounds tasty, right?  So here I am in Big Sky Ski Resort, in Montana, and we've been skiing for a few days, and we decided to go up to the top of the highest peak.  It was a long ride up with the Gondola, and when we arrived at the top we could see it was quite steep all around.  The south slope is the most gentle, but still a black diamond run.  I've done several black diamond runs and wasn't worried about the steepness, but as we began our descent, I noticed a lot of rocks.  It wasn't that the snow was deep and a few rocks stuck up, it was the snow was really thin, and rocks were underneath and everywhere.  The snowboard crunched and scraped from the rocks every few feet and I went over to a patch of untouched powder to get into deeper snow.  It wasn't deeper, in fact.  It was just the same, but not packed down, so I would sink into it and then hit the rocks.  I tried to go slowly and then turn and go slow again, but on one of the turns, I sped up a little (you have to speed up in the turns, because you point the board downhill for that short time) and then I fell.  I've fallen many times, and usually I slide a little bit, but this time, hidden in the powder, a rock was lurking.  It felt like a pillar kind of rock and I hit it with my side.  It hurt a lot, but when you feel the muscles tensing up and the pain diminish you know that it is worse than you think.  I tumbled a little, then came to a stop and lay back in the snow.  When i moved, I could feel a crunch.  Not a good kind of crunch, like the crunch of a bag of unexpected chips that you forgot you had in your pocket and discovered when you were hungry.  Not that kind of crunch at all.  So I figured I broke a rib, or two.  Lindsay was far down the hill, signaling for me to come on down and asking if I was all right and I eventually called her and said no.  She called the Ski Patrol, who arrived on scene and did all the Wilderness First Responder checks (things that I learned how to do last year) and put me in a sled and slid me down the hill.  That part was not fun.  It was a bumpy ride.  They also put me on oxygen, since I had trouble breathing and it was something like 11,000 ft.  Kind fellows.  Then they got me to the ambulance and to the hospital where they did an ultrasound to check for bleeding (and my spleen) and then an X ray to look at the bones.  I can't show you the actual X ray for me, because they didn't give it to me, but here is one I found online.  You can see the rib has a slight jump to it, and that is what you see with mine.  Not much else.
I'll be taking it easy for a while until it heals, hopefully in 4-6 weeks.