In the first incident of its kind, a doctor skiing down the Haulback Trail at Sugarloaf, was hit by something very unusual - a deer. A whitetail deer attempting to cross the trail crossed paths with Dr. Ray Stone, while making a turn, resulting with both of them falling to the ground.

Stone, a family practice doctor who lives in New Gloucester and works at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston said he was utterly confused last month after being knocked-off completely while skiing.

"I was going pretty quick down the top half of Haulback, arcing from left to right and all of the sudden I just got knocked right off my feet and I was falling," Stone wrote in a letter to The Irregular, a weekly newspaper in Kingfield.

Longtime Maine skier and ski writer Dan Cassidy wrote a story about this incident that prompted Stone to write in that he was the skier who hit the deer. Cassidy wrote that he had never heard of a deer-skier collision in the 45 years of his skiing career.

"Never, never, never," Cassidy said. "I've never even heard of anybody encountering a deer on a ski trail, especially an alpine trail. I've seen an animal, like a fox, come out on occasion but never a deer."

However, both the deer and Stone were not injured after the incident.