Yep I was wearing a helmet unfortunately the helmet goes on my head not on my ass/hip
That was a sort of freak accident. Basically we had gone inside for about 40 minutes to have a beer or two, temps dropped rapidly while we were in, and this was the first lap after we went back out. I underestimated/did not account for the change in speed as the slopes firmed up, went in waaaaay to hot, didn't commit to anything and went off the lip off-balance. Overshot the landing transition and came down on my ass on the flat.
Out cold for about a minute. I called it a day after that. Could barely walk for a few days but was back on the slopes 4 or 5 days later I think. Hurt for quite a long while, and to this day now my right hip makes a clicking/popping noise that it never did before.
It is funny to look at this and like Sam's accident and even though we both got pretty wrecked (him moreso) we both got *really lucky* because both cases could've been worse.
But this is the only time in ~16 years of snowboarding that I ever really hurt myself until about a year later when I banged the same hip and saw stars falling off the wall ride...
General progression assuming you can already ollie:
Ollie off rollers and push piles, pop off side hits/transitions between trails, pop or ollie from the knuckle of jumps (to get a feel for landing on the transition), start hitting small jumps (5-10 footers - low consequence even if you knuckle them you won't blow out your knees or anything like you could on a much bigger jump), and then progress your way to larger & larger jumps.
I was never really comfortable trying anything bigger than about a 25 footer which are about as big as they ever build at Pine Knob or Mt. Holly. I have seen 50 foot jumps in person and they scared the shit out of me.