Unfortunately it wasn't anything dramatic looking. At first blush, even after Ashton took the crankset apart and showed it to me, it didn't really look like anything was amiss, other than there not being any way to fix the axle and the crank head back together again. A trained eye would have probably immediately spotted the evidence of a failed weld, but nothing really jumped out at me until he pointed it out. Even the manner in which it broke was pretty anticlimactic: I noticed something weird when my chain started rubbing on the front derailleur after I cleared that drop, and I couldn't shift into the big ring, so I got off to look at it and then realized the crank/spider was loose.

Jesus, that's gnarly. I hope he recovered.