Hey skihobo,
I walked down the mountain after the crash but I knew that my neck was #%$!ed. I didn't know it was broken but the medics had been alerted and they immediately treated it like a spinal and taped me to a backboard. I was ambulanced to the local hospital where I had X-rays taken but they couldn't tell from the X-rays whether it was broken or not. Taped back down to the backboard and ambulanced for 2.5 hours to the closest major hospital, where they were able to do a CT scan (after waiting in Emerg for over 14 hours!). The CT scan showed that the C1 had definitely been broken.
From this, I would say that detecting a fracture in your vertebrae with only an X-ray is extremely difficult, so your ER should have given you a CT scan/MRI in order to make certain. Hope you've healed up well man! Thanks for the positive words on the article.