Until the early 1950’s, a summer without skiing was a lot different than it is today. Summer, in earlier times, meant frequent trips to the garage to check on whether or not your skis had warped or twisted in the heat. The skis were all made out of laminated wood and didn’t have plastic bottoms.

To try and prevent the warping, there were a few tricks that people did. Some of my friends would take their metal edges off and cement the screws in the wood when they put them back on. Other people who were trying to get a third season out of their skis would put copper rivets in some of the edge screw-holes. And almost everyone I knew scraped the finish off of the top of the ski and re-varnished the wood. We would patiently rub the tops down with steel wool between coats of varnish, and while we were varnishing them, we would talk of rope tows and what would today be called primitive accommodations. We planned trips to resorts within an all night drive of where we lived, and my married friends got their wives to cook up tuna or cheese casseroles that we could heat up in an electric frying pan in a cheap motel.

It would be 1953 or ’54 before the minimum wages were over twenty-five cents an hour, so a two dollar rope tow ticket took some people eight hours of work just to earn the money to buy one. No matter, most of our ski clothes all had diluted, grey-rope-tow-hemp splashed all over them.

After a summer of surfing every weekend, some people had their entire winter ski trip schedule all mapped out. If it snowed in the San Bernardino or San Gabriel mountains of Southern California, we would, of course, drive to these nearby mountains since they rim the Los Angeles Basin to the east. Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains is over 10,000 feet high and its steep sides offer some truly spectacular skiing when they get snow. However, in the late forties we had to climb up for every turn we made going down. Summer was when you tried to keep your legs in shape so when you finally drove to the snow, you could climb and ski all day long and not have it bother you.

The other thing that was missing in the late forties and early fifties was plastic on the bottom of your skis. We laboriously put on layer after layer of lacquer as a running surface and then guessed at what kind of wax to put over it when you finally got to the snow. The warmer the snow, the softer the wax was about all I knew. I used to just watch the hotshots and then borrow their wax. I was usually a weekend behind and sometimes I climbed up and walked back down with big globs of snow stuck to the wrong wax on the bottom of my skis.

The laminated wood skis had almost no torsional rigidity no matter how many coats of varnish you put on them. As you skied across an icy patch, the tip of the ski would twist off towards the valley below and so you leaned farther forward so you could put more pressure on the tips of your ski. That’s why most of the early photographs of skiers show them leaning very far forward. Arguments were also made about long poles or short poles. The short pole aficionados thought that if the poles were short it would make you lean farther forward when you were skiing.

When I went to a friend’s house to watch him varnish his skis, or he came to mine, we got in lengthy and complicated discussions about camber, rigidity, placement of bindings, which ski to stem and esoteric stuff such as that.

At the end of the ski season we had an eight foot long piece of two by four lumber that we clamped the tips and tails of our skis onto. There was another smaller piece of wood under the binding to keep the camber in the ski until it could feel the soft caress of powder snow the following winter.

We took very good care of our pile of stuff because skis already cost as much as $24.00 a pair for the top of the line model. I spent an entire winter in Sun Valley skiing every day on a pair of $21.95 Northland seconds that I got in trade for painting a sign at Pete Lane’s ski shop. They were seconds because they had a knot in the wood up near the tip and were less than aesthetically perfect, but they skied perfectly for me.

It was not until the winter of 1948/’49 when the French National ski team showed up in Sun Valley with offsets edges that we started chiseling out the wood above our edges so that we too could have offset edges. Nevermind that we didn’t know what they were for and that the French also sharpened their edges.

The enjoyment level for us was just as much as it is today for the many skiers, who when they get to their computer, with a few strokes, make all of the arrangements for their ski vacation- including condo, airplane tickets, rental car, lift tickets and rental equipment that is all tuned up, waxed and ready to go. You have to do it that way today because everyone is so busy texting each other instead of sitting around in a garage working on their equipment and reliving the past and planning the future.

I’m lucky I enjoyed it then and I can hardly wait until I start looking for the snow reports.

- Warren Miller

For great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren’s wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/warrenmiller.  To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, www.warrenmiller.org. Copyright 2010

For the last three years or so, I have been busy writing and drawing three different books. One book is about aging, which is something we all have to deal with. The second one is a cartoon book about golf. While doing the illustrations for this book, I discovered that “life is too short to learn how to play golf.” The third book, and the most exciting to me, is my autobiography. I started it a year ago with my co-author, Mort Lund, and so far we have written about my life up to the seventh grade, with 72 more years to come.

I heard about this great way of self-publishing recently, that some gazillion dollar company has offered to anyone with access to a computer, so I set out to try and find all about how I too could self-publish one or more of my books. Since I already self-published nine different books during my filmmaking career, I had a few questions that I needed answers to. Simple questions such as: what different size books do they offer, the cost of different sized books, how many signatures (16 page units) can they bind in one book, what about hard cover or soft cover, what do they require of me in submitting my manuscript, photos and art work, what is the cost difference in color and black and white photos and art work, etc.?

Not being your normal teen-aged computer wizard, I tried to follow the directions on my screen. I registered two different times during a three hour ordeal. I finally gave up and called customer service. I heard the standard taped message from somewhere deep within India: “This message may be recorded for quality control purposes. Someone will be with you in a minute.” I then got to listen to an entire piano concerto from end to end. Finally someone came on the line. “May I help you?” And I proceeded to tell the voice my problem. The voice replied, “I will see what I can do.” I got to listen to another piano concerto in its entirety before I heard from the voice again, “someone will be in touch with you in the near future.”

I thought I would try the same drill with another voice, so I went through the same thing once again with the same read-from-a-script answers. When I asked, “Is it possible to speak to a supervisor?” I had to listen to more piano concerto music. An agonizing five minutes later, the same voice said, “We are not allowed to go over there.”

Eventually I did find out what “will be in touch with you in the near future” means to this gazillion dollar publishing company. It means that I will hear from someone within 24 hours. Since this whole charade happened on a Friday afternoon, am I expected to sit by my phone until Saturday afternoon? If the company is so busy that they can only return a phone call any time within 24 hours, something is very wrong.  If I owned a company today and it took me 24 hours to return a phone call, I just might hire a couple of the 2,000,000 out-of-work people and teach them how to answer questions from potential customers such as myself. Can I wait until sometime next week to get my information? I will have to, unless I choose another publishing company in the meantime.

I think this whole hurry up and get it done expectation is a function of way too much information at our fingertips. Cell phones, iPads, iPods, texting, you name it. When someone shows me their Blackberry, I show them my white berry. It’s a small 3×5 spiral notebook that fits in my back pocket and I always have a pen in my front pocket. I have been creating and selling stuff since I was 11 years old, and I managed to do very well with the old fashioned way of writing notes to myself and calling personally to answer the needs of potential customers. Do I need to carry around a device that can hold 1,500 musical tunes? No! How would I ever learn to use it? If I had the sudden urge to listen to Rachmaninoff?

Do I need or want to get my three books published? Yes! Do they have to be printed by tomorrow? No! I think many people today just can’t handle such an abundance of instant information. Especially when you can’t get it from a company except by computer. It took me almost two years to draw all the cartoons for my golf book. I probably will sell it a different way. I just have to dodge and weave for a little longer to get the job done, just as I did for the 55 years that I was making ski movies. In those days, I had to wait for someone to build a ski resort before I could make a movie of it.  This time I might or might not wait for the message from that someone in India who will call me back within 24 hours.  

- Warren Miller

For great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren’s wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/warrenmiller.  To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, www.warrenmiller.org. Copyright 2010

I read an ad on my computer the other night it and it was hard for me to believe such a thing was possible. For $49.95 you can buy a ballpoint pen that will not only write in your checkbook (yes, I still use mine!), but will also do the following things: record video, snap photos, use a built-in camera that can take as many as 4,000 still photos or 75 minutes of video with a microphone, and use a USB connector so that you can upload everything to your computer.

The pen ad triggered a lot of memories of getting on a chairlift with a rucksack full of camera gear over sixty years ago. I had a hand-wind Bell and Howell 70da that held 100 feet of film capable of capturing two and half minutes of footage on each 100 foot roll of film. It had three lenses- normal, wide angle and a two-power telephoto. I usually carried about 20, 100-foot rolls of film to get me through the day. I also carried a heavy tripod with ski pole baskets on the legs to keep it from sinking too far in the snow.

The camera cost $256.00 and the film cost $10.00 a roll. The rucksack weighed in the 25-pound range, not counting a bag of Trail Mix I would pack for lunch so that I could work all day without interruption. (Trail Mix loose in my parka pocket, along with down feathers, etc, was the first offering I gave my future wife for a lunch out. That was on the chairlift the day after I’d met her, and yes, she’s still with me 25 years later!)

In the mid 1970’s, I finally got far enough ahead financially to buy a state of the art Arriflex with a 12 to 120 zoom lens. That camera also took 100-foot rolls of film, but it was electrically driven by a heavy battery belt. It could handle a 400-foot roll, but the magazines were too heavy and required a dark room to load the film in them. So again I packed around 20, 100-foot rolls of color film. That camera, film and battery belt moved my rucksack into about the 35-pound area. I never did actually weigh it because I might have quit my job filming skiers or snowboarders if I found out how heavy it was.

The first fifteen years I made my movies I did all of the photography for a couple of reasons: 1) I could not afford to hire someone else to do it; and 2) I really enjoyed seeing things for the first time and then sharing my discoveries with my audiences. I see a lot of that sharing now with the use of digital/electronic cameras. People are shooting everyone, everywhere and then sending the pictures to everyone else they know.

When I first filmed in Europe in 1952 I couldn’t find chairlifts anywhere, even though I took pictures in St Moritz, Davos, Klosters, Zurs, Lech and Arosa. Of course all of that has changed and so many more people can enjoy the freedom of standing at the top of a hill where everyone is equal.

My camera and my skis were a magic carpet to the world for me. Once I was able to start hiring cameramen to cover places I didn’t have time to get to, I did enough research and had enough experience to direct them before they left my office in Hermosa Beach, CA. We all had the same mission. WE had to be the first person on the lift in the morning and the last person off the hill at night. All of us carried the same 30 or 40 pounds of camera equipment from sunup to sundown. The only difference in the weight during the day was the Trail Mix that was no longer in our rucksacks, but instead in our gradually increasing waistlines.

The first time I took any 16mm ski movies was at Squaw Valley on a two foot powder day and they were of Emile Allais, the ski school director. It was the fall of 1949, and I naively put my Bell and Howell in the brown leather carrying case with the red velvet lining in which it had came from the factory. After the third shot, I left the leather carrying case at the chairlift loading platform because I was wasting too much time getting ready to take the pictures. Time was always of the essence when we were filming so we could get powder snow shots before anyone else would track up the hill.

We, particularly Don Brolin and I, led the charge for a lot of years. Then Brian Sisselman joined us and between the three of us we managed to film on every continent from Africa to Alaska, from Japan to Antarctica and from New Zealand to Zermatt. I think we all had the same drive to share what we were privileged to see firsthand. No time clocks, just get those images on emulsion and get them back to the editor in our Hermosa studio, so we could share what we had been privileged to film and in the process earn a living while doing it.

There never was such a thing as a bad day, no matter where in the world we were trying to get pictures. Powder snow, rain, black ice, sub-zero temperatures in the Antarctic, behind the Iron Curtain in Russia or above 18,000 feet in three feet of powder snow in the Himalayas. Those over 35 pound rucksacks we toted all over the world are now retired.

Fifty years or more was long enough lugging rucksacks, and I ended up an inch shorter than when I started lugging mine around. It sure was a lot heavier and almost certainly a lot more rewarding than lugging around a three ounce, $49.95, combination ball point pen, video, still camera with a microphone. But it may be fun having one in my new era, as I try to catch up with this century.

- Warren Miller

For great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren’s wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/warrenmiller.  To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, www.warrenmiller.org. Copyright 2010

The evening after Christmas in 1986, I was riding up to a party at a mountain restaurant in Beaver Creek when I met Frank Wells for the first time. Frank and his wife Luanne had a condo in the Vail Village. The next morning, he and I went out skiing together.

From then on, almost every time he came to Vail, we managed to spend many of his days there skiing together. Occasionally my wife Laurie would ski with us, and she was the only person who could beat Frank to the bottom of the hill. He was a fanatic on being in shape. From time to time he would have me meet him at the top of the mountain, have someone carry his skis up on the lift and he would jog to the top before we skied hard all day.

One afternoon, I stopped by his condo with some art work to show him. I had created a credit card with Mickey Mouse on the front of it and told him, “Anyone who put that card on the table at a power lunch would have it picked up by the waiter.” Unfortunately, Disney has an absolute ban on the discussion of anything to do with money, so my idea was turned down. We probably skied together 15 or 20 days a year and got into some pretty lively discussions about everything, except his or my business.

In the spring of 1984, I got a phone call from Frank and he said, “Miller, come on out to Elko and ski with us this weekend. I’ve rounded up a bunch of friends and it’s the last weekend of the year ski celebration.” I said, “Frank, I can’t do that because Laurie and I have our trailer all packed up to go to the San Juan Islands for the summer and work on our new house.”

Frank called me back twice the next week and finally on Thursday he said, “Miller, this entire weekend is on me. It won’t cost you a dime. Free room and board, airplane ticket and helicopter rides. Where can you ever get a better deal than that?”

 Again I declined and said, “We are leaving Vail for the summer and the date is chiseled in granite because we have to meet our San Juan Island plumber on Saturday. Call me when you get back and thanks for the invitation.”

 The drive from Vail to 90 miles north of Seattle is a two day, almost thousand mile long drive, and when you have a dog and a couple of cats, it can seem like a two week drive. We loaded up- and wrapped up in tarps- the stuff we would take to our new cottage in the islands and we started driving.

When we got there, it took the usual two or three days to get unpacked and moved into our 900 square foot cottage which was really a three-car garage built in 1934. I had remodeled it into a house with two bedrooms and it became our summer home for the next nine years.

On Tuesday afternoon the phone rang and it was Frank Wells’ son. What he said almost knocked me off of my feet.

“My mother would like you to speak at my father’s funeral.”

That was the first time I had heard about the helicopter accident. I went down and sat on the rocks overlooking the water and cried long and hard.

I thought about how Frank’s first real experience with snow and ice was when he was flying from Oxford in England to South Africa. He saw Mt. Kilimanjaro from the air and decided to land so he could take a closer look at it. The plane ground looped and they sat around a few days waiting for someone to come and help them. No one showed up, so they climbed the highest mountain on that continent. Frank later spent several years of his life trying to be one of the first people in the world to climb the highest mountain on all seven continents.

He, along with his climbing partner Dick Bass who developed Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah, climbed all of them except Everest. After Frank was named the president of The Walt Disney Company, Dick Bass went on to complete the Everest ascent himself.

 At the funeral, I had the privilege of saying a few words about Frank, along with Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and half a dozen other close friends. Frank was an incredible human being and in the many years that I was privileged to ski with him, talk with him and have dinner together with his wife Luanne and my wife Laurie, I never tried to get him interested in any of my hundreds of films that I had produced. He was my friend and that was enough for me.

Had I gone on that ski weekend in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada, I would have been sitting next to Frank Wells when that helicopter slammed into the ground at over 125 miles an hour. That’s something I have never quite gotten over.

He is missed.

- Warren Miller

For great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren’s wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/warrenmiller.  To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, www.warrenmiller.org. Copyright 2010