A while back, I skied in 15 inches of powder snow that had fallen on top of the three feet that had fallen in the previous four days. I was skiing with some friends who live in Telluride and they were really extolling the virtues of all of the development that has taken place down there in the last 20 years.
The first time I saw Telluride, 30 years ago, I was awestruck with its natural beauty as I drove slowly down the main street and realized that all I had to do was turn on my camera and I would have the award-winning promotional movie my client had hired me to produce.
The man who was to show me around town and ski for my cameras had lived there since the old mining days and was reported to be a good skier.
He was a great skier.
He had managed to survive in Telluride for almost 20 years after the mines closed and had bought three Victorian houses for $25 each. That’s right $25 each. He would have bought more of them, but he couldn’t afford to.
We worked on the film for a couple of weeks in delightful powder snow and I kept asking the handful of people living in town in those days, “Why is the major resort development being done down here in the valley instead of up on the shoulder of the mountain where the good skiing is?”
No one had an answer.
The film I produced for Telluride worked well and my next film production job was a ski film for the French government and Air France, so my Telluride client asked me if I would take his film with me to Europe and show it to the Swiss company that had put up the money to build his first two chairlifts.
Two weeks later in Basel, Switzerland, I walked into a building that looked like a 1935 bank building in a major industrial city anywhere in the world. It was very gray and drab outside and formal, and very intimidating inside. Across a wide lobby area, a single 40-watt light bulb illuminated a small window with bars that was similar to that of a 1920s bank teller. A very stern looking, overweight lady, with her gray hair pulled back into a tight bun, glanced up at me as I walked across the wide marble floored room, my cowboy boots making alarmingly loud sounds.
“Ja?”
“I am supposed to show the director of your company a copy of my film about Telluride,” I replied.
“Moment. I will tell him.”
The clock on the wall ticked loud enough to almost drown out the traffic noises that crept through the thick entry door as I waited, and waited, and waited for Herr Director.
While waiting, I was attracted to the only thing visible on any of the dark mahogany walls. It was a framed document that upon closer examination became an antique, hand written accounting page. The date on it seemed to be very misleading because it was dated Juno 7, 1542.
Later at lunch, Herr Director explained that, “Yes, the date was correct, and it is a document from the first year this company was in business. And we have been doing business at the same location for over 400 years.”
Further questioning revealed that their primary business was financing wool merchants, not ski resort developers. He went on to explain that most of their wool came from Australia and New Zealand. Their vast holdings of sheep in Australia and New Zealand were so large, several million head, that many years ago they went into the shipping business. Nowadays to get their sheep products to market, after raising the sheep and then shearing and cleaning the wool, they haul it to Europe in their own cargo ships.
All during World War II, their company had shipped their wool from Sydney, Australia, to Genoa, Italy. From there they shipped it by train to Switzerland where it was woven into fabric. The fabric was then sold and shipped to Germany where it was made into uniforms for the German army.
It’s a long convoluted journey from raising sheep in the outback of Australia, to Italy, to Switzerland, to Germany, where the gold from the sale was earned by a four hundred year old Swiss company, and eventually loaned to a man in Beverly Hills so he could build the first ski lifts in Telluride, Colo.
The lure of skiing does indeed create strange and interesting partners.