This winter on our annual migration to Montana for a winter of making turns, I brought all of the backup documents of my history of 60 years of making movies. I did that so I could work on my autobiography.
Stacked on a table near my computer are several dozen three-ring binders of Warren’s wanderings. Opening those binders is reliving a great life of wandering the world and discovering new places to film, mountains to climb, lifts to ride and local skiers to meet. My first 10 years of running the camera, anyone who could make a half-dozen turns without falling was an extreme skier and they were glad for the opportunity to ski for the camera (these people were usually the ski school directors). It would be almost a decade before locals began to out-shine the ski school directors.
It is hard to keep in perspective that in the early 1950s there were only 15 chairlifts in North America, a lift-line wait of 30 minutes was common, and Klaus Obermeyer was teaching skiing in Aspen. His pupils were always cold, so he cut up a down comforter and invented the quilted parka. It is hard to give private lessons to pupils who are freezing.
I was teaching a class in Sun Valley once when the snow turned to freezing rain. I thought that the pupils would all quit and not come back after lunch. Four ladies came back, and soaking wet I hung in there and taught in the freezing rain for two hours. They were four army nurses from Alaska and this was the best weather they had seen all winter.
I close that three-ring binder and pull down and open another one. In it, is the script for the first movie I made in Europe in 1952. I was completely hypnotized by The Matterhorn and the cable and cog railways that took me to hotels and restaurants in places that instantly changed my mind about what the world had to offer. All you had to do was somehow get to these kinds of places and my films took you there. These railways had been built prior to World War I and were so well-built and maintained that even today they look and perform as though they are brand new. On that trip to Switzerland I was so absorbed in the beauty of The Matterhorn that when I got home I found out I had the equivalent of 17 minutes of film of one view after another of The Matterhorn, any one of which will change your mind about what the beauty of a mountain can do for you. Getting to ski and film them was inspiring for me.
On one trip to Zermatt, Herman Geiger was just getting his glacial landing in a fixed-wing airplane to work without scaring you half to death. I was able to get a 20-minute ride for $10, and as I rattled down the bumpy glacier and off the edge of a very high cliff with my camera running, the pictures I got scared the heck out of my audiences the following winter. It was unfortunate that Herman was killed not too long after I flew with him.
After doing all of the photography for the first 15 years, I had gotten so busy that I could have used a 750-day year. That was when I hired Don Brolin to help me with the filming and I was able to spend more time editing, marketing and making the film company grow. That was five years before Mike Wiegele started up his helicopter operation in Blue River, B.C.
In the winter of 1969, I sent Rod Allin out there to document this new way to find powder snow. Mike did not even have two-way radios because he didn’t have any employees. That first winter he booked twelve skiers at $1,300 each for a week of skiing, and an entire new industry was created. It was then, and is today, the ultimate ski experience. Put it on your wish list because without a goal such as that, you just might spend your entire ski career at your local mountain. But then, at least you are having a ski career and who knows, maybe someday a wandering cameraman will film you and, like the Steven Stunning Ski School director at Illinois’ highest ski mountain, you too will be famous and people will ask for your autograph as you glide to a stop at the end of the lift line for your 22-minute wait for a ride to the top, for yet another taste of freedom on a mountain.