It had been raining nonstop for 13 days and our 12-man film crew had been unable to get a single action shot of 1968 Olympic gold medal winner Jean-Claude Killy during that September in New Zealand. The meter was running and we were already way over budget. The volcano Ruapehu just would not let us go to work. However, the nearby volcano of Narahoe stood bright and shiny only six miles away in the New Zealand winter sun.
We stood in the rain and watched it blow up four days in a row. My beginning geology course in college told me that it took twenty-four hours for this semi-active volcano to build up enough pressure to erupt once again.
If I planned it properly we could hire a helicopter and fly Killy, my cameraman Don Brolin, Leo LaCroix and myself to the summit and get a lot of pictures of skiing on this active volcano and leave by the afternoon and have one of the 13 episodes of “Killy Skis the World” finally in the can.
Brolin and I loaded up our camera gear and skis and in 10 minutes we were looking down into a smoking, roaring crater of a volcano building up pressure. We quickly got some good shots of the smoke and surrounding snow as we waited for Killy and his teammate Leo LaCroix to come back in the helicopter.
Filming them shoving off from the rim of the crater with the smoke belching out in the background and skiing along the edge of the ashes and rocks was pretty spectacular. How can anyone miss getting good ski action of a man who had just won 17 World Cup races in one season and three gold medals in the winter Olympics.
After five or six trips up and down the volcano, it began to get a little dicey because we were getting close to its estimated eruption time. On one run the mountain was really jiggling with the impending eruption and so it became difficult keep the camera steady. It was already 3 p.m., 30 minutes before the anticipated eruption.
The helicopter pilot reluctantly took us back to the crater for one more run. The crater was a lot louder and some ash was now coming out in a steady volume but the shots of Killy and LaCroix against the smoke and ashes were really great.
Killy and LaCroix did not stop where we wanted them to but skied right on down to where the helicopter was waiting with its engine running and blades already turning. By the time Don and I had our cameras put away into our rucksacks, the helicopter had taken off for the 10-minute ride back to the hotel. That meant that Don and I had to wait 20 minutes before it would be our turn to load up and escape the eruption.
The pilot in his tweed suit, necktie and saddle shoes set the helicopter down within 20 feet of where we were standing and it was the quickest helicopter loading of my filming career. Don and I climbed in and as we were fastening our seat belts the engine revved up, the tail lifted up and as we gathered speed and altitude, we slowly turned left, headed for the hotel and looked out the windshield to the left. We watched Narahoe erupt.
Later in our studio in Hermosa Beach, I got to preview the show for the sponsors. The word that came down from the suits in the agency made us take out any reference to the volcano because they said no one would believe anyone would be that stupid to do what we had documented on Kodachrome film.
Amazing footage like that languishes, I presume, in the film company’s vault today.