On a rainy Sunday afternoon, my neighbor Howard Wright, who is a former airline pilot, came by my house with his computer and showed me a film about half a dozen paragliders flying down from the summit of Mount Blanc in France. After almost a 15-minute decent, they landed in a village below.
The first time I saw a film of the 15,000-foot-high Mount Blanc was 60 years ago. That was when Bill Dunaway, who used to own and publish the Aspen Times together with another mountaineer made the first descent of the treacherous the treacherous north face on skis.
This steep glacier was first climbed in the late 1800s and has claimed the lives of hundreds of people.
The thick glacial ice slowly moves down the hill, crevasses open and close and giant ice blocks rise up and tumble over. I know how dangerous a glacier can be having been on a lot of them with my camera.
One time in France I took a chance and was able to climb up and stand on a giant ice block and get really unusual shots looking down at my skiers as they went by one at a time below me and jumping across a fairly wide deep blue crevasse.
The next day, I was filming on another part of the same glacier when I saw the government rescue helicopter headed for where I had been filming the day before.
Another television camera crew had seen my ski tracks to the top of that same ice block. While the cameraman was on top of the ice block, it tipped over and, as it did, it broke up and part of it crushed the cameraman.
For some unknown reason I have always had freedom on my shoulder and luck on my side, whether it was on the Tasman Glacier in New Zealand or on the glacier in Chamonix called La Mir de Glace. On a sunny day sometimes several thousand people will ski down it and many stop part way and have lunch in the bright sunshine.
On that sunny Sunday a skier slid into a narrow crevasse and only dropped down about 15 feet. People quickly ran over to help the victim, who was standing upright with his lower ski and boot wedged into both sides of the narrowing crevasse.
Someone was lowered down with an ice axe and attempted to chip out the ice that was holding the ski and boot, but the crevasse was closing up faster than the rescuer could chip away at it. The man stuck in the crevasse was slowly crushed to death.
I always relied on the skill and knowledge of mountain men who knew almost exactly what the snow and ice would do under almost any circumstances. “Almost any circumstance” is the definitive phrase here.
If I wrote all of the stories that I have heard or experienced during those many winters in the mountains, I am sure that I could write an entire book about it.
But I have drifted away from the movie that Howard Wright showed me – the men paragliding down the north face of Mount Blanc. You quickly get caught up in the beauty of the day and the colored parachutes set against the tumbling ice blocks and awesome crevasses. In reality, an unseen sudden gust of wind tumbling down from the summit could instantly deflate their parachutes.
As the first few paragliders in close formation are being filmed from the helicopter with a village in the background you begin to wonder where they will land with their skis on.
They glide in for a landing on wet grass after completing the first ever journey of its kind down a 15,000-foot-high mountain.