New Film Explores Efforts to Protect Our Winters in Whitefish

In April 2022, Explore Whitefish and Whitefish Mountain Resort announced a multi-year strategic alliance with Protect Our Winters (POW) with a goal of raising awareness about climate change, exploring solutions to reduce emissions and empowering people to protect their communities, lifestyles and livelihoods from a warming planet. 

Starting in the spring of 2022, the alliance began working on a film that would encapsulate those goals, and in January released “75 Years, a Short Film from Whitefish, Montana About Protecting Our Winters,” written and produced by Brian Schott and edited by Justin Kauffman. Early on, Schott, Kauffman and Explore Whitefish marketing manager Dan Hansen began exploring how to bring a narrative about climate change to the screen in a succinct, relatable way.   

Protect Our Winters (POW) was founded by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones, who attributes his advocacy work to his love for snowboarding, as well as the shifting landscapes and shrinking snowpack he’s witnessed firsthand through the years. 

For Schott, selecting Maggie Voisin as a Whitefish Mountain Resort spokesperson who could confidently articulate POW’s mission-driven philosophy was an easy choice.

“I’ve been skiing Big Mountain for 20 years. I couldn’t imagine my life any other way,” Voisin, the Whitefish-born X Games medalist and Olympic freestyle ski phenom, says in the film’s opening sequence. “I hope to keep skiing, but the sad reality is the three Olympic sites I’ve competed at won’t be able to host another Olympics by the end of the century.”

Voisin was a member of the Olympic team in Sochi (2014), PyeongChang (2018), and Beijing (2022). Reports have since pegged the amounts of artificial snow utilized during those Winter Games installments at 80%, 90% and 100%, respectively. Even with new snowmaking technology, rising temperatures put harsh limits on future host sites for the games, experts say. 

To sharpen that point, another larger-than-life Montana figure appears as a narrator in the film — writer, wildlife biologist and Vital Ground Foundation founder Douglas Chadwick, who explains in “75 Years” that the earth is as hot as it’s been in 125,000 years. 

With Voisin and Chadwick driving the film’s narrative, “75 Years” takes the audience through some of the most striking changes to the local mountain landscapes over recent decades, as well as the work to rectify them. From the melting glaciers in Glacier National Park to Whitefish Mountains Resort’s efforts to replant the endangered whitebark pine, the film also touches on heightened wildfire risk throughout the west and the threat of warming rivers to native trout habitat.  

“From Maggie, it was a true exploration as we moved on from issue to issue,” Schott told the Beacon. “Initially we thought we were going to make a six-minute film, but by the time we finished with interviews, we had enough footage to make a 30-minute movie.” 

Rather than utilize a single narrator to guide viewers through the various issues, Schott instead relied on experts to describe their personal experiences with climate change and explain how local governments and nonprofits are making progress. 

Appearing throughout the film are Jim Williams, former regional supervisor for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Karl Anderson, a whitebark pine culturist for the Flathead National Forest; Bob Keane, associate director of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation; Dan Fagre, a retired U.S. Geologic Survey ecologist who led the Benchmark Glacier Project; and Whitefish Mayor John Muhlfeld.

Despite touching on complex and often divisive issues, “75 Years” turns each topic into something tangible that every local resident might encounter throughout the year, personalizing the consequences of climate change.

“We wanted to make this into a human issue,” Schott said. “We have purposefully made this an apolitical film. There’s no legislation or politics involved. Instead, we’re pointing out what’s happening locally, providing people with a little bit of inspiration, and elevating the conversation of what’s happening with climate, and what Whitefish is doing with its climate plan.”

The only policy mentioned in the film is the Whitefish Climate Action Plan, which the city adopted in 2018. However, that narrative focuses on the partnerships fostered within the city that are promoting strategies to counter climate change, such as making the farmers market zero-waste. 

Schott said the most difficult part of crafting the story arc was finding ways to tie such visceral depictions of climate change together without having it be a complete doom-and-gloom story. After wrestling with that portrayal, Schott found a natural hopeful end to the film by bringing it in a full circle and filming Voisin skiing on Big Mountain with the youth freestyle team. Their shouts of joy as they send it off jumps and swoop through terrain parks provide viewers with a promising blueprint for the future. 

“Skiing with the younger generation is one of my favorite things in the entire world,” Voisin tells viewers toward the end of the film. “Experiencing winter has made me who I am, and I can’t imagine a world where future generations wouldn’t get to experience that. We won’t be perfect, but we have to try.”

Check out “75 Years” online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWXZGWoKzk.

A previous version of this article mistakenly identified Douglas Chadwick as Doug Peacock.