On a rainy Sunday afternoon, my neighbor, Howard Wright, who is a former airline pilot, came by the house with his computer and showed me a film you have to see to believe. It is a film about half a dozen paragliders flying down from the summit of Mount Blanc in France. After almost a 15-minute descent of the brilliantly colored parachutes flying over everything that is both beautiful and life threatening on a glacier, they land in a village below.
The first time I saw a film of 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 North Face of Mount Blanc on skis.
This steep glacier has to be taken seriously. It was first climbed in the late 1800s and has claimed the lives of hundreds of people who made a simple mistake in climbing technique while trying to reach the summit.
As the hundreds of feet 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. But, I never have been without an experienced guide except for the one day on the Tasman glacier on Mount Cook, New Zealand. I was filming triple Olympic gold medal winner Jean Claude Killy and Leo Lacroix with the help of my best cameraman – Don Brolin. For some reason. when you are looking through the lens of a camera you tend to ignore the danger of potential death.
I have been close a lot of times during my career and somehow, I was able to quit while I was ahead.
One time in France, I took a chance and was able to climb up and stand on a giant ice block and get 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, maybe less experienced, 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 gentle glacier in Chamonix called La Mir de Glace.
About 50 years ago on a glacier in Austria, a frozen body emerged from the ice at the foot of a glacier after a 400- or 500-year journey from where he fell to his death. His body was so well preserved by the glacial ice that scientists were able to keep it frozen. During the autopsy, the scientists were able to find out what he had for lunch on the day of his death, along with other information about him.
On nearby Mount Baker that I can see when I am out catching crabs near my island, about 10 years ago during a particularly dry snow year and warm summer, the tail of a P-38 airplane emerged from the glacier. The World War Two army fighter plane had been missing with its pilot since 1942.
Sitting here at the computer in the sanctuary of my office listening to concert music on Symphony Hall, I reflect on the many times that I put my life on the line to get some of the pictures that I brought back to my audiences for all of those years. It was a long, happy, but sometimes dangerous journey.
I always relied on the skill and knowledge of mountain men who knew almost exactly what the snow and ice will do under almost any circumstance. Almost any circumstance is the definitive phrase here.
But, I have drifted away from the movie that Howard Wright showed me with half a dozen 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 as though the paragliders are in no danger whatsoever. When 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 journey of its kind down a 15,000-foot mountain without spending any time climbing up the mountain. Just rent a helicopter with a few friends and do it.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
