Since I got my first job writing a weekly column for the Vail Daily about 25 years ago for 52 columns a year, for 25 years, 1,300 columns equals a lot of words.
One of those columns appeared soon after it snowed 99 feet at Mount Baker one winter. Another when it started to become a 7- or 8-hour drive to go the 100 miles back from Vail to Denver on Sunday night, with a car full of sleepy children and a sleepy driver. A day in the mountains skiing with the family is bracketed on each end, with rambunctious children or sound asleep children smelling of melted snow mixed with sweaty wool.
Every one of those 25,000 skiers that you had to stand in line behind at Vail has at least 10 or 15 experiences that can become a newspaper column. What about getting there and finding no place to park other than in a supermarket parking lot a 1½ miles from the chairlift?
How about having to wait in the chairlift line while you watch Steve Stunning, the private ski instructor with the family of eight, in the preferred line walk by you? How about fighting the logistics of getting enough food and soda pop or coffee for the whole family without spilling anything?
Someone has to haul food all the way to Two Elk to feed any number between 5,000 and 10,000 skiers who all arrive at the same time to eat.
I could write about being lucky enough to live in Vail for more than a decade and every night that it snowed when I went to bed, I set my alarm clock for 7 a.m. so I could be one of the first people in the lift line.
I would write about discovering that if I rode on the lower chairlift at Lionshead and skied from there to the bottom of the mountain, I would have those runs almost to myself, because everybody else was racing for the back bowls. The line for that back bowl chairlift could sometimes be more than 30 minutes long.
Living at the high altitude of Vail gave Laurie and me a distinct advantage when our friends came and stayed with us while they gasped for air because they lived at sea level. I wrote a column about condominium parking spaces at Goldpeak that sold for as much as $25,000, when you could park two blocks away for $10 a day in a covered garage.
I was lucky enough to ski with amazing people such as former Congressman Jack Kemp, astronauts Scott Carpenter and Alan Shepard, Bob Galvin, Chuck Percy, Arch McGill, Josephine Abercrombie, Patsy and Bill Smith, Jack and Kathleen Eck, Bill Whiteford, Howard and Marty Head, Frank Wells … Oh my goodness, there are hundreds of amazing, priceless friends who were so welcoming to me.
Skiing is great that way; we’re all equal on the side of a mountain. Just like the late 1940s when I first met Josephine Abercrombie and I’d ski with Cary Grant, Ernst Hemingway and all the amazing people who came to Sun Valley when it was truly the best there was in the ski world. It still has the most amazing terrain of any ski area, and Dick Durrance had a lot to do with laying the runs out perfectly.
During our Vail days, I was no longer running a motion picture camera, but I believe that some of those who skied with me felt that they might appear in a movie. Yes, I know that camera was a real magnet for skiing companions. I also know that my shiny bald head was easy to spot in a chairlift line full of wool hats or brain buckets.
After skiing all day every day in Vail for a few years I knew where there were a lot of small stashes of powder snow hidden behind trees, though I’d always have to hike out.
I had a couple of friends who were retired and enjoyed making turns as much as I did. David Grable was a man I skied with every time he showed up from his busy moving and storage business and local realtor Art Kelton was another one I would meet on the mountain. Don Hodel and Bob Craig would come over from Keystone and park in front of my house and meet me when I walked out of the garage with my skis on my shoulder to get ready to coast to the Lionshead gondola.
Laurie and I have been living in Montana for the last 15 years with a different set of ski runs, friends and experiences, which are even better. Or, I’m just getting older. At 90-years-old, I wonder at the amazing people that skiing brings together. It seems like every day that goes by there’s another happening that could make interesting reading if I needed to write that many columns. Fortunately, I only need to write one column a week.
The last 4 or 5 years I have also been writing my autobiography. There’s an awful lot to write about after 90 years and I’m looking forward to completing that autobiography sometime just after the New Year with the help of Laurie and Andy Bigford, my editor.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
