It was the middle of February 1950, at the new ski resort called Squaw Valley, which was at best, only half finished in almost every respect.
One morning I awoke to find the door to our Navy surplus, unpainted barracks blocked by 4½ feet of snow that had fallen during the night. The door swung to the outside and we had to push a great big pile of snow aside to get the door open. Suddenly, Squaw Valley was a completely different place after this massive snowstorm.
I was surprised that the chairlift was not running. Instead, the bottom bull wheel would revolve about three-quarters of a turn, then stop and slide back. It was obvious that a tree had fallen or some catastrophe had happened to the chairlift during the storm. So, the only option was to climb up and see what had happened.
Stan Tomlinson, Emile Allais, Brad Board and I set out for the long, hard climb to inspect the lift. It was difficult going because each time we took a step forward, our skis disappeared in knee-deep snow and we had more than 2,000 vertical feet of this slogging ahead of us.
About an hour or so later, we found the problem. A massive avalanche had come down the headwall and tipped over Tower 22. None of us were ski lift repairmen, but we had brought about 200 feet of climbing rope and several spanner wrenches with us.
We tied the rope to the bottom of the tower and then gradually removed the bolts that held the tower to its foundation. We figured that the tower just might have enough tension on the cable to have it just hanging there so that we could swing the bottom of it back and forth until it was on enough of an angle to release the cables. With luck, the lift would run without the need for the hold down tower.
Since I was the youngest and dumbest in the group, I was elected to remove the last bolt. None of us had any idea which way the tower would tip over when we were swinging it back and forth. I would take a quarter of a turn on the bolt and then jump out of the way.
The final time I tapped the bolt it gently fell out of the hole and the tower just was sort of hanging there so you could move the bottom of it with a gentle push. Now we all got on the end of the rope and started swinging the bottom of the tower back and forth. Finally, one of the small wheels on the tower broke off and it fell explosively into the 4 feet of snow.
The tower fell off of the cable, the cables shot up in the air and the chairs spun around the cables and the sympathetic vibration of the cable went all the way down to the bottom of the lift. Fortunately, not derailing from any of the other 20 some odd towers.
We considered our job finished and skied down to relate our story to the lift operators. With fingers crossed, the lift was turned on and miraculously it ran without a problem.
The tipped-over lift tower as I recall, lay there in the snow the rest of that winter and the following and I’m not even sure that is was ever replaced, though I do know that it was finally removed.
These kinds of activities came along with your job description and pay scale of $125 a month, a place to sleep, and three meals a day. Management considered us part-time employees because we only taught from 10 a.m. to noon and from 2 to 4 p.m. or a four-hour day.
I didn’t have a business plan for my film company in those days because I didn’t know what a business plan was. All I know is that I did everything possible to earn an extra $10 here and there to buy yet another roll of film to produce my first film, “Deep and Light.”
My boss, Emile Allais, was understanding about my obsession with getting deep powder snow onto my Kodachrome film at every opportunity. Several times when there was powder snow I had no money for Kodachrome so I pretended to change rolls of film and practiced camera angles. These images were imprinted only in my brain. To help buy Kodachrome film, I drew a new cartoon every day after work, put it up on the bulletin board, sold it for a buck and did pretty well.
Unfortunately, for history’s sake, I did not take my 16mm camera with me on the day of the lift tower catastrophe. It would’ve made a nice sequence in that first film if in fact I knew what a sequence was at the time.
Fortunately, I became friends with a dentist from Marin County by the name of Dr. Frank Howard who had been making 16mm ski movies for free trips to ski resorts for quite a while and I was not the least bit bashful when asking him how to edit film.
Everything starts somewhere and my film business started when I was living in the Navy surplus, unpainted, dormitory at Squaw Valley that first year.
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.
