When I was a teen, we lived to ski. We would occasionally have Warren Miller Films screened at our school, usually sponsored by the High School Ski Club. As cornball as Miller can be, his films are always a celebration of the sport that few have matched. And they come from a simpler time, where we reveled over the smell of burning Ptex, the graphics on the new Rossis, and fresh dumps of snow that seem less prevalent as our climate changes.
Miller once said:
For years I have been telling people: “Any job that you have in the city you can get a job doing the same thing at a ski resort. All you have to do is quit your job, rent a trailer, load it up and move to the mountains.”
Of course, that kind of thing is much harder to pull off in these days of million dollar condos and the notorious Jackson Hole 7-7-7 homes (seven bedrooms, 7,000 square feet, seven million dollars). Warren is livin in the past, but so what.
Even with the "ski porn" available today, Miller is still up there in my mind, as his storytelling always beats the sometimes cliche "huckin" and "yeah dude" dialogues in the more up to date films. Nowadays, Miller's films are produced by his son, and I look forward to this year's entry.
Here's a blog post on New West that Warren wrote for the New West Snoblog.
