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Show 'Legends of American Skiing' - A Four Star Film Take me back to those times when you wore a tie to go skiing. When the head-wall head-wall at Tuckerman's Ravine on New Hampshire's Mount Washington was the site of the wildest downhill race ever conceived. Put me on a ski train to Sun Valley, upstate New York. The High Sierra. I want to see Alf Engen win the jumping, Nordic, downhill and combined titles to be the first and last man to carry home all those national titles. I want ski adventure, the comraderie of the slopes, the narrow, winding New England En-gland racing trials. Short of climbing into a time warp, it will never . happen, right? But this week in Park City, there was an hour and 20 minutes when I had the chance to travel to those places, meet the people who were there and hear what they had to say about the, origins of a sport in America that has become such a large part of my life. The film, "Legends of American Skiing," is the finest work ever done on the subject of who got all this madness started. This magical, first-rate documentary takes us from the earliest American ski scenes, the gold camps of the High Sierra and the timber towns of New Hampshire, and brings us through territory that the most avid ski historian would long like to linger. When Snowshoe Thompson Thomp-son got national press for delivering the mail on his 12-foot boards across 90 miles of the most demanding It wasn't until the latter 1930s that the first chairlift, an American invention, was built. Invented by the ski outpost of Sun Valley, the chair has led to our ski access of today. I wonder how many of us would be willing to ski if we had to climb for our vertical? "Legends of American Skiing" is the definitive work to date on the origins of this great sport in America. The romance captured by the mingling of the old photos and film footage with interviews of people seen in this footage is staggering. I wanted the film to go on and on. And it might continue. The film brings us to 1940 and the Moultons are looking at part two, which will bring us up to the present. Melinda says there may be a similar project on the history of golf in the works. If you missed the Park City run of the wonderful film, take hope. If you have the time to travel to Telluride, Colo., over the Memorial Day weekend, the film may be entered in the Mountain-film Mountain-film competition. For you three pin skiers out there, you won't believe the Telemarks the people in this film make. Exquisite. Quite simply, "Legends of American Skiing" reminded me of why I have decided to pursue a life in the mountains. moun-tains. It depicted skiing of no hype, no glitter, no one-piece suits and frizzed out-hair. It was not the skiing of the beautiful people. The crowded crowd-ed lift lines, the commercial resort shops and the grind. It was the skiing of the people who were beautiful because they did what they loved for the fun of it. And that is what the sport is really all about. iiiimii Ji -II mm., II 1 .1 .ill III mil mi. iiiii I I High Sierra mountain country coun-try anywhere, the first seeds were sown for the boom we see today. The long board racers hit 80 m.p.h. side by side in races for cash. The gold field dope dealers would stand by the racers, mentally preparing prepar-ing them for their feats, right up until race time. It is all in this masterful film. We saw the early days at Sun Valley, Alta, Stowe, Aspen, the jumping, the first downhill. We saw it all when this film graced the Egyptian Theatre's screen March 2. Filmmaker Rick Moulton, the producer and director and his wife Melinda, the business production manager, mana-ger, came to town to show the fruit of their five-year labor. They talked about how they had to find the funding, the old footage, the interviews inter-views with the people who were there during an afternoon after-noon on the Park City slopes. Magnificent stuff, two people and a handful of others, pursuing history before be-fore it died. We heard Lowell Thomas tell us how he figured he's spent more than a million dollars traveling to remote American ski outposts to do broadcasts to the American people over the NBC radio network. When Thomas got the itch to head for Sun Valley, he had to pay the line charges to New York for his show. When Thomas, Dick Dur-rance, Dur-rance, Alf Engen and the Dartmouth ski team were making ski news, they did it by climbing to the top of the mountains they skied. |