Rising above the glacier for thousands of feet was Mt. Cook (12,319 ft.). This day the mountain was once again covered in clouds. Down at the base, at the Mt. Cook Hotel, it was raining hard. The very expensive seventeen-man film crew and I had been sitting around waiting for it to clear for six days. All of us, including Jean Claude Killy and Leo La Croix, were anxious to get up on the glacier so they can do what they do best, turn their skis both ways. Killy had just won three gold medals in the 1968 Olympics and was starring in a television series that I was producing, while travailing all over the world with my crew.

Helicopter Hunting
Back in 1968 in New Zealand, deer and all other cloven-hoofed animals had become a real pest because of over population. There was a bounty on them of three dollars for each tail you turned in. This was all new information to me when our helicopter pilot invited us to go hunting with him, in his helicopter of course.

He suggested that we first try and hunt for some Himalayan tahr (mountain goat) because they lived closer to the hotel than any species of game. Tahr were plentiful and legally considered as pests. I didn’t know what or how big a Himalayan tahr was, but I was willing to try anything to reduce the boredom. In our rain soaked parkas, Killy and I climbed into the three-place Bell helicopter and started gaining altitude up the side of a very steep rocky cliff behind the hotel. When we were about fifteen hundred feet above the hotel, we could begin to see dozens of tahr feeding on the many small ledges on the side of the cliffs.

Mel, the pilot, gave me a .30-caliber automatic rifle even though I had never fired one like it in my life. He said, “take your choice." I had no idea whether a tahr was as big as a cow or as small as a dog, and when he said they weigh about a hundred pounds or less, I knew the animals I would be shooting at were far away.

As good luck would have it for me, bad luck for the tahr, I accidentally managed to hit the first one I shot at. Then I watched it tumble down the side of the cliff as Mel adjusted a couple of things on the helicopter and we dropped like a safe with the door open.

When we got down to the level of the dead tahr, he said, “It’s way too steep here to try and set the helicopter down, but here’s what we’ll do. There’s a fifty-foot long rope under the seat with one end attached to the helicopter. Just throw the other end of it out and then slide down the rope. No need to worry mate, you’ll know when you get to the end of it because there’s a big knot there. When you get there, I can swing you back and forth and you can get off on that ledge where the tahr is. Then tie the rope around the tahr and we’ll pull him up into the helicopter. Then we’ll drop the rope back down to you, you can hang on, and we’ll drop down to where it’s not too steep to land. Then you can get back into the helicopter.”

I replied, “Mel just give me another bullet and let’s try to get another one so the tahr will roll down to a spot that’s flat enough for you to land.”

I hit the second one and that night we enjoyed roasted Himalayan tahr in the hotel dining room, along with some great mashed potatoes, asparagus, and some home-made mint jelly on the side. The next morning I arranged with the local taxidermist to mount the Himalayan tahr head and it still hangs in my office forty years later. It’s in memory of a rainy afternoon in New Zealand with triple Olympic Gold medal winner Jean Claude Killy and Mel Cain, the best helicopter pilot I ever flew with.


Editor’s Note: This is one in a Tahoetopia series written by Warren Miller, legendary ski cinematographer. For other columns by Warren, click on Warren Miller.