It would be a long trip to NZ, with stops at Mt. Ruapehu on the North Island and Mt. Cook on the South Island. Then we had a week in Australia to film Killy and Leo Lacroix, his teammate during the Olympics.

The journey would continue in America, with shows filmed at Mammoth Mountain, Aspen, and Vail. Then off to Europe to film more shows in Grindelwald, St. Moritz, Zermatt, Chamonix, Val d’Isère, and Courchevel.

It was the most exhausting and frustrating time of my fifty-year long, film-producing career. There was a lot of hard work, which is OK. But the big disappointment was the fact that no one ever watched the shows because they were run on Sunday afternoon TV, right up against National Football League games!

When the European tour was all over, I had to let 43 employees go and sell most of my camera equipment to cover the expenses. Then I went back to the business that I enjoyed the most--producing, filming, and directing my annual ninety-minute theatrical ski films. I spent four months of every fall and winter traveling to cities all over America and Canada to narrate each show live.

Don Brolin, who ran a camera for me for 35 years, had been a one-man-band most of the winter I spent on Killy. As soon as another of my cameramen, Rod Allin, got back from the Killy TV shoot in Europe, I had him on an airplane to film ski resorts Don hadn’t gotten to as yet. I did two weeks of office work in Southern California wrapping up the Killy TV series and licking my financial wounds, then I set out myself with camera gear to help out Don and Rod.

There was a new place to ski on the horizon at that time. A man named Mike Wiegele was just starting a helicopter operation in Blue River, British Columbia. He invited me to send a camera crew up there and show the world what helicopter skiing was like. In March of 1969, Mike had hired a small, three-place, two-passenger Bell helicopter. He had a lot of ambition and smarts, but he didn’t even have two-way radios because he didn’t have any employees. One of the skiers was a young man from British Columbia named Wayne Wong, who would later become a permanent fixture on America’s Freestyle ski scene.

A week of helicopter skiing and sleeping in the Blue River Motel and eating in the only restaurant that was open at that time of the year, the Bus Stop Restaurant, cost an awesome $1300 a week, or almost $200 a day. The crew was socked-in for three days of fog until finally, Mike decided he would gamble a tank of helicopter fuel and try and fly up above the clouds. It was a great success.

They finally broke out high up into some of the most awesome and beautiful, never-before-skied-terrain that our cameras had ever documented. Wayne Wong and the other skiers performed freestyle tricks on the glaciers and amongst the crevasse. I still remember listening to the fantastic audience reaction the next winter as I showed tens of thousands of people Mike Wiegele’s Helicopter Skiing for the first time. Today, his helicopter skiing is still the ultimate freedom trip on skis or on a snowboard.

While Rod Allin was documenting helicopter skiing, Don Brolin and I flew to Anchorage, Alaska to film the National Junior Ski Championships. The weather held for us and as I rounded the bend and looked down the Turnagain Arm towards Alyeska, I noticed there had been a lot of changes since my first trip up there to film it.

Ten years earlier I had to put one foot in front of the other while climbing the mountain in order to get every single shot for the film that year. The only thing at Alyeska at that time was a trapper’s cabin, at the end of a dirt road, off of the gravel road from Anchorage.

In the Junior National Alpine Championships there was a spectacular bump in the downhill where Don Brolin got some unbelievable, super slow-motion shots of the kids hurtling through the air, upside down, with their skis cart wheeling along behind them. We used such high-peed cameras that at 1,000 pictures per second, it took over 40 seconds to view just one second of action.

Rod Allin spent 15 years filming for me, while Don Brolin spent 35 years taking many of the pictures that people always give me credit for. The thing that stood out the most about that extra-long winter around the world adventure, starting with Killy, was that Alyeska (Alaska) is the only ski resort I ever filmed where you can sometimes go night skiing all day long!

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.