Review by Allen Best
Skiing – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Spirit of Snow
A Film by Dave O’Leske
I never put on skis until I had twice voted in presidential elections, but I had voted yet a third time before I learned how to turn those skis. That was seminal. Now, 20 years deeper yet into life, I’ve turned skis often and count those days as being among life’s richest.
Few of those most joyful of days have been at ski areas. I harbor no particular prejudice against ski lifts or people who patronize them. Skiing, whatever the uphill conveyance, is fun.
Yet, given a choice between an average day at a ski area and an average day in the backcountry, I will choose the latter every time. Backcountry skiing is skiing at its best.
I have loved sweating and huffing to pull myself up a mountain, wind stinging my face, sunshine beating on my shoulder. I have been enchanted by the textures of snow, here flouncy and there crusty and later crafted by heat into dips like the cartons for eggs — sun cups, they are called. I have loved explored the mysteries of the landscape, a day’s journey reading like a good novel. I am enchanted by the exhilaration of turns in virgin powder.
Exclusivity is partially at work here, and it’s exclusivity money can’t buy. I like the purity, the honesty of this arrangement, where you earn your turns. You’re free to go anywhere on these wonderfully sprawling public lands where your strength and sensibilities will allow you. These adventures from average or better days, sometimes alone but sometimes with a friend or three, leave me with a glow of satisfaction that burns fiercely even many years later.
The richness of this backcountry experience is captured in Spirit of Snow, which premiered this year at the Telluride MountainFilm. Backcountry adventurers, aided only by climbing skins or waxes, methodically enter the mountain fastness in opening scenes, and in the concluding scenes gracefully swoop down slopes silky light with powder. Mountain majesty and winter gruffness, work and play, friendship and aloofness — all the ironies and narcotics of backcountry skiing are here.
Like backcountry skiing, this film is low-budget. Filmmaker Dave O’Leske got no grants. A resident of Ridgway, O’Leske worked construction at Telluride and fished in Alaska during summers so he could afford to spend six days a week for two winters sweating above timberline with a camera on his back.
That is passion.
This is also history. O’Leske sketches the sport from cave-dwellers to condo-dwellers, allowing the story to be told through the voices of various septuagenarians, octogenarians, and even a 93-year-old, Inga Prime, a part-time Vail resident who aims to ski at age 100.
No story of skiing, backcountry or front, is complete without mention of the 10th Mountain Division, an extraordinary collection of skiers from World War II. Training at Camp Hale, north of Leadville, the 14,000 men daily explored the Sawatch and Gore ranges. Yet despite knowing almost nothing about avalanches, 10th Mountain veteran Earl Clark points out, none of the 14,000 men were lost to avalanches.
Deep powder ecologist Dolores LaChapell recalls the wondrous days of powder skiing at Alta in the 1940s and later years of skiing powder around Silverton. Avalanche forecaster Jerry Roberts recalls his own love affair with backcountry skiing in the San Juans beginning in the 1960s. Former hard-car skier Erik Schultz of Alta, Wyo., tells about why he still sit-skis the backcountry after a couloir wreck paralyzed his legs.
A surprising interview is Dick Durrance. Among the world’s most accomplished skiers in the 1930s, he was also in the 10th Mountain Division before helping build Alta, Sun Valley, and Aspen into major resorts. He was, as well, a noted ski filmmaker. Yet, in his interview, he confides that he now finds skiing most enjoyable in the backcountry.
This is an irony the film nods at but then sidles past. To become more popular, skiing as a sport has steadily lowered the bar. Technological changes, from lifts to shaped skis, have all sought to make skiing attainable to everyman, to make all skiers feel above average.
This is all the technology that money can buy. At its extreme, this attitude is reflected in the use of helicopters, snowmobiles, and still other contrivances to ski at several dozen ski areas in a day. That feat rivals those “dubious superlatives” that distinguish Kansas, i.e. world’s largest ball of yarn and world’s deepest hand-dug well.
The flip side is backcountry skiing at its purest, which Spirit of Snow conveys. A note in the closing credits says that no mechanical or motorized means were used in the filming. Somebody who doesn’t understand backcountry skiing would never think that important to note.
As cinema, this movie is flawed. It tries to ski two different paths on the same trip, that of backcountry skiing but then starting down the the larger story of skiing. But this awkward ambition is more than compensated by O’Leske’s passion for backcountry skiing. Spirit of Snow is not, as one judge in Telluride remarked, ski porn, the snow equivalent of six crotch shots a minute. This is about the soul of skiing.
The film may be shown at various film festivals in Colorado as well as at fund-raisers for backcountry and avalanche organizations. Broader distribution at a later date is possible. If interested, you can contact the filmmaker, Dave O’Leske, at doleske@hotmail.com.
–Allen Best
