Over seven decades and more than five hundred films, the filmmaker and skier Warren Miller captured a sublime pastime. Photograph Courtesy Warren Miller Archive

Skiing is indefensible, in many ways. It’s hard to think of a more indulgent variety of play. It’s expensive, exclusive, lily-white, and—once you factor in airplanes, helicopters, Chevy Tahoes, Ski-Doos, snowmaking, hot tubs, heated driveways, and immense and often vacant second or third homes—ravenous for fossil fuels. (Many seekers of deep snow seem oblivious to their role in possibly depriving themselves of it, down the line.) The skiing industry can seem, at times, to be little more than a front for real-estate development and the sale of winter gear manufactured in squalid factories overseas.

The more conventional conception of the sport, though—certainly among those who do it—is that it represents adventure, freedom, and transcendence. It’s a dance with gravity, a test of prudence and pluck, a peerlessly close collaboration with the elements. To the extent that snow-clad mountains represent some ideal of purity, navigating them with planks fixed to your feet can seem, once you’re clear of the Ski-Doos and hot tubs, almost virtuous. Above all, it’s a graceful way to get around and a great excuse to get out.

No one did more to advance this perception of the sport than the filmmaker Warren Miller, who died last month, at the age of ninety-three. Over the course of seven decades and more than five hundred films (yes, five hundred, though many of them were not about skiing), he presented a joyful, unencumbered pastime full of high jinks and pratfalls, often sublime, sometimes ridiculous, never anything but uplifting and beneficial to life on planet Earth. These were fun films about having fun, inviting viewers to come join the fun, too. Still, the complete works could conceivably serve as the basis for a humanities elective at a Rocky Mountain college, titled “Steep, Deep, But Never Cheap: a Marxist investigation of leisure culture and the mass marketing of aspiration.” (I dipped a toe in these waters eight years ago, in a story, from Vancouver, about the history of Olympic skiing, by way of Eric Hobsbawm’s idea of “invented tradition.”)

Miller’s films both tracked and helped define the evolution of postwar skiing culture, from its flinty rope-tow beginnings to the stretch-pants jet-set glamour of the sixties, on through the decadent, hirsute, hot-dogging seventies and then the regrettably hued (and soundtracked) but refreshingly intrepid eighties, when a handful of buccaneers began looking beyond the Alps and Rockies to plunder the untouched powder fields of such frontiers as Alaska, Greenland, Japan, and Iran. The subsequent flowering of big-mountain free-riding, or, if you’d prefer, extreme skiing, took this photogenic incarnation of the sport from the dirtbag fringe into what is now big (or biggish) business.

Each winter, Miller caught it all on camera, and, each fall, he delivered the results to aspirants around North America just as, in anticipation of the coming season, they took inventory of their gear and idly contemplated dry-land training. Miller toured the country with his films and, in the early days, provided live narration—his wry, sometimes goofy delivery managing both to elevate and democratize the endeavors caught on screen. Eventually, his narrations were prerecorded, but the tours continued—each new one a rite of fall. The genre has proliferated in recent decades, as the likes of Teton Gravity Research and Matchstick Productions crank out episodic spectaculars that make the rounds of theatres and high-school gyms before ending up in ceaseless rotation on TV screens in time-share condos and resort-town bars. This stuff is sometimes called ski porn. Miller, you might say, was its Hugh Hefner.

Miller’s true model and progenitor was an establishment Easterner named John Jay, a descendant of the Founding Father. Jay pioneered the ski-travelogue road show among the wealthier classes, which had taken up the sport before the Second World War. Miller grew up in Southern California, in humble and somewhat turbulent circumstances, and was a product of the sport’s more egalitarian inclinations, which have been all but abandoned in recent years. (See the course handbook for “Shredders and Debtors: easy credit, hard luck, dirty dishes, and laundered money in the intermountain West.”) He took up skiing as a teen-ager, on Mt. Waterman, outside of Los Angeles, on boards he bought for two bucks, which he’d earned delivering newspapers. After returning from the Second World War, he bought an 8-mm. camera (seventy-seven dollars) and, with his friend Ward Baker, began travelling around to the (mostly new) ski areas of the West, living out of a teardrop trailer. They were proto-ski bums—of the productive-vagabond, rather than the layabout-trustafarian, strain. The first film, in 1949, was called “Deep and Light.” Over time, their budgets and their fortunes improved, and their territory and audience expanded, although Miller went through his share of difficulties: a few divorces, some money troubles, and, eventually, the loss of control over his company and even his name (he was sued, successfully, for narrating a film by another company). Nonetheless, in time, he became skiing royalty.

It was somehow perfect, then, that he wound up, at the end of his life and career, at the Yellowstone Club, an exclusive members-only ski area in Montana. Its motto is “Private Powder”—both a despicable idea and an irresistible one, if you’re an addict. Miller, for the past two decades, had served, in a mostly ceremonial capacity, as the club’s director of skiing. Until a few years ago, he had a big house on a prime lot near the main lodge, which bears his name. (The house was bought by a Google billionaire.) Though Miller had long griped about the commercialization and corporatization of skiing, his tenure at this plutocrats’ playground was, in addition to a ski-bum fairy tale, a fitting and somewhat bittersweet reflection of the one-per-centing of the sport.

Following Miller to the Yellowstone Club, fifteen years ago, as an ambassador and pro, was Scot Schmidt, an old Miller mainstay. In 1983, Schmidt, a lapsed ski racer from Montana City, Montana, fell in with a cadre of speed skiers at Squaw Valley, a resort on Lake Tahoe. These freaks, when they weren’t tucking down sheer tracks in aerodynamic suits in quixotic pursuit of a world speed record, spent their down time shooting off cliffs, in their stiff, super-long 220-cm. skis. One day, a cameraman of Miller’s, having seen their strange tracks, showed up to film them. “A couple of weeks later, I get a letter from Warren Miller, the Man, saying it was the most spectacular footage he’d ever seen,” Schmidt told me, a couple of days after Miller died. Miller invited Schmidt along on a shoot in New Zealand, to film a segment on his next movie. “That was the beginning of my Warren Miller adventures,” Schmidt said. Over the next decade, he appeared in a dozen Miller features. He travelled the world, and became the first real professional extreme skier, the star of my own formative years. (I first encountered him in Miller’s opus “Steep and Deep,” from 1985, but must confess to prizing, above all his performances, his work in Greg Stump’s masterpiece “The Blizzard of AAHHH’s,” from 1988.) Another ski-bum fairy tale: he’d made a living, though not a hefty one, chasing thrills in the hills. Most of the time, he wasn’t paid directly for the life-threatening stunts he pulled for the movies and magazines, but he had endorsement deals with the gear companies to promote their stuff (including his trademark yellow-and-black North Face Steep Tech suit). The ski areas and gear companies also helped pay for the films. (This, in part, is how so many warm-weather flatlanders wound up wearing Steep Tech.)

One morning, right after Miller’s passing, Schmidt, now fifty-six but still lithe and springy on the snow, was on a chairlift at the Yellowstone Club, skiing with some visiting guests and recalling his time with the Man. Schmidt had been helping to produce a film about Miller when he died. Last spring, they’d spent a week pulling stories out of him at his home on Orcas Island, in Washington—his final interviews, apparently. In the film, Miller will be narrating his own tales, in that iconic voice of his. (Schmidt said, “His wife said he wasn’t allowed to talk in the lift lines, because then everyone would recognize his voice, and then they’d all want to talk to him, and he wouldn’t be able to get on the lift.”) This week, the filmmakers, who aren’t certain when the film will be finished or released, are helping to promote a day of tribute to Miller: on Saturday, every skier is encouraged to take a run in his honor and post a video or photo with the hashtag #RIPWarrenMiller.

FURTHER READING Coverage by New Yorker writers of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Schmidt, in Miller’s absence, was now the reigning eminence—a native of one patch of Montana presiding over a vastly different one. As it happens, I’d lived in Montana for a short time, in my twenties, and had been a regular at Bridger Bowl, the local hill in Bozeman, where Schmidt grew up racing and horsing around. I’d come West with some vague ideas about a life in skiing, fed, in large part, by the ski movies I’d seen, among them many of Miller’s and Schmidt’s. The vagueness of my plan, and some profound and heretofore unacknowledged limitations in skill, gumption, and tolerance for both risk and pain, put an end to that notion soon enough, but now here I was just up the road, twenty-five years later, the sheepish, fortunate guest of a successful old friend, doing laps with the great Scot Schmidt.

At the top, Schmidt led us out onto a section of ridge where no one had yet skied, and pointed out a narrow chute that dropped steeply toward the meadows below. The snow was pristine. He pointed out the place on either side of the gulley where a new layer of snow barely concealed bands of rock. A real tight fit. O.K., then. Roll camera.

Four hop turns in, I hit some of the concealed rocks and my left ski popped off. It hurtled down the steeps and buried itself in the deep snow about a hundred yards below. Cut! One could only imagine the skiers Schmidt puts up with. After a moment, I clumsily made my way on one ski down to where Schmidt had uncovered the other, and I could hear, in my mind’s ear, the old Warren Miller voice-over, some folksy observations about overconfidence and the ravages of age, and maybe something about how, even at a swanky, fraught place like the Yellowstone Club, the mountains are still mountains, and the rocks are still rocks.