Freezing in a cramped trailer, shooting rabbits for dinner, slurping a gruel of ketchup and oyster crackers: Warren Miller’s early 20s would have been downright Dickensian if they weren’t so much fun.

Miller was a ski bum before that required a trust fund and four-wheel drive. In the late 1940s, when just 15 or so ski lifts threaded their way up the mountains in the West, Miller and a buddy planted themselves for the winter in a parking lot at the ski resort in Sun Valley, Idaho. They snuck onto the hill without paying, met girls, held parties, and had a marvelous time — a pattern he repeated, and then repeatedly lauded, over more than half a century.