Award-winning columnist, photographer and news writer Ellen Leahy is back as the editor of the Skaneateles Press, in beautiful Skaneateles New York.
She is the former editor of the Skaneateles Press and the Marcellus Observer, and most recently the Syracuse City Eagle. She makes her home in Skaneateles where she is also a freelance photographer and caregiver for her parents, Bill and Marion Leahy.
She began her formal writing career as a columnist with one of her hometown papers, The Duxbury Clipper, in Duxbury, MASS. Born in California, she then moved to Sea Girt, NJ. She is a product of small town America - and the late great American Middle Class.
The photo at right is the drive down to Brook Farm off of West Lake Road - one of my former Skaneateles haunts.
Currently reading...
CLEAN, as well as other assorted reads on my dad's Kindle.
The official start of winter for many a Central New York winter fun enthusiast is when the Warren Miller film rolls into town.
Warren Miller’s “Children of the Winter: Never Grow Old” drew a decent crowd to Salina Street’s ornate Landmark Theatre. CNY skiers and boarders wandered in as they do off chair lifts, in singles, pairs or quads, some with families in tow to see the 59th annual all things skiing-plus documentary at $18.50 a pop.
I remember being introduced to the Miller flick genre when I moved to CNY in the 1970s. These were ski cult movies one viewed outside the traditional theater-setting, but I’m not sure on what, as it predated the VCR revolution. One terrific area skier, Mary Menapace said, she remembers her husband John narrating Warren Miller movies at a church hall in DeWitt back in the day.
Today, the Warren Miller film company has evolved much like the technology of skiing. It’s a top notch, highly skilled marketing machine that spends all year following people who play with mountains of snow in unusual ways. Then, that year’s movie rolls out around the nation, perhaps the world, as the ski season opens. It’s really a pep rally complete with the requisite hot ski babe MC with a mitten full of giveaways.
“Children of the Winter” opens in Cordova, Alaska with a helicopter on a small launch pad on the back of a fishing vessel. A skier and snowboarder are dropped on the tippy top of a mountain with a vertical drop, or what skiers would call chutes, blanketed with snow spattered with a few rock-faces they would have to navigate around. The pair was pumped. My heart was in my throat, this was as close as I would ever get to that mountain. My companion a lifelong skiers thought instead of his wallet, “Who do I make the check out to?”
How could Miller’s troupe top these magnificent vertical drops in Alaska - easy - we followed male Olympic champions as they finally got to ski some of the areas where they only had time to race - in both Europe and Japan. We were introduced to the party side of skiing with four professional musicians from four bands that come together each winter around this mountain good time in Vermont as “Yukon Cornelius.” We hung out with the best chicks in skiing; a pipeline surfer turned mountain man; experienced ski joring, which included magnificent horses pulling skiers over jumps through the streets of a wild west mountain town; and flew through the air with the greatest of ease on skis and boards and even mountain bike footage.
The finale was a trio of skiers crewing on a sailboat in the frosty waters surrounding Iceland to trek up virgin slopes that rose up from the water’s edge. The three came back down again on skis complete with the sending off of a bit of the late Utah extreme skier Billy Poole’s ashes into the air.
The Miller films are now easily available on DVD, so one doesn’t need to go to the theater. But the mob mentality mirrors that of your basic apres ski party and really is infectious, sort of like the old “Rocky Horror Picture Show” minus some of the horror.
Meanwhile outside the theater, snow was starting to blanket the streets of Syracuse, fueling Miller’s pump that had the crowd already cheering at all the right moves. There is something about the odd wholesomeness of many of the individuals in the film, their passion for playing with the snow and their naiveté about the machinations of the world off the mountain. It really was a fun night out observing the cult of people who are “Children of the Winter.” This is one adventure flick worth your time, whether you ever ride a pair of skis or a board. At the very least it will make brushing the white stuff off your car not as much of a chore.
Go to billypoole.org to make a donation to a memorial fund for winter programs for kids.
CATEGORY: Winter Sports
TAGS: warren miller,skiing,ski joring,children of the winter never grow old,landmark theatre,Billy Poole,Yukon Cornelius
