When they made the movie with Shea, they skied and climbed quite a bit of stuff. They had a small budget and had a crew who hauled the camera gear around. Perhaps since it was a “production” there is some historical bias against Shea, as well as his story fading because he’s unavailable for interviews (not to mention the film footage being unavailable for excerpt), but I used to climb and ski with Shea and can say that he was a straight shooter and definitely one of the top alpinists in the country at that time, and also an excellent skier.

Whatever the case, the “Fall Line” movie had large impact on ski alpinists and wouldbe ski alpinists OUTSIDE the Tetons. Since the premise of the “Teton Skiing” DVD as stated at the start is: “In the history of skiing, few places have had as much influence on the sport of skiing as the Tetons have,” then Shea’s skiing and the movie are very important, and as Derek wrote earlier he realized that but couldn’t include it because of space/length constraints. If Shea actually did make the second, then I’d hope that would be corrected in further editions of the CD.

History writing is tough, and I made a lot of mistakes when doing Wild Snow — this sort of picking away at the details is normal.

Fall Line movie trivia: For years there was a big network television sports show called “American Sportsman.” At the start of the show they had a bunch of movie clips that showed the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. During that segment a film clip of Shea taking a near-death fall down Kochs Couloir on Middle Teton was shown over and over again for years, making Shea possibly the most watched extreme skier in history.

Bob, You’re right, Jeff did ski it twice in the summer of 1979.