Alpenglow Ski Mountaineering History Project

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University of Washington Daily

This newspaper is available on microfilm at UW.

U.W. Daily, Oct 9, 1980, p. 21 - Baldwin, Doug, "Skier makes movie on Mount Rainier"

During two separate climbs in July and August, 1980, John Fuller, head of Nordic Mountain Ski School, made The Cross-Country Challenge: Skiing Mount Rainier," a 15-minute film of Steve Barnett and Don Portman nordic skiing from the summit of Mt Rainier. Fuller, a former DJ at KING-FM, is now a graduate student in archaeology at U.W. Steve Marts was one of the principal camera operators. Gray Warriner did the editing. Mark Hutson, a local ski mountaineer, was hired as a guide to oversee the technical climbing during the filming. The first filming trip was via the Emmons Glacier and the second via the Camp Muir route. According to this article, they filmed the skiers in the summit crater in terrible skiing conditions, but never used the footage in the final movie (but see jf-1980-challenge). Conditions on Rainier were poor and they never skied the upper 2,000 feet of the mountain.

Steve Barnett remarked: "Everything went badly. Only very rarely are snow conditions on Rainier good enough to ski from top to bottom." Don Portman concurred: "Lousy weather and lousy snow made it kind of frustrating. Skiing Rainier is just not as appealing as I had thought."

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