Hitting The Celluloid Slopes Four Local Graduates Move Their Free-Skiing Exploits To The Big Screen
Spokane natives who have gone off to make their fortunes in Hollywood aren’t the only locals getting into pictures.
Unless you’re a disciple of the growing ski-film cult, however, you probably haven’t heard of these other guys, even though they all graduated from area high schools during the past decade.
Kevin Brazell and Koy Hoover of Spokane plus Todd Johnson and Micah Black of Cheney each has brought his own radical take on the world of free-skiing - known as “extreme skiing” in its former life - to the silver screen. Well, at least to the shelves of video stores.
Black, with the most extensive film pedigree, has appeared in four free-skiing productions in the last three years. Brazell is in a pair, and Johnson completed his first picture this year. Spokane folks saw Hoover’s telemark turns when Warren Miller’s “Snowriders” was in town last month.
What is it with these Spokane boys?
“They’re chargin’,” said Dirk Collins of Teton Gravity Research, a Jackson, Wyo. ski film outfit. Brazell, Black, and Johnson all appear in “The Continuum,” which Teton Gravity Research released this fall.
Wade McCoy, a Jackson-based photographer who has shot these three for publications like Powder magazine, puts it another way:
“There are a lot of great skiers out there. These guys are right in there with the best of them.”
Kevin Brazell, Jackson by way of a forest fire
A pal from Central Valley High School worked at Yellowstone in 1988, the summer of the fires. She was airlifted to Jackson and came back raving about the place. That was enough to convince Brazell, a Mount Spokane skier as a youngster, that he needed to get to Wyoming.
Already a strong skier when he arrived, Brazell concentrated most of his time on Jackson Hole’s lower lifts. He remembers Doug Coombs and other prominent Jackson locals mocking him from the chairlift as he pounded the bumps.
“It was really them trying to make me see past the terrain I was on, to open my eyes to what was out there,” said Brazell.
Coombs soon became Brazell’s “mentor,” dragging him into the Wyoming backcountry. The relationship opened Brazell up “to a world of terrain I’d never before imagined,” he said.
Brazell is now a three-time top-10 finisher at the U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships. On the heels of “The Continuum”, his new movie “Controlled Gravity” was released Dec. 27.
After all this exposure, Brazell said he tries not to dwell on commercialism within the ski industry that has, for better or for worse, forever altered this business of getting from top to bottom. Forget the hype surrounding the sport in the ‘90s, Brazell says. Just go skiing.
“Skiing has to be something that you love, and that you live for,” he said. “When you get right down to it, it’s all about being with your friends and having fun.”
Koy Hoover, Spokane via Sun Valley and Vail
For the last three years, questions governing Koy Hoover’s life were simple. Glades or bowls? Lift service or backcountry?
From a skier’s perspective, it would seem as if Hoover had everything - 150 days a year telemarking in places like Sun Valley, Idaho, and Vail, Colorado.
Yet he’s back in Spokane, the owner of Copper Creek Wraps and Smoothies, a new downtown restaurant.
How could he leave big-name ski towns for Spokane?
“I’m still struggling with that,” said Hoover, who finished a degree at the University of Washington by correspondence this year. “There are days when I just don’t know.”
He says his ski-town days are really just on the back burner. Plans to create a series of restaurants in ski towns around the West would get Hoover back to the places he loves - with the financial security often sorely lacking among ski-town locals. It’d be like having your powder, and eating it too.
He still gets his turns in on weekends in the Schweitzer backcountry, where he skied as a kid. Warren Miller producers say they’re psyched to use him in their next film.
So don’t look at Hoover’s move back to Spokane as an admission that stable life in a ski town is impossible. It’s more the acceptance that if he’s going to get back, he’ll have to pay his dues elsewhere.
“I knew I had to get out of a ski town and make myself work,” Hoover says. “It’s too hard to work when it’s dumping out.”
Todd Johnson, Jackson via Steamboat
When Johnson showed up at Steamboat Springs, Colo., in the winter of 1989, he must have felt naked.
No Gore-Tex jacket. No skis. He didn’t know how to ski.
He’d made the Spokane Community College basketball team as a walk-on in 1988. But over a a beer in a downtown Spokane bar, he and Micah Black agreed something was missing from their lives.
Two games into the season, Johnson quit SCC and headed south to the Rocky Mountains with Black.
Learning to ski that first season in Steamboat Springs, Colo. became a wicked cycle: falling, getting up, and falling again in pursuit of his best friend.
“Good thing Steamboat is flat,” yells Johnson’s roommate from across the room in his Teton Village, Wyo., home.
Johnson just laughs. Shots of him in the “The Continuum,” taken from the Grand Targhee backcountry, are anything but flat.
Skiing steep terrain, he muses, is a lot like taking risks in life’s other arenas.
“It could be a sketchy, exposed traverse where you have a little bit of fear or uncertainty - and then conquering it,” Johnson says. “It’s the same thing as someone taking a risk in business or even a relationship - just applying it to something I love to do.”
So if skiing represents the girlfriend, then Johnson’s 1994 tangle with Toilet Bowl Face, a hallowed pitch among Jackson locals, must have been the consummate break-up scene. He crossed his ski tips above the huge rock outcropping. He tumbled and broke his arm.
Johnson asked doctors to form the fiberglass cast at an angle that would allow him to continue skiing.
“We were dropping into Corbett’s Couloir (another Jackson legend) with Kevin Brazell after just a couple of days,” he said.
Mica Black, Jackson via Steamboat Springs It was a personal tragedy that picked Black up like a fistful of snow, blowing him into ski town life - and eventually magazines and ski films - like an Arctic front over the Tetons.
His father, Jim, was a ski instructor who weaned young Micah on the little-area settings of 49 Degrees North and Silverhorn (now Silver Mountain). He died in 1987. Even before that, Black says he was growing restless in Spokane.
With Johnson, he packed the car and headed for Steamboat. A year later they were in Jackson, where their skiing styles immediately threw them into the same circles as photographer Wade McKoy and brothers Steve and Todd Jones, who own Teton Gravity Research.
In addition to “The Continuum,” Black can be seen in Real Action Picture’s “Cosmic Winter,” “Snow Drifters,” and Reel Adventure Films’ “The Tribe.”
Black got his start in film when Real Action Pictures producers came to Jackson for segments of a film called “Into the Snow Zone.” He was their mule, lugging camera equipment to the various locations.
“They had some professional skiers, but they didn’t know the area,” Black says.
“I knew the area, and they got into the lines I was skiing,” he says. “Basically, I was just hucking my meat off 60-foot cliffs.”
Six years later, Black has skied Chamonix, Alaska’s Chugach Mountains, and New Zealand.
He ponders his modest existence - no speedboat, no condo on the lake, no luxury automobile. Black worked last summer on a trawler in Alaska. In the winter, he skis. Period.
“Maybe I should have my car, house, kids, full-government tax plan. I don’t.” he says. “Society says it’s wrong to live the way we live, but it feels so right.”
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: VIDEO VIEWING If you’re interested in seeing these Spokane skiers rip into snow, here’s how to get hold of their videos. The Continuum, Teton Gravity Research, 1996. Featuring Micah Black, Kevin Brazell, and Todd Johnson. Call (307) 734-8192, $26. Controlled Gravity, Bridger Productions, 1996. Featuring Kevin Brazell. Todd Johnson makes a cameo, jumping into Corbett’s Couloir. Call (800) 379-3338, $24.95. The Tribe, Reel Adventure Films, 1995 Featuring Micah Black. Call (970) 349-0860, $27.95. Cosmic Winter, Snow Drifters, Real Action Pictures, 1994-1995. Featuring Micah Black. Call (800) 565-7777. Cosmic Winter, $19.95. Snow Drifters, $24.95. Snowriders, To be released fall 1997. Info: Warren Miller, 2540 Frontier Ave., Suite 104, Boulder, CO 80304 or via Internet at http:/ /www.wmfilm.com/