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Local adventure-sports filmmaker bit by bureaucratic snow snake
Photography Courtesy of Eric Daft
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Ed explains that part of his motivation to make more professional ski movies was to expose people to great new music via the soundtracks, getting away from the aggressive, hardcore-metal-thrash tunes that tend to dominate the commercial ski film world. His wife Angela owns and operates Big Hole Music in Driggs, so he has a huge library of up-and-coming bands to choose from. Ed’s ski videos, the majority of which are sold over the counter at Big Hole Music, serve in turn as an informal marketing tool for the store’s music. My Backyard featured music from R&B/Hip-Hop artists Michael Franti and Spearhead (not as well known at the time), the German retro-modernist funk group Poets of Rhythm, reggae-punk rockers Slightly Stoopid, and even a Social Distortion cover of Johnny Cash’s classic Ring of Fire.
When Ed began selling My Backyard II, featuring many of the same local skiers who appeared the first film, along with heli-skiing footage from Alaska‘s Chugach Range, the movie registered on the U.S. Forest Service’s radar screen. Teton Basin Ranger District officials pointed out that Ed did not have a commercial permit for shooting on National Forest lands. Public Law 106-206, passed in 2000, states that capturing video on federal lands for profit is forbidden without a commercial permit. While Ed’s sales were modest, really just a way to offset some of his equipment expenses, selling his movies classified him as a for-profit enterprise. He was presented with three options: pay a flatpermit fee of $150 plus $300 for each day of shooting, get fined, or pull his movies off the shelf.
Ed says the controversy has interrupted his efforts to produce My Backyard III. He wants to work with the Forest Service to legitimize his projects, but complains that the fee structure “shuts out the little guy.” The daily fees make shooting in the Teton backcountry prohibitive for him. Bigger production companies like TGR pay the same fees, he says, but create considerably higher impacts. Barring a creative solution to the permit fee problem, he says his future ski films might have to focus on Alaska.
Ed’s interest in Alaskan skiing stems from his participation in a 2007 Mt. Logan ski expedition, on which he captured video at elevations as high as 16,000 feet. He calls the trip “life changing.” For the past three seasons he has been traveling to Thompson Pass, near Valdez, shooting helicopter and snowmobile-based skiing in the Chugach Range. In 2008, while making a promotional video for Alaska Backcountry Adventures (a heli-ski company belonging to Teton Valley-based photographer Howard Stoddard), Ed was approached by skiers wanting him to create a video of their vacation. “My payment was basically a seat on the heli,” he says. He managed to fund twenty-four helicopter runs this way. His customers included Czechs, Americans, and a “little Japanese guy” who wanted an all-reggae soundtrack and “knew three words in English: powder, respect, and ganja” (well, the last one is sort of an English word). Ed’s favorite shoot was of a parachutist who hired the company’s helicopter to take him up 8,000 feet for a freefall jump.
Economic reality is pulling Ed in the direction of contract video for clients. In addition to his work in Alaska, he as produced promotional pieces for Grand Targhee and powder cat-skiing videos on Peaked Mountain. He now employs a borrowed $10,000 high-definition video camera for many of his projects, a quantum leap above his duct tape-mounted helmet cam. He also recently contributed footage to Freedom Riders, a mountain bike documentary chronicling the cooperative downhill trail-building efforts of the Jackson Hole mountain-biking community and the Bridger-Teton National Forest, the first collaboration of its kind. Ed and friends performed much of the riding in the film. He says the project was particularly fun because many of the biking shots involved constructing tree-mounted camera platforms and cable zip lines to achieve overhead tracking shots of the cyclists.
“It’s really hard to capture mountain biking,” Ed says. “That’s where the zip lines gave a really unique perspective.”
Because Freedom Riders showcases a successful, forward-looking partnership between a land agency and a private entity, it gives Ed hope that he can persuade the Forest Service to allow him to make modest ski and mountain bike movies locally without being crushed by fees. In lieu of cash payment, he says, he would like to create educational videos for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, perhaps addressing illegal trail-building issues and promoting trail stewardship in Teton Valley.
Ed pictures it as a win-win scenario: He could continue to pursue his passion, while giving something back to … his own backyard.
