Released 20 years ago this winter, Greg Stump’s Blizzard of AAHHH’s defined the modern state of skiing. On the plus side, it featured future snow legends like California soul skier Scot Schmidt, Glen Plake (he of the Mohawk) and recently accredited mountain guide and tele-apostle Mike Hattrup, whose collective passion for skiing high peaks, narrow chutes and windblown bowls led to a wild snow revival that pushed the sport back past the liftlines. The film’s release coincided with the home video revolution, and repeated viewing of VHS copies of AAHHH’s inspired an entire generation of East Coast iceheads to move west to become ski bums. It helped accelerate the evolution of gear, as skis got as fat as surfboards to float the deep snow the off-piste pilgrims were finding. And from Jackson Hole to Aspen, the pressure to access public-land powder saw dozens of ski area boundaries opened.

“Greg has always been one of the best editors in the business, and AAHHH’s perfectly captured that pent-up need for adventure in American skiing,” Schmidt said in August when I reached him by phone to discuss the anniversary of the film. “Ski areas were all about grooming, snowboarding was about to blow up, and skiers like us were looking for a new kind of freedom.”

To the negative, AAHHH’s also made words like “Extreme” part of the mountain, then American lexicon, eventually employed as adjective for everything from “Extreme Burritos” to “Extreme Supermarket Savings.” On the slopes, neon became the height of fashion, middle-class mountain kids started talking and dressing like L.A. gangbangers, and the videotape and action sports industries created an increasingly crappy collection of ski films. With names like Teton Gravity Research, Matchstick Productions and Poor Boyz, the filmmaking shred-frats that followed Stump oversimplified his style, substituting cliff jumps for storyline, buzz rock for narrative and staccato clips for sequential scenes. It became cliché to describe the constant climax production style as less akin to the objective lens of natural filmmaking, and more like the flesh-grabbing flashbulb of porn.

“Surfing went through this same kind of wilderness a few years ago. Everyone got so impressed with the quality of the images that they could produce digitally, and with the ability of the athletes they’re filming, that they all started following this pattern of making hard-core action porn,” says Brian Wimmer, director of the X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival, an annual Park City-based celebration of surf, ski and climbing films. “It’s only in the last three or four years that surfing has seen a return to movies that are not only cinematically spectacular, but that are telling the story of some soulful journey at the same time.”

Wimmer thinks a similar revival has begun for skiing. He points to films like last year’s Steep, a history of ski mountaineering produced by PJ Productions, a documentary company founded by the late ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, and the story of the Jackson Hole Air Force, the Rockies’ most-infamous ski bums, as evidence of a renewed emphasis on storyline. He’s most encouraged, however, by the news that Stump is making a ski movie again.

“Stump was one of the inspirations for X-Dance. He took it to a whole other level with his simple narrative, incredible editing, and a way of commenting on current events like the Persian Gulf War that made his movies more than just action sports films,” Wimmer says. “Just to know that he’s making another movie raises all kinds of expectations.”

For Stump himself, the expectation is to create the final statement on ski films. Emerging from a well-lived wilderness of his own, Stump built a studio in Victor, Idaho, after more than a decade splitting time between Whistler, British Columbia, and Maui while working on commercial productions for everyone from Aspen Ski Company to his buddy Willie Nelson.

“I finally found a private investor who believed in the project so much that I don’t have to ask anyone else for funding,” says Stump. “That gives me the ability to concentrate on the film, which is great because I’ve got so much material to edit down — I’m looking at 70 hours of interviews alone.”

Titled Legend of AAHHH’s, Stump says the film is a four-part history of skiing and ski movie making. The extensive Q&A sessions are with ski film innovators including Warren Miller and the recently deceased Otto Lang and Dick Barrymore, who Dick Dorworth eulogized in MG #149. Stump says he wants to provide a clear path back to the pioneers of ski films.

“My narrative style is basically a Dick Barrymore imitation, and he was basically imitating Warren, who was influenced by John Jay, who was influenced by Dick Durrance and so on,” says Stump. “I feel a huge responsibility to the immense archives that I have, and sometimes have this sense that I’m trying to save the best of the old world for future generations.”

Stump is working to secure a commercial distribution deal for the film much like Barrymore did with Last of the Ski Bums in 1969. He had hoped to submit a clip of the film for consideration for the Sundance Film Festival in January, but is now working to have the film ready for release in the fall of 2009.

“It’s important to me to make a movie that everyone can enjoy,” Stump says. “Even if they never once thought about going skiing.”

—Peter Kray