In the winter of 1963, I worked as marketing director at one of the West's premier ski stations. I invited Warren Miller and his family for a visit to film our resort for his annual adventure travel film. Then as now, getting your resort in a Warren Miller movie was great marketing.

Warren arrived Easter week with wife Dottie and three children, Scott, Chrisey and Kurt. Little did I know that, 25 years later, Kurt Miller would be signing my paychecks.

What I did know was that I had a mission, which was to get hired at Warren Miller Productions. In retrospect, I can't see where I had the audacity to aim for the rarest and best job in the ski industry, but I did.

With the help of my friends and a portfolio I'd laboriously developed, I landed the dream job. I was standing at the corner of Hard Work and Good Luck. Thirty-six years later, I still am.

In May of 1963, driving my trusty 1949 Studebaker and living in a $75-a-month beach apartment, I became Warren's first production/media employee. Come to think of it, that made me the first full-timer he'd hired in his 14 years of movie making.

After months of mostly menial jobs, I finally got my break on a trip to Sun Valley, birthplace of Warren's legendary career and where the family still spent its Christmas holidays. There, we were approached by a young skier who asked if Warren would film this stunt he'd supposedly perfected. John Solberg said he could ski straight down Christmas Bowl, lift his right ski and slam it down at a 90-degree angle on top of the left just in front of his binding. He claimed he could execute the maneuver on cue, blowing out of both bindings like a human cannon ball-but unhurt.

Warren picked the location and chose his camera position. He had me set up for a second shot. Solberg staged one grand wipeout after another. For the first time in 15 seasons of shooting, Warren had the luxury of a second camera. My shots turned out quite usable-not as smooth as the master's, but OK.

That earned me a solo trip to film at Colorado's Arapaho Basin and, when those shots worked out, to New York for a trip to Austria. A trip to the birthplace of alpine skiing and the legendary St. Anton resort was a thing of dreams-except for one thing. This was the week of the Fasching holiday and every bed in the area was booked.

The director of tourism, who was a big Warren Miller fan, found me a place to sleep, which was a bathtub in a small pensión near the main cable car. Thing was, I couldn't go to bed until after the last bath had been taken each night and I had to be gone before the first bath in the morning. I hate to think where I might have slept if the guy didn't like us.

The 1960s was a period of massive growth in the ski industry. America's current mega resorts were just being built or on the drawing boards and we followed them closely. We filmed at Vail the season it opened. Before they opened, he also used a helicopter to film Alpine Meadows, Alpental and the Grand Montets at Chamonix. I choppered to the summits of Snowbird, Snowmass and Telluride. It was an exciting time.

In 1967, we traveled to both Japan and the Soviet Union. Japan was delightful with its masses of wildly enthusiastic novice skiers. The slopes were alive with out-of-control ersatz racers. Next, we went to Moscow as one of the first U.S. cameramen permitted into the U.S.S.R., where smiles were few, laughter nil. Each day I discovered mail, bearing no return address, tucked into my personal effects. One correspondence was slipped into my pocket in a men's room on the Moscow subway. On a return layover in Paris, I stamped and mailed all 25 of the contraband letters.

Then I was sent to Grenoble to film the 1968 Olympics. I had no official credentials and no firm arrangements whatsoever. I contemplated a cold night in my rented auto when friendly faces began to appear: the Ski Magazine crew was one photographer short for the men's downhill. I shot black-and-white stills in exchange for a spare apartment. I still didn't have that coveted photo ID, but stealth and perseverance prevailed. This was a relaxed time in Olympic history, with relatively loose security. What happened at Munich in 1972 changed all that.

All good things must end and, in 1985 at age 53, I just couldn't haul 50 pounds of gear around the mountain as needed. Dame fortune rescued me again. Warren needed someone to manage the production department. It was time for this old action cameraman to come in from the cold. When Kurt Miller and partner Peter Speek bought the film company from Warren, I stayed on to run the film division of what has become a rapidly growing enterprise.

Now it's time for what comes next. Just as I once traded my skis and camera for a desk and phone, now my job description commands more time with my wife, Colleen, and Colorado's rainbow trout. Thanks to great friends, good luck, a dash of talent and hard work, it's been a fantastic 36 years.