Craig Beck

Text by Jocko Weyland
Photography by Cole Barash

Carnelian Bay: Exploits of physical grace and at times questionable sanity wedded to self-reliant ambition and hard work are Craig Beck’s métier, a legacy still in the making at the slightly mellowed age of 78. Craig’s notoriety can be traced to his films, going back to arguably the world’s first ‘extreme’ ski movie, 1973’s 8mm Timepiece, followed by his 1975 opus, Daydreams, which brought him worldwide attention both from in and outside of the ski circuits. Self-financed, edited, and scored completely by Craig, it features the talents of such luminaries as his brother Greg, Dave Burnham, Chris Von Der Ahe, Brady Keresy, Pecos Welch, Earl Downing, and Mark and Tuck Rivard, among others. Highlighting the discipline’s avant-garde of the time, the skiing is, needless to say, amazing. But there’s plenty more than just 100-foot jumps off Squaw Valley’s Palisades; between manoeuvres and jump turns on 50-degree pitches, there’s also the sun, wind blowing flakes through the ether, and many serene, contemplative ‘daydream moments’.

It’s important to note that none of these people were paid. These were real ski bums in the best sense of the epithet, emblematic of a more innocent era before professionalisation and commodification became endemic in action sports. This cinematic endeavour showcases the fast-changing technological and artistic developments of the freestyle gestalt at its beginnings, when it was still unashamedly called ‘hot dogging’. Serious undertakings, yes, but without the overdetermined, self-referential, overly documented tawdriness so prevalent today.

As witness to, chronicler, and participant in this era of skiing, Craig has an unusually clear-eyed outlook on the ramifications of ‘progress’ vis-à-vis his close personal relationship to the sport’s inherent and frequently fatal dangers. Consequently, the sobering topic of early demises hovers over this exchange, evidence of Craig’s philosophical relationship to the extremely thin line between this side and the other. That said, he’s the opposite of gloomy or morbid; to the contrary, he is full of life and still stoked.

Through it all, Craig worked as a ski messenger at the 1960 Olympics, became an early hang gliding trailblazer, made more films, and also nurtured a long-running interest in 19th-century longboard ski racing and legendary Sierra Nevada mailman John Albert ‘Snowshoe’ Thompson. In more recent years, he’s committed to making and riding handcrafted lake surfboards. Surrounded by 19th-century skis, aerodynamic helmets, aeroplane models, and handwritten hang gliding flight logs in the upstairs office above Craig’s workshop, we screened Daydreams before embarking on this wide-ranging conversation. The at times awe-inspiring anecdotes and attendant answers are related here by a gifted raconteur who seamlessly mixes the gravitas of experience with an unbridled enthusiasm for recounting past adventures, combined with a keen view toward future undertakings.

Craig Beck, longboard racing in Soda Springs, California, 1993. Photography by Tone Maguire.

Daydreams is the ultimate ski movie, on some level, though it begins with you doing yoga on the top of Washoe County’s Mount Baldy.

I was way into yoga as a kid.

It sets up a sort of Zen-like oneness with nature that animates the film. There are these beautiful, rounded shadows as skiers swoop through the snow. It’s almost lunar. No features. Tranquil, even.

Nobody else around, and it’s really no longer imaginable due to the influx of customers. Those scenes on Olympic Lady—the chair was broken, and six of us got permission from the head of ski patrol and later from Squaw Valley Ski Corp. President Jim Mott, and we started hiking up KT at midnight in the deep powder for that.

I assume while making Daydreams, there might have been some issues with ski patrol?

We were kicked out of everywhere. I was hated by those guys. But once I got my camera out, their attitude changed. Most of the time, at least.

Much more prosaic but just as important: How was the film shot and funded?

All on 16mm with A-, B-, C-, D-, and E-roll, on Beaulieu, Bell & Howell, and ARRIFLEX cameras. I spent $100,000 doing carpentry work to finance it, lying about the square footage of my house to get a loan.

What you captured was truly a golden age, and I don’t mean in a superficial, ‘Oh wow, look at them with those long skinny skis’ manner. It was all so new; literally what is shown had never been done before. So many great, sometimes nail-biting jumps. Mark Rivard broke both legs landing that front flip off Palisades, though that was the only injury that occurred during filming, which is kind of amazing. Prior to that, he was the other main cameraman?

Yes. And Tuck Rivard, Mr KT-22, is a very good friend. I went 90mph with him this last season.

All that incredible skiing and then a segue into hang gliding, which is totally understandable since skiing was dovetailing with other pursuits such as skating and surfing at the time.

Hang gliding was a natural offshoot. This was before parachutes for hang gliding, and it was pretty sketchy. Mark Rivard landed in a tree, ruptured his spleen, had to go to the emergency room, and sort of lost interest after that. He’d seen God and didn’t want to get a closer look.

All things weren’t as peaceful as they look in the film. That part that shows me landing on top of the other hang glider without the pilot knowing, well, that’s not the easiest manoeuvre. Ken Kuklenski, who you see floating by, he was the world champion, and he died the next year doing loops. And Dave Burnham—my son was named after him—he was killed by a drunk driver while riding his Harley a few years after Daydreams.

Death before their time appears to be a recurring theme. But I really like this quote from your voiceover: ‘Have you ever dreamed of flying, free from the earth and you own body’s physical limitations, free to fly like a bird on an invisible flow of air, to soar the updrafts along the ridges and ride the thermals over the desert floor?’ It really is about making dreams come true—in this case, the ancient desire for flight. Who is the woman hang gliding?

Tina Trefethen. What a sweet gal. Great friend, incredible skateboarder, a hang gliding world champion. Later she was very seriously injured in a skate crash at the 1978 Signal Hill Speed Run.

The notorious race when so many people got really badly hurt, not to mention the competitors tripping on acid while riding enclosed luges going 60mph. Just thinking about it makes my palms sweat. In your film, Tina’s barefoot in a swing seat, swooping through the air with toes en pointe, then landing on gnarly rocks and broken bottles.

The ballsiest person I’ve ever known. She’s amazing, and that’s her taking off at Point Fermin by San Pedro. That place was only open for a year or two. Extremely dangerous—pilots were getting killed left and right.

How much confidence you have in your rig, that’s also a leitmotif. Ski bindings, skateboard trucks, whatever, you can trust these things to a certain extent, but not necessarily with your life.

One thing that was funny: When they came out with the ultra-lights, people would go, ‘Oh, OK, I’m ready now because it has a motor’. And no, sorry, all that does is cause more problems. More potential for something breaking, more vibrations, more weight when you land. People’s conception of things, their faith in that—It has an engine!—it’s interesting. That’s why I like hang gliding so much. Very simple. And in my case, I was building my own gliders, and I had a lot of confidence in them.

Music is central to the documentary, and you’ve talked about the movie as a sort of symphony with an introduction, not wanting a lot of narration like other ski films.

We were looking for stuff and had to go through a lot of different agencies to get the rights, or I wasn’t going to end up with a movie. First you hear ‘The Eagle and the Hawk’, a John Denver song performed by Anne Vielle. Cindy, my wife, played a lot of the music, and also there’s the Frisco Kids. I recorded maybe 15 or 20 of their songs on a TEAC 3340S; those were quadraphonic and state-of-the-art at the time, the best you could get. I had two of those, a 16-track mixer, and the Marantz 4-track. I’d mic everything—drums, guitars—and engineer it all.

How was it possible to use Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’? Since they were such a popular group, I would have thought the cost prohibitive.

I really love that song and really wanted to use it. Cindy called up Capitol Records and asked, ‘How much does it cost?’ And they said, ‘Sure, Pink Floyd, they charge one million per song’. But she somehow got through to their guitarist, David Gilmour, and told him, ‘My husband is making this movie. He flies hang gliders, jumps off huge cliffs. It’s going to be the craziest movie ever, and you should be involved in it’. And his response was, ‘Sounds outrageous, outstanding. I’ll tell you what: If you give us some of that footage, we’ll use it on our European tour as a backdrop. We’ll trade you’. That was it. And the whole thing was, like, 80 bucks in secretarial fees for the agency.

Coming forward to the present, what do you think about where skiing has gone in the last 30 years? Has it gotten too ‘extreme’?

Absolutely. That line was crossed a long time ago. So much so that I pretty much just dropped out of filming that sort of stuff because I didn’t want to encourage it anymore. It was getting too crazy, and honestly, the level of talent had declined.

Mark Rivard performing a giant front flip off of Squaw Valley’s Palisades, California. Still from Craig Beck’s Daydreams,1975.

Craig Beck with his Sierra White Hawk hang glider, designed and built by him, Slide Mountain, Nevada,1982. Photography by Doug Cook.

Craig Beck, Slide Mountain, Nevada, 1974. Photography by Tuck Rivard.

Craig Beck during takeoff, Slide Mountain, Nevada, 1982. Photography by Doug Cook.

You can go 60mph down a 55-degree face in a straight line between rock walls 10 feet apart, and I’ll give you plenty of credit for balls and what you might term ‘technique’. But the finesse, the skill, and the more idiosyncratic, personalised styles you see in Daydreams, that’s missing. Now it borders on madness.

Also, back in that day, you had to be a good skier. It’s not easy to ski like that. Anybody can ski now, especially because of the wide skis. Then, they were all 215s.

As to the risk, I sat in here with Shane McConkey and Steve McKinney many times and discussed all aspects of speed because I had a lot of aerodynamic background and had studied wing sections trying to perfect them for my White Hawk hang glider. Steve said, ‘Well, you know, the maximum speed for the body free falling is 124 to 128mph’. I told him, ‘That’s not true. That’s the maximum speed you’re going to reach if you just fall out all sloppy, but if you start streamlining yourself, you could go faster’. As far as speed skiing, I said if you had the extremely long skis, shaped helmets, those finned pants, fairings, all the rest, you could go 150mph on skis. And now they are going 160mph.

That’s insane. McKinney was a real pioneer, the first to surpass the 120mph mark at Portillo in 1977, and he was the fastest skier in the world for the next four years. He also flew a hang glider off of Mount Everest from an altitude of 22,000 feet. As a 12 year old, I read about and saw pictures of those Silverton speed runs and was astounded, but it scared the shit out of me—and I was a kid tucking to close in on 80mph myself. I also remember being really sad after finding out McKinney died in 1990 when he was sleeping in his car on the side of the road and another car hit him. As a teenager in Colorado, I really looked up to him. While we’re on the topic of speed, could you talk about Bruno Gouvy?

He was crazier than Patrick Vallençant on a different level, fucking bananas. I told him if you designed a pod for skydiving, you could go 200, 250mph. So, he built a pod for himself, jumped out of an aeroplane, and went 365 mph—lost control, spinning, shitting in his pants, thought he was going to die, but eventually got out of it and landed. By the way, both he and Vallençant died because of broken carbineers.

Man, Vallençant looked so cool in those photos in Powder in the early ‘80s. The pink snowsuit, those glacier sunglasses, dropped tips in the air in flight. His motto was, ‘Si tu tombes, tu meurs’, which translates to, ‘If you fall, you die’. It brings up the leap of faith, again. Do you attribute that to your upbringing? Your father was an air force pilot?

He was, and he fought in World War II, flew Mustangs, and was part of the occupation of Japan. He was over there, my mom and I were back in Downey, California, and he’d have the other guys take pictures of him flexing his muscles, doing push-ups. You know, ‘Keep interested, Dorothy, I’m over here’. She’d do the same for him, in her bathing suit, because they were a beach couple from Santa Monica. That’s how I saw my dad and got to know him: in black and white, until I was four. Then my mom and I got on a little dinky freighter in San Francisco and headed over, a 10-day trip to Japan that took us through enormous storms. We took another boat to Okinawa. It had been the site of the biggest invasion of the war, and the entire island was devastated, wiped out—nothing but ruins and poverty-stricken people in rags begging for food and eating out of trashcans.

The Americans were wealthy, we had a PX, food to eat, a roof over our heads. Coming from southern California and the luxury, the peacefulness, and parks, I just couldn’t believe the destruction. And there were typhoons, raging and blowing, palm trees lying flat. Right after one of those, I’m going to sing in my first Christmas pageant, and on the way to school, in a rice field alongside the road, there’s a B-29 that crashed earlier that day. Killed a couple of people on board, one being the father of one of the kids in my class.

That’s quite a young age to come to that awareness, the reality of death.

That it happened to people you knew, it happened out of place and at the wrong time. Anyway, the fighting in Korea got so intense, we had to go back to the States. We were there for another year while my dad was still fighting in Korea. He came back a very experienced pilot and was going to be a test pilot in the Air Force for all the latest jets. He had enough combat experience, the bravery and medals. We were at Fort Walton in Florida and lived on the ocean. The other pilots were a bunch of crazy guys, and we had a lot of fun. We had water skiing, aqua planes, everybody had boats and sports cars. It was a really cool lifestyle. My dad built our first pair of water skis from a piece of mahogany plywood. He cut out two eight-foot slats about six inches wide, soaked them in water for a couple of days to get the tips wet, then put them on the floor and drove the station wagon up onto them to bend the tips. He cut the bindings out of inner tubes. Then he got an assignment to be the top American test pilot for the British, so we went to RAF West Raynham. The British had some more advanced aircraft than ours and had been getting close to breaking the sound barrier quicker than we had. And Reimar Horten had been designing the flying wing, which would later become today’s stealth aircraft.

Boys and planes—it’s a thing, a real romance. One of my parents’ friends was a pilot who gave me his leftover copies of Aviation Week & Space Technology.

England was super cool, and I loved it because the history, castles—I just absorbed all that like a sponge. After that we went to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the centre of aviation, and had the National Museum of the US Air Force where I became the chief brat. These guys would always give me model aeroplanes, and I made my own Air Force museum at home. But yes, through the whole time in England and everywhere else, the aspect I’ve mentioned of people dying was very common.

Seems it engendered a sensitivity to life’s preciousness, along with a fatalistic acceptance of traumatic, grisly, horrific exits.

It’s sobering. Flying’s not the issue. It’s the landing, right? You can jump off the biggest cliff in the world, and it’s fun all the way down until you hit. There was an air show at Wright-Patterson, and my dad was in the very first squadron group of the Thunderbirds. It had been announced he was piloting a certain plane, a F-84F, and we were watching. The plane did a high-speed stall coming in for landing, fell out of the air, hit, and cartwheeled. You could see the guy flying out on fire and landing in a tree. And we were crying because we thought our father was dead. But then he comes driving up. They had switched planes right before takeoff. So, yeah, those are really shocks to the system. My mom had seen so many people killed. She finally just said to my dad, ‘Hey, guess what dude? You’re out of the Air Force’.

She was over it. So, how did you end up in Tahoe?

After he got out, he said, ‘Let’s go on vacation to Lake Tahoe’. We came up and we drove around the lake, and it was really pretty. A year later, after winding things up in Southern California, we came, a caravan of Becks, on my 14th birthday.

What’s the story with you being a messenger at the 1960 Winter Olympics?

Going to high school in Truckee, California, I was the new kid, and there were no electives left, no wood shop or metal shop. I was like, ‘What do you got?’ ‘Journalism’. I got in there and was learning how to write stories, and I’d go give the news on the PA in the morning.

A budding cub reporter.

This guy comes into the class, and he says, ‘Hi, I’m from the Associated Press. We need two messengers for the Olympics. Can anyone in here ski well?’ I’d never skied, but my friend, Bob Hobbs, said, ‘Raise your hand!’ I got a pair of A&Ts, Anderson and Thompson skis, but since there was no snow that year, I’d only tried them on in the living room. Well, we get there to Squaw Valley Resort with all the athletes and reporters. It’s bustling, and Bob and I get credential packages that allow us access everywhere. I thought I’d just stick by Bob and figure it out as I go, but Bob goes with United Press International and me with the Associated Press, so I’m on my own. The men’s downhill is happening, and I rode this thing, the Jigback Tram—it was freaky. It went straight up Headwall sideways, a series of eight chairs, each holding two people. I get on that, and I’m getting scared. I’m in over my head. Headwall looked like a cliff, you know? And it’s snowing, and I’m going up there with the downhill guys. Jean Vuarnet, who went on to win the gold, could have been sitting next to me. We get up there, and I saw a guy go over to Headwall, and I just followed him, just going, turning, skidding to a stop. So steep. I learnt how to turn, stop, and everything on that one run. But, you know, when it’s steeper it’s easier to turn.

Surfing, skating, skiing—with everything, that’s the case. You have to overcome your fear of steepness and speed. There’s this paradox with part of your brain telling you, passionately, ‘Don’t do it!’, and you have to ignore that and lean forward, always with your body ahead of your skis.

I got off Headwall, and after that the rest of the mountain was pretty easy. When I got down, I was whistling Dixie, like, ‘Where do you want me to go next?’

Trial by fire.

I was a good hockey player then, too, and soon figured out skis were just like long ice skates.

Jumping ahead a few years, what about Jean-Claude Killy?

I got to ski with him at Alpine Meadows. I saw him going down by that big cliff under the Roundhouse lift and waited in line, and we rode up together a few times. Later, we reconnected. He put up posters for Daydreams at his shop when I showed it there in Val d’Isère. He was a great skier, and really put it all together, winning gold for the Slalom, Giant Slalom, and Downhill at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics.

Now, really going back—Snowshoe Thompson. He’s a folk hero and often cited as the originator of California skiing in 1860s. I know you spent a lot of time researching him and wrote a screenplay about his life.

He was an esoteric figure up here until maybe 20 years ago, but earlier than that I got a copy of his diary at a museum down in Auburn, California, and eventually ended up meeting his great-granddaughter, who gave me a pair of his skis. I went to different museums, and one of them had an old tip-bending machine, so I took pictures and started making my own skis. Also, I studied the waxes they used. These replicas over here use old waxes made with whale spermaceti and pine tar, all different things. Home recipes.

In that period, some of those guys were certainly thrill-seekers. On Highway 50 by Spooner Summit, there’s a plaque about the flume that went down the mountain to Carson, and it describes how sometimes, people would ride down the flume on the logs standing up. How gnarly is that? Surfing on a log rushing down the flume. I’m guessing a few didn’t make it.

I’m sure there were a few DNFs, as in ‘Did Not Finish’. So, these guys on these skis, the very early version, that’s the history I wanted to tell. They were racing for thousands of dollars, starting in 1865 up until 1909 or so. It was a very big deal, and I studied a lot of courses and went up and looked for the runs. At first you think, ‘OK, big deal, it’s just a bunch of drunks’. But these were German and Swiss engineers using Swiss stopwatches accurate to at least to a 10th of a second, and in some cases, the average speeds were 90mph. I’m going, ‘Are you shitting me?’ The Europeans weren’t even approaching that until a hundred years later. But you have to make a distinction between Snowshoe Thompson delivering the mail: He would be considered a big mountain skier now, jumping things, carrying a big pack on his back. The first really extreme skier.

Since it keeps coming up, having known so many people who died doing what some might call these swashbuckler activities, what’s your perspective? Is a spectacular death at a young age better than growing old languishing in a nursing home?

I get asked that question and hear that, ‘Well, at least he died doing what he loved’. To me, to die that way would be the ultimate insult because it would show that I fucked up, and I don’t want to fuck up when I’m doing extreme stuff. I don’t mind fucking up at the peewee golf course, but in other places and situations, that would be unacceptable. I would just as soon die in my sleep.

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