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'Buried' is a touching look at how a decades-old trauma still affects these avalanche survivors

A new documentary, "Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche", chronicles an avalanche that happened at a California ski resort and how it affected those who were there that day.
Lanny Johnson
A new documentary, "Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche", chronicles an avalanche that happened at a California ski resort and how it affected those who were there that day.

A new documentary, called Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche looks back at a terrible event at a California ski resort. KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz says the movie gives more than an account of what happened then.

Seven people died in that huge avalanche at Alpine Meadows ski resort. Four of them worked for the ski area, and, of course, those interviewed for the film bear scars. And that’s what comes out in this movie about time and memory. It’s fascinating to see how the people involved looked then, compared to now.

Buried, directed by Jared Drake and Steven Slig, takes the time to establish that they were 20-somethings having a blast on the ski patrol in the early 1980s. They took the work seriously, but the old photos and footage look like old home movies of surfers at about the same time — kids who found a way to make recreation the center of their lives.

Meredith Watson, the lone woman ski patroller in 1982 implies that while the men made things tough for a woman, she loved dynamiting avalanches.

"The idea of blowing things up appealed to me," Watson says in the film.

Pretty quickly, Buried shows that ski patrollers and other workers at Alpine Meadows were a tight group. They were roommates, lovers, active young people at the time of life when they form powerful friendships around common tasks. Work dominated their lives, but while the work was demanding and dangerous at times, it was fun. In their world, they were royalty.

Jim Plehn is probably the center of the picture. From his own description, he was the one member of an academic family at Berkeley who didn’t take the expected path. He went off to ski, and was soon asked to become the Alpine Meadows Avalanche Forecaster.

Skiing is one of those activities where human beings bluntly encounter a natural world that doesn’t give a hoot about them. Skiers slide out of control on the snow and crash into trees; altitude and exertion cause heart attacks. People die — and sometimes they die from avalanches. Plehn carried immense responsibility and no matter how good he might have been at that job, the natural world is finally not controllable, or predictable.

In March 1982, 11 feet of snow fell on Alpine Meadows, near Lake Tahoe, in a week, and finally cascaded down the steep mountainsides. The avalanche obliterated buildings and killed those seven people. And when it began snowing again during the rescue work, Plehn had to call everyone off the mountain for a day because it was too dangerous to keep looking for their friends. Plehn now lives as a semi-hermit.

As others recall the avalanche and its aftermath, they tear up and grow distant in the eyes. Larry Heywood confesses that he felt emotionally numb until the first funeral, and he says “I wasn’t a particularly empathetic young man.”

So, Buried develops an elemental quality. From its early pictures of young people at play, it looks at those people nearly 40 years later, when they’re no longer young and no longer at play. You can see and feel the effects of aging, and get a sense of what it’s like to carry terrible memories for a long time.

Buried has minor problems. It’s tricky for documentaries to try to recreate events, and occasionally, it’s hard to tell if footage is archival or re-staged. It would help if the film also noted when images of Alpine Meadows were taken recently or in 1982, or some other time.

But in the overall effect of Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche, these are not major concerns. This is a touching film. Even when it’s busy establishing just the sequence of weather and snow, you feel the human dimension – that the people who talk about the event are not cool-headed reporters. They’re talking about their own lives and the crisis that has hovered over them since it happened.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.