Bob Kellogg comes home to talk skiing and help MS

Bangor native Bob Kellogg started skiing at Sugarloaf-USA in 1956, the year after it opened.

A love of skiing and sailing has kept him on the move ever since, landing him at various spots around the world. He’s back in Maine for a while, headed to “The Loaf” for the winter.

Along the way he’ll make a stop at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono to help a medical trio called The Bangor Bombers kick off the 1993-94 ski season.

The Bombers – Drs. Bill Wood and Garrett Martin, and registered nurse Leesa Easton-Cook – have taken on the task of trying to fill the Hutchins Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 27, for the Maine premier of Warren Miller’s latest ski film, “Black Diamond RUSH.”

The film features another native Mainer and Sugarloafer, U.S. Olympian Julie Parisien of Auburn. Parisien appears in a segment shot in Chile.

The trio, with the backing of several local businesses, is sponsoring the film as a fund-raiser to fight multiple sclerosis. Last April, the Bombers represented Sugarloaf-USA in the Jimmie Heuga Ski Express national championship in Vail, Colo., a ski-racing fund-raiser for the Jimmie Heuga Center.

Heuga is a former Olympic medalist who contracted MS in 1974 and later founded the non-profit MS research center in Avon, Colo.

Kellogg has more than a passing interest in Miller films. In 1972, when he was working at the Alta Ski Resort in Utah, Kellogg was featured in the opening segment of a Miller film.

Since then, Warren Miller has come to be considered “King of the Sports Filmmakers.” He has taken audiences on a series of wild ski trips throughout the world, complete with comedy and daring ski antics.

The Bombers are hoping the unusual film event will draw a diverse crowd and serve a variety of purposes – from heightening awareness of MS to sparking interest in the Heuga Center that offers scholarships to qualified applicants.

Maine has one of the highest rates of multiple sclerosis in the country, acording to the medical experts. MS is a disease of the central nervous system.

Kellogg left New England for Alta in the mid-60s and stayed nine years. In 1972, Miller’s film crew was looking for powder footage and Alta had it, Kellogg said.

“His photographer asked me if I’d like to ski for them for a day, if it were a good snow day,” Kellogg said. “Well, it must have snowed a couple of feet the night before. It was one of those picture-perfect days you could do no wrong.”

Up on the opening lift run, they chose an area not popular as a first run for most skiers – good snow and untracked – and proceeded to film.

“The guy had a ton of gear,” Kellogg recalled. “He would ski down with his camera, stop, get set up, and yell to me to go ahead when I was ready.

“I had to laugh. Usually, on a day like that, you’d get in a heck of a lot of skiing but, with all the stop-and-go, I was lucky to get a 10th as much as I hoped.”

Unfortunately, Wood discovered the film with the Kellogg footage is not available. But when Hutchins Concert Hall film-goers watch the daredevil antics of powder skiers in this latest movie, they can share in the knowledge that one of their own helped pioneer activities that are taken for granted today.

“If you or your family came to Alta, I would be the one to answer all your questions about helicopter skiing and, more often than not, the one to organize the trip and guide you into the back country,” Kellogg said of a sport that he helped start at Alta years ago.

He said that heli-skiing, where skiers fly into remote areas, are dropped off, and then descend the mountain, is as good as it gets.

“Our main concern always was, and still is, safety and the avoidence of avalanche areas,” he said.

Kellogg, Wood, Martin and Easton-Cook would love nothing more than to fill the house for this fun film and worthy cause.

“It’s premier entertainment for the whole family,” Kellogg said. “You don’t have to enjoy skiing to enjoy one of these movies. Miller keeps it light enough so that you really could have just a passing interest, or less, in the sport. It is fun, and it is funny.”

“Black Diamond RUSH” was filmed on diverse locations from Vermont to Romania and includes the Parisien segment with the United States Women’s Ski Team in Chile, heli-skiing in Alaska, a snowboard expedition in Russia, no-holds-barred freestyle aerials in Canada, and the steep chutes of Val D’Isere in France.