Fire and Ice a Mile High

NBC shoots a movie on top of a mountain

In the script the scene took a few lines and a gallon or two of purple ink. The helicopter slams into the rock "with a grinding scream, the blades crumple back like spaghetti, still twisting in a slow-motion convulsion of shrieking metal. Like a great dying bird, it seems to keel over in a last agony, twisting downward in a wrenching, moaning death. Whoomp!"

But that scene, and particularly that whoomp--in NBC's upcoming made-for-TV movie High Ice--took six weeks and more real-life dash and daring than will likely be visible on the 19-in. screen.

According to the plot of the $1.8 million film, which will probably air early next year, two young couples who climb mountains on weekends are caught in an avalanche. One of the men is killed, and the three survivors are trapped on a tiny ledge, with nothing but frigid air and a glacier beneath them. An Army helicopter spots them, but when it angles down for a rescue, it bangs into the side of the mountain and crashes to the ice below.

Most of the movie's close-up action, featuring Actors David Janssen, Tony Musante and Madge Sinclair, was shot on a set constructed in the community center gym of Darrington, Wash. But the helicopter scenes were shot 4,200 ft. higher up, on and around the sheer rock face of White Horse Mountain in the northern Cascades. Director Eugene Jones spent six months finding just the right-size ledge, which measured an appropriately uncomfortable 31 ft. by 3 ft.

Professional climbers, including Beverly Johnson, who was the first woman to scale Yosemite's El Capitan by herself, were recruited for the high work. They doubled for actors and assisted cameramen who were lashed to precarious ledges. Everyone was ferried up by helicopters borrowed from an Army Reserve unit, and most of the crew worked 14-hour days over a period of six weeks. Several chose to remain overnight in a cave on the rock face. "There was one guy who was like a human fly," marvels Captain Richard Dominy, the commander of the copter unit. "He liked it so much up there he didn't want to come down."

To film the exploding helicopter, the hardest shot of all, the shell of a Viet Nam-vintage Huey chopper was filled with explosives and hoisted aloft on a 220-ft. cable by a larger Chinook. Then it was hung by cables attached to the rock itself. Either the cables were not fastened tightly enough, however, or a rock sliced them apart, because the Huey fell to the ground and exploded before cameras could be set up.

Jones located another chopper body and tied it more firmly to the rock. Demolition Expert William Balles loaded it with C-4 plastiques, 50 gal. of gas, and black powder wrapped in naphthalene--a mix designed to make the explosion as fiery as possible. A special "cable-cutting" charge was planted to send the Huey tumbling at just the right moment. When the copter blew up, on cue this time, the sound was heard 40 miles away. One local radio station called it a sonic boom.

Despite the danger to all involved, there were no major injuries. Relieved, Jones relaxed by shooting a nude scene between two of the actors. American viewers will not see that sequence, but he figures it will help attract theater audiences in Europe, where audiences apparently think whoomp! means something other than an exploding helicopter.

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