Frosty the Snowman loved it . . . So did skiers and snowboarders throughout the Intermountain Area. And ski shops and ski schools and lifties and tourists and record-keepers. In fact, the region’s snow totals of 2022-2023 were so monumental that the season will be the feature of the J. Willard Marriott Library’s Ski Affair, to be held Wednesday, October 25, 2023 at 6:00 P.M. at the Cleone Peterson Eccles Alumni House on the University of Utah campus.

This benefit for the library‘s Ski and Snow Sports Archives will include an opportunity drawing, social hour, dinner and a program. It’s also an outlet for ski and snow lovers alike to gather in celebration of the sports they love the very most.

The goal of this annual event is to bring awareness and funding to the library’s incredible Ski and Snow Sports Archives – one of the largest collection of its type globally – housed within its building walls. The archives contain the history and development of Utah’s prospering winter sports industry. Documented are the history of ski competition on local, national and international levels; the founding of major resorts; snow safety and avalanche control; ski equipment; ski instruction; freestyle skiing; the 10th Mountain Division; back-country skiing and virtually every facet of winter sports in Utah and the surrounding region. The archives are the repository for the Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games Bid Committee records and the records of the 2002 games themselves.

The unprecedented snow season celebration will be capped via a video produced by Ski Utah, the organization that promotes the ski industry entity. Its president, Nathan Rafferty, will give the industry’s highlights of the past season and provide a sneak peek on the upcoming season.

A highlight of the evening is a premier of a locally produced film, The Last Gunners. The seven-minute production will have its debut at the 2023 Ski Affair. It highlights the end of a historic era in the annals of snow safety in Utah – the use of military Howitzer weapons to mitigate the dangers of avalanches on roads and ski areas.

“It took hundreds of conversations, piles of emails, sifting through primary sources and one extremely early morning to get it all done,” states film producer, Lexi Dowdell who worked to create this movie with director Tim Jones.

This past season was the 75th, and last season, that Alta Ski Area will be using WWII artillery to mitigate avalanches, giving way to safer, more precise methods.

As the video highlights, Howitzers came on the ski scene at Alta in 1947 when the U.S. Forest Service teamed with a Utah National Guard artillery unit, Utah Highway Department and Alta’s snow safety experts Monty Atwater and Ed LaChapelle to bring down avalanches in a predictable and safe manner. Because of them, Howitzers became the standard for such avalanche mitigation efforts worldwide.