Disclaimer: I went into this documentary with no prior knowledge of the topic. If you are similarly clueless and would like to watch this film with fresh eyes, I suggest you do the same and stop reading after this paragraph. Although…I would rate this documentary as just okay. You might enjoy reading this post just as much as actually watching it.

Now for the part with spoilers.

This film is exactly what it states in the title: a documentary about the avalanche that occurred at the Alpine Meadows ski resort in the Lake Tahoe area in 1982. They interview the ski patrol employees who were working that year, give us some background on avalanche control work, and do a good job building tension up to the avalanche and through the rescue effort.

The big payoff in the film comes on day five after the avalanche. Two people are still missing. Having already pulled six bodies from the snow, the rescue effort has now become a recovery operation. Morale is so low. They are working to uncover the basement of a building when a hand reaches out from a hole.

The hand belongs to Anna Conrad, who has survived five days in a small air pocket. She has a concussion, she is sick from dehydration, but she is alive.

Until this point, we have only seen Anna’s picture flashed across the screen; she was a cute twenty-two-year-old in 1982. Now she appears in front of us forty years later, an old woman with wrinkles, grey, thinning hair, and a sagging neck.

The contrast is striking.

It’s striking to me because our society has such loathing toward the aging process. The worst thing a woman can do is let her skin get wrinkly (stay out of the sun or else!) or gain weight (stop eating so much or else!) or get saggy (spend ridiculous amounts of time doing resistance training or else!).

But here is Anna, alive, with the droopy neck to prove her years. Her roommate Beth did not survive the avalanche: she is frozen in time in pictures from 1982, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old.

But society wants me to be Beth, frozen in her youthful beauty? Oh hell no.

Aging is life. Aging is stress and boredom and raising kids and having a career and muttering the f-word to yourself while doing home repairs and learning to appreciate peanut M&Ms and early bedtime. Aging is all the stuff Beth didn’t get to do, but Anna did.

This, I think, was not the message the filmmakers expected someone to get from their movie, but it’s the message I got. And next time I am poking at my face in the mirror and worrying that I’m starting to get jowly (I am; it’s okay) I’m going to think of Anna and how she lived.