Reliving the rescue: Filmmakers revisit 1967's daring Grand Teton feat

GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK — A year ago, Jenny Wilson, the Salt Lake County councilwoman and former mayoral hopeful, went with her family to her favorite national park, where she found herself retelling her favorite national park story.

It involves a daring 1967 mountain rescue of two climbers off the North Face of the Grand Teton, which is sort of like plucking two billiard balls off a pool table standing on its end.

Jenny was 2 at the time. Her dad, former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson, was 28 and part of the rescue team.

After she finished her tale, Jenny's husband, Trell, gazed toward the

summit of the Grand Teton, at 13,770 feet the overlord of everything below, the Brad Pitt of peaks, easily America's most photographed and painted mountain.

"You know what?" he said. "That ought to be a movie."

Pretty much all he needed to say.

Fast forward a year and the documentary film, "North Face, 1967" is well into production. First, Jenny, who in an earlier life learned the film business working for the Sundance Institute, rounded up enough private funding (some of it hers and Trell's) to get started

Next she recruited a strong team of filmmakers led by producer-director Meredith Lavitt, an ex-Sundance colleague with a number of documentaries to her credit.

Finally she contacted members of the 1967 rescue team and invited them back to the Tetons for a chance to tell their story all over again.

These are men who 42 years ago were fit, young guys who worked as summer rescue rangers for $2.84 an hour because they got paid to climb.

Now they're fit, old guys who climb for free.

It took them less than a heartbeat to say yes they'd be there.

For five days this past week the six living members of the rescue team, none of whom will ever see 60 again, immersed themselves in the present and the past, traipsing around mountains they knew and know like the back of their pack.

From Olympia, Wash., came Pete Sinclair, 73. From Ogden came Bob Irvine, 70. From Salt Lake City came Ted Wilson, 70. From Bozeman came Rick Reese, 67. From Anchorage came Ralph Tingey, 66, and from Dartmouth, Mass., came Mike Ermarth, 65.

Standing in the shadow of the North Face, tranquilized by cool, clean Teton air, everyone got to look in the camera and tell his version of who, what, when, where, why and how — and when one person's memory collided headlong into someone else's, creating a physical, psychological and existential impossibility, they agreed to go with whatever version was sexier.

"The bull — was really flowing," Ted Wilson said, smiling.