John Eaves: From Bond to Bogner’s ‘Fire and Ice’

In Heli-Ski, People

Photo: Danny Stoffel | John Eaves skiing and shooting at CMH Valemount

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Words by Morgan Dinsdale | October 12, 2017

John Eaves is a name you may not immediately recognize, but few have made skiing look so cool. As the man behind some of Bond’s most famous ski chase sequences, John’s Bond dodged bullets while racing 100km down a bobsled run; was chased by motorcycles in For Your Eyes Only and skied steep glacier pitches and snowboarded alongside Tom Sims in A View To A Kill. Time and again John’s skills as a freestyle skier (he’s a 42-time freestyle champion), translate outside the traditional athlete box. Over his lifetime John has been a stunt double and actor in over a dozen action films and documentaries, including his last documentary, 2001’s Ski To The Max, which was filmed in part at CMH’s Cariboo Lodge.

Photo: John Eaves in a Bogner video in the 80’s

John has been skiing with CMH since his first trip to the Bobbie Burns in 1981, when he came to film a powder scene for Fire and Ice, a ski film he starred in, that was directed by legendary ski racer Willy Bogner. Since then John has spent almost every winter returning to CMH’s many lodges as a cinematographer for CMH guests looking to document their heli skiing experience. “I’ve filmed all over the world and taken very adventurous clientele to find new places to ski, to places that had never been skied before, in Greenland, Iceland, even to the Himalayas,” he says of his time working on the other side of the camera, “And now as they get older I’ve noticed their one area of choice, now that they aren’t searching to the farthest corners of the earth, is always CMH. Year after year I go back there with them, and it’s never anything short of spectacular!”