Amazing the things that are tucked back into my feeble brain. As I work on the autobiography, more and more of them surface.

The '60s were really roaring in ski development in France. Every time I went to Courchavel, I hardly recognized the town. So much changed.

Janeau Tourneau and his brother had opened a bar called The Farm Yard. Behind the bar, instead of the usual display of all kinds of bottles of booze, there was a very large plate glass window. Behind that was a farmyard scene full of live animals. A couple of cows, a mule, pigs, chickens, you name a farm animal and it was there.

They were in a closed room and whenever the bar was closed, it was dark in the farmyard and the animals slept. When the bar was open after skiing until 2 in the morning, they turned on all of the lights on bright, lighting the farmyard. As far as the animals were concerned, this was daytime to them and they did whatever farm animals do in the daytime.

Any time I watched them, all they ever did was watch me and the other people who were at the bar. The owners were very happy with the setup because their overhead for a seven-day week for the animals was a bale of hay a day. The pigs lived off of the leftover dinners from the restaurant next door. That was a very cheap salary for the floorshow.

In the middle of winter, they had substituted a pregnant cow for one that had been there for a long time. You could buy a lottery ticket on the exact time when the pregnant cow would deliver the calf. I did not wait around for the delivery of the first calf to be born in a combination bar-barn.

One evening a French TV crew was filming the Farm Yard Bar and I saw my first Arriflex camera up close and personal. I coveted that camera for years, but at over $3,000, it was a long way out of my budget for a long time.

One winter I was producing a half-hour television film for “Look Nevada” featuring Leo LaCroix. I had gotten to know him quite well when he skied with Killy in the infamous 13 week-13 ski resort television series right after Killy won three Olympic gold medals.

In 1966, Leo had stood in the starting gate in the World Championships in Portillo Chile on a pair of skis he and his brother had made in their own garage. Leo finished second in the downhill on those skis. I was always so impressed with him.

Also along on the filming trip was Jon Reveal, who later laid out most of the ski runs and the lifts here at the Yellowstone Club in Montana, where Laurie and I live in the winter.

We climbed into a Pilatus Porter aircraft at the Courchevel airport halfway up the hill above the hotel and flew to La Menuire, which at that time was being touted as part of the Three Valleys.

When we flew over the ridge separating the two ski resorts, I was very surprised to see a lot of high-rise buildings and no people. They were not yet open for the winter, but when I filmed the buildings I had to film them from the second story up. It was as though an atom bomb had a gone off and killed all of the people. Almost all of the condominiums had been sold, and unlike in America when someone bought a condo, the French ones came without sinks, toilets or cabinets. Leo told us, “That's the way we do it here in the Three Valleys.”

I was really amazed to see these half-dozen buildings, all over 10 stories tall, and not another living person in sight. The road up to the village had not been completed for winter travel on purpose. That way they could contour all of the ski runs and check the snow every day in order to build avalanche fences and the many ski lifts in exactly the right places.

As Leo again said, “It is the French method, and we like it. We will build the roads when we are sure of the ski run.”

When La Menuire became operational, you could ski 14 airline miles from one end of the Three Valleys to the other.

The bar with the farm yard and the animals were right down the street from a hotel called Bachelors Only. The owner had a simple marketing strategy that really worked. When you checked into the hotel, the owner had you stand on a set of scales that he had gotten from an airport somewhere. He wrote down your weight on your registration card, and as he did he pointed to electric lights above each place there was a room key.

He went on to say, “Each bed is mounted on a set of scales and if the weight on your bed gets over what your registered weight is, that light where your room key hangs will go on and I will know that you have a guest in your room. When the light goes on, I automatically call the police because you are cheating me.”

During the grand opening week of his hotel he paid the local gendarmerie (cop) the equivalent of $25 to arrest a guest and a woman of the night for double occupancy in one of his single rooms. The story and photographs of the arrest appeared in almost 400 newspapers all over the world. He has been almost sold out ever since the article appeared.

A friend recently returned from a ski vacation in Courchavel, and I was amazed when he said he had to pay over $1,000 a night for a hotel room. The times are changing everywhere. But you don't have to go to France and pay that much for great skiing.

How lucky we are all over America to have had so many smart people have the foresight to build our great ski areas.

Filmmaker Warren Miller lived in Vail for 12 years, and his column began in the Vail Daily.