Taylor Fraser later edited the Houlihan footage into an exciting film with the inspired choice of the Egmont Overture. The Alaska papers carried the story, and NBC called, but we wanted to be more serious than the news would be. The tuner finally admitted that we were all crazy. Mickey Houlihan came dangerously close to the lip of the cornice, and his son Sean hung below the helicopter filming, because Mickey told him not to. As avalanches poured down on both sides of our pinnacle, we set up, filmed, and re-crated the piano over eight hours.
We flew it up to nearly 13,000 feet with one copter while filming it with another. The Steinway technician in Anchorage had a client who was moving a piano to California, so it was already crated. We scouted eight locations, and picked the one which remained calm enough to fly out of eight hours later. Most high mountains are in wilderness areas where you can’t fly a helicopter, but the Chugach are in a National Forest, right next to where they film the Valdez extreme ski movies. (Some of the photos from those climbs can be found in my eBooks.) But politics change, and it seemed safer to do it in America. Schuster, a violinist and piano tuner, owned Acme Piano Company in Sellwood and had played with the Portland Symphony Society for the 1937 Presidents. I wanted to repeat my climbs in the Himalaya with a piano for a book I was writing.
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