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A 91-Year-Old Skier's Wisdom

Nov 23, 2015 | 831 videos
Video by Riley Hooper

Henry Bendinelli, who passed away on Oct. 27, 2015 at the age of 91, had been skiing since he was 12. In his lifetime, he estimates that he skied a distance twice the circumference of the earth. The filmmaker Riley Hooper met Bendinelli when he reached out to her on Vimeo asking for her help deleting some videos. "By the end of our lengthy correspondence (he never did find the delete button, I ended up just deleting the videos for him) he had invited me to go skiing with him when I was home for the holidays," she wrote. "I accepted his invitation and, naturally, made a film about him as well." Her film is a moving tribute to the wisdom of age and the value of intentionally spending time outdoors. "When you're skiing, you forget all of your cares," Bendinelli says in the film. "You're sailing on down there just as free as a bird."

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Author: Nadine Ajaka

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