The jubilation Billy Poole took to the mountains befitted his life's goal to ski in a Warren Miller movie, his friends and colleagues say.
    He lived the dream for a week before he became the first person to die on camera in the history of the Warren Miller entertainment franchise.
    "It's just devastating for us - that we lost Billy, and that it happened on our project," director Max Bervy said Wednesday, a day after a Poole was fatally injured while filming in Big Cottonwood Canyon.
    Bervy said he plans to honor Poole's career in the upcoming film. He said he will speak with Poole's family to learn how they want footage shot earlier in the week to be used.
    Poole was skiing in an area between Solitude and Brighton ski resorts Tuesday afternoon when he hit rock on a bad landing, Salt Lake County sheriff's deputies have said. He died at University Hospital.
    The fall put an end to a career that was "coming to fruition," said Poole's friend and business partner, Julian Carr. Poole was featured in this month's Powder magazine, became a marquee athlete for Salt Lake City-based Black Diamond and looked forward to the fall release of the as-yet-untitled Warren Miller film.
    "He was getting all the opportunities he should be getting for his talent," said Carr, who co-owned Discrete, a ski headwear company, with Poole.

He was kind of in a league of his own."
    Poole's name "had come up many times" as Warren Miller reps looked for a Utah skier for the new film, Bervy said.
    "Last year and this year, suddenly everyone knows who he is," Bervy said. "He worked very hard to get there."
    Poole's final ascent rose out of relentless pleas to filmmakers and sponsors, a near-fatal avalanche last winter in Canada and those requisite, starving-artist years of bathing out of the kitchen sink in a 10-man house his friend Nico Melendez can describe only as "gnarly."
    The day Poole landed the Warren Miller gig he called Melendez, who had produced films featuring Poole through his Salt Lake City-based Levitation Project.
    "I was so happy for him and just proud of him, going from this guy who was so hungry he was calling anyone who would listen to him, to the pinnacle of a professional skier's career - being in a Warren Miller film," he said.
    Leigh von der Esch, managing director of the Utah Office of Tourism, said Poole's accident likely will not affect the state's two-year relationship with Warren Miller as sponsor of the film's national tour.
    ealberty@sltrib.com
   
   
    Billy Poole's friends and family will air a memorial video of Poole's ski career today at a reception held from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Goldminer's Daughter Lodge at the Alta ski resort.