In 1978 a construction crew digging up an old hockey rink in Dawson City, Yukon, unearthed 533 reels of silent-era nitrate film representing 372 titles from 1903 to 1929, all frozen in the permafrost. This episode explains how half a million feet of highly explosive nitrocellulose ended up as fill dirt beneath a community ice rink, and why that reckless decision accidentally preserved a lost chapter of twentieth-century history.

The story begins with the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association screening films at the end of the continental distribution circuit, where studios refused to pay return freight on battered prints and the reels piled up in a bank and then a Carnegie Library basement. It follows bank employee and hockey treasurer Clifford Thompson, who in 1929 used the films to insulate a converted swimming pool against melting permafros ...