Mountaineer Jim Morrison hopped left on his skis, sending trickles of snow down a sheer gully on the North Face of Mount Everest, then he hopped to the right, his breath heavy in the oxygen-thin air.
Below him plunged 2,700m of snow, ice and rock — the most merciless ski run on planet Earth.
It had never been skied, until Morrison did it.
Photo: Savannah Cummins, National Geographic via AP
“It was a spectacular four hours of skiing down a horrific snow pack,” Morrison said of his historic Oct. 15 run.
He climbed Everest’s notorious North Face through the Hornbein Couloir alongside 10 other mountaineers and documentarian Jimmy Chin, who is codirecting a documentary about Morrison’s run.
The adventure was “the skiing equivalent to free soloing,” Chin said. “If your edge blows out or you slip anywhere on the line, you’re gone. You fall 9,000 feet [2,743m].”
The ski run started atop Everest, about 8,800m above sea level and in the death zone, where people cannot survive for long.
“When it comes to big mountain stuff and climbing, it’s like landing on the moon,” said Jeremy Evans, who wrote a book about the last person to attempt the run.
The young snowboarder, Marco Siffredi, disappeared on its slopes in 2002.
The adventure was dreamed up by Morrison and his life partner, accomplished ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson. They planned to do it together until her death in 2022 while skiing on the world’s eighth-highest mountain.
From then on, it was a trip Morrison was doing for them both.
Only five people had completed the four-day climb to the summit up the imposing North Face using the “Super Direct” route — it is straight up, and then straight down — and nobody had since 1991.
Throughout the climb, Morrison said he kept Nelson in his mind, and “as I got higher and higher, and further into the death zone, I got closer and closer to her.”
On the summit, the sun was shining. The Himalayan Mountains splayed out around them. Morrison donned his skis and dropped in, doing controlled hop turns.
The route’s details, which he had studied, imagined, witnessed, read of and dreamed about, took over his mind. He was not thinking of a possible fall, only the next turn. Every breath was a challenge at that altitude.
At several points, he used the ropes, including where there was only rock, but he relied on them less than he had anticipated.
When he neared the bottom, crossing into safety, he exhaled.
He screamed, and cried and he spoke to Nelson.
The next morning, he walked out and looked up at the towering North Face, he said.
“And I could sort of feel Hilaree’s presence at the very top, the top of the world,” he said.
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