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 9,000 feet (2,700 meters) of snow, ice and rock — the most merciless ski run on planet Earth.
It had never been skied, until Morrison did it.
“It was a spectacular four hours of skiing down a horrific snow pack,” Morrison told The Associated Press Tuesday of his historic Oct. 15 run.
Morrison climbed Everest’s notorious North Face through the Hornbein Couloir alongside 10 other mountaineers and documentarian Jimmy Chin, who is co-directing a documentary about Morrison’s run. Chin also filmed Alex Honnold’s ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes for the documentary “Free Solo.”
This adventure is “the skiing equivalent to free soloing,” said Chin. “If your edge blows out or you slip anywhere on the line, you’re gone. You fall 9,000 feet.”
The ski run starts atop Everest, some 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) above sea level and in the death zone, where people can’t 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 from the summit. The young snowboarder, Marco Siffredi, disappeared on its slopes in 2002.
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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.
At the bottom of their route up Mount Everest, before their four-day climb to the summit, they craned their necks upward.
“We’ve spent an entire lifetime climbing in the big mountains,” said Chin. “I’ve never to this day seen anything that’s more intimidating as a climbing objective.”
Only five people had climbed it before, and nobody had since 1991. While the other, more popular routes up Everest follow a ridgeline, this path up the mountain’s imposing North Face was called the Super Direct route — it’s straight up, and then straight down.
Their 12-person team started, climbing through snowfields, over rock and on patches of ice, facing the possibility of rock falls and avalanches. They had carefully timed their trip in a narrow weather window, seeking enough snow to ski and safe conditions.
At night, they spent hours hacking ridges into the ice and snow that they could squeeze into to sleep, always harnessed to their ropes.
One night, they were huddled on the mountain face as a howling wind rained snow from above and threatened to blow their tent off the mountain, said Chin.
Morrison went to sleep. Chin needed sleep, too, and they’d done all they could to secure themselves to the mountain.
“So I put in my earplugs because I figured if we go get blown off the mountain, I don’t want to know what’s happening,” he said.
The sun came up. As they continued climbing, Morrison assessed the snow that he would be skiing down, and “basically everything I saw looked terrifying. The snow conditions were really, really bad,” he said.
But Morrison kept on, holding 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.
They celebrated together and took selfies. Morrison spread some of Nelson’s ashes.
Then, as Morrison donned his skis and looked over at his teammates, he realized: “‘OK, now I’m in a completely different world. I’m on my own.’”
He dropped in, doing controlled hop turns on his skies. The route’s details, which he had studied, imagined, witnessed, read of and dreamed about, took over his mind. He wasn’t thinking of a possible fall, only the next turn. Every breath was a challenge at that altitude.
He’d later text his friends: “the conditions were abominable, and I was able to shred a lot of it.”
At several points, Morrison 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.”