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mountaineer jim morrison He bounced left on his skis, causing snow to fall down a steep gully on the north face of Mt. EverestThen he jumped to his right, his breathing heavy in the oxygen-thin air.
Below him fell 9,000 feet (2,700 m) of snow, ice and rocks – the most merciless ski run on planet Earth.
It was never skied until Morrison did it.
“It was a great experience skiing down terrible snow,” Morrison told The Associated Press on Tuesday about his historic Oct. 15 race.
Morrison climbed Everest’s infamous North Face via the Hornby Couloir with 10 other climbers and documentarian Jimmy Chin, who is co-directing a documentary about Morrison’s race. Chin also filmed Alex Honnold’s climb captain Without ropes in Yosemite National Park for the documentary “Free Solo”.
The adventure is “the skiing equivalent of free soloing,” Chin said. “If your edge blows out or you slip anywhere on the line, you’re gone. You fall 9,000 feet.”
The ski run starts from the summit of Everest, which is about 29,000 feet (8,800 m) above sea level and is in the death zone, where people cannot survive for long.
“When it comes to big mountains and climbing, it’s like landing on the moon,” said Jeremy Evans, who wrote a book about the last person to attempt to escape the summit. Young snowboarder, Marco Siffredi, disappeared on its slopes in 2002.
The adventure was dreamed up by Morrison and his life partner, accomplished ski mountaineer Hilarie Nelson. They planned to make it together until his death in 2022 while skiing on the world’s eighth highest mountain.
From then on, it was a journey that Morrison was taking for both of them.
At the foot of his route to Mount Everest, before his four-day climb to the summit, he craned his neck upward.
“We’ve spent our whole lives climbing big mountains,” Chin said. “I have never seen anything that is more intimidating than the purpose of climbing.”
Only five people had climbed it before, and no one had climbed it since 1991. While other, more popular routes up Everest follow a ridgeline, this route up the mountain’s gorgeous North Face was called the Super Direct Route – it’s straight up, and then straight down.
His 12-person team began climbing snowfields, rocks and ice floes, facing the possibility of rockfall and avalanches. They had carefully planned their trip in a narrow weather window, looking for enough snow and safe conditions to ski.
At night, they would spend hours shoveling snow and ice so they could sleep, always tied to their ropes.
One night, Chin said, they hid on top of the mountain because a strong wind was blowing snow from above and was in danger of blowing their tent off the mountain.
Morrison went to sleep. Chin also needed sleep, and he did everything he could to secure himself on the mountain.
“So I put my earplugs in because I thought if we went flying off the mountain, I wouldn’t want to know what was happening,” he said.
The sun rose. As they climbed, Morrison assessed the snow he would be skiing down, and “Basically everything I saw looked terrible. The snow conditions were really bad,” he said.
But Morrison kept moving forward with Nelson on his mind, and “as I got higher and higher, and farther into the death zone, I got closer and closer to him.”
The sun was shining on the peak. The Himalayan mountains were spread all around them.
They celebrated together and took selfies. Morrison spread some of Nelson’s ashes.
Then, when Morrison put on his skis and looked at his teammates, he realized: “‘Okay, now I’m in a completely different world. I’m on my own.'”
He dropped in, performing a controlled hop turn on his sky. The details of the route, which he had studied, imagined, seen, read and dreamed about, occupied his mind. He wasn’t thinking about the potential fall, only about the next turn. Every breath at that altitude was a challenge.
He later messaged his friends: “The conditions were disgusting, and I was able to destroy a lot of it.”
At several points, Morrison used ropes, including only rocks, but he relied on them less than he expected.
When he reached the bottom, reached a safe place, he exhaled.
He screamed, cried and talked to Nelson.
The next morning, he said, he went out and saw the towering North Face.
“And I can feel Hillary’s presence, on top of the world.”