Outside Online calls it "perhaps the most impressive ski descent of all time"—one American Jim Morrison managed to achieve on Wednesday. The 50-year-old ski mountaineer completed a historic ski descent on Mount Everest's Hornbein Couloir after depositing the ashes of his late partner Hilaree Nelson at the summit; Nelson died in a fall on Nepal's Mount Manaslu in 2022 while with Morrison. Morrison dedicated the day to her, marking the occasion as both a farewell and a tribute.
The Hornbein Couloir, located on Everest's North Face, is considered one of the most difficult ski lines in the world—"dizzyingly steep," in Outside's assessment, a 1,500-foot gully with slopes between 45 and 60 degrees. "If you want to get off the top of Mount Everest as quickly as possible—save for strapping on a wingsuit and leaping off—the Hornbein is the way," the site quips. Morrison's team was only the sixth to even ascend this route, and the first since 1991. When linked with the Japanese Couloir below, the descent covers nearly 12,000 vertical feet.
While others have skied parts of Everest—most notably Yuichiro Miura in 1970 and, more recently, Andrzej Bargiel in a run completed without supplemental oxygen—Morrison's descent of the Hornbein is seen as a new benchmark. Morrison described the conditions as a mix of "survival skiing and actual shredding," with sections that were rutted and icy, including a 650-foot section of bare rock he had to rappel down.
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National Geographic reports his team included Jimmy Chin, who with Chai Vasarhelyi won an Oscar for 2018's Free Solo; they're now working on a National Geographic documentary film on Morrison's feat, which he had attempted twice before unsuccessfully and which the magazine calls "easily the most audacious ski run in history."