H2uh0

I left my clients on top of Mount Everest. They wanted it that way. Truth be told, Kit DesLauriers, her husband, Rob, and their great friend Jimmy Chin barely even noticed when I left. They were busy laughing, crying, taking pictures, hugging, and pointing out the far corners of the world visible at 11 a.m. on October 18, 2006, along with our crack team of nine climbing Sherpas, who'd heroically fixed every inch of the route up from our high camp at the South Col. I'd have preferred to stay and celebrate, too. Except these weren't just any clients. Each of the three was an elite athlete (Jimmy and Kit are both members of The North Face's professional team). And we had a deal: If they climbed to the top strong and responsibly, I'd let them find their own way down...on skis.

Mount Everest is not yet popular with skiers. Go figure. Perhaps it's because one must climb up first. Or the small matter that skiing Everest is life-threatening on the best day. It has been skied before. Among others, a few notable attempts include Japanese speed skier Yuichiro Miura, who in 1970 set his sights on the Lhotse Face, taking off from 26,000 feet at the South Col with a parachute, barely surviving a several-thousand-foot tumble and an Evel Knievel–like disregard for fractures. More recently, Slovenian Davo Karnicar is the only person in history to have actually skied continuously from the summit to Base Camp, which he did in less than five hours in 2000. Frenchman Marco Siffredi snowboarded the Great Couloir, on the north side, in 2001, before returning to the mountain and disappearing in the effort to board the Hornbein Couloir in 2002; he was 23.

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