The route is steep (up to sixty degrees), exposed (most of it in the “you fall, you die” category), punishingly long (nine thousand vertical feet), and prone to hellish conditions. During the usual climbing season, in the spring, there isn’t enough snow to ski on. The Hornbein is a flute of stone, with a thin ribbon of ice and snow. In the fall, after the monsoon, there is too much snow; constant avalanches make it suicidal to attempt. But Morrison and Nelson deduced that there might be a slim window, before the arrival of winter, when the avalanches have abated, leaving a firmer surface—skiable, if you have the chops and the guts.
Morrison and Nelson had both. Each of them had previously been to the summit of Everest—Morrison in 2018 (he’d skied part of the way down), Nelson in 2012 (she also reached the summit of Lhotse in the same twenty-four hours, setting a record). The pandemic interfered, but they picked other peaks, rehearsing for Everest, with the filmmakers along for the ride. On a 2022 trip to Manaslu, in Nepal, the cameras were there, recording the moment when Nelson, two turns into her run, got swept up in an avalanche and went over a mountainside. They were also there in the ensuing hours and days, as Morrison and his Sherpa companions searched the enormous debris field for her corpse. The recovery mission, involving remote, unexplored terrain, a helicopter at extremely high altitude, and the constant threat of more avalanches from above, was as dangerous, perhaps, as anything these men had ever attempted. But they shared the conviction, unusual for mountaineers in such a hostile place, that they couldn’t leave without her.
“It was a profound, transformational moment for me to know that when I found Hilaree, she wasn’t in her body,” Morrison told me. “I dug her out of the snow. I held her in my arms. I screamed, and I cried, but it was just her dead body. She was no longer there, and it was as clear as anything has been in my entire lifetime. I had been haunted so much by my wife and my children, and what state they were in when the plane crashed, and how they were recovered. I had been haunted by these visions of their half-burned corpses. Then contrast that with what I went through with Hilaree. There was so much more finality to it.” Morrison had her body cremated in Kathmandu, at a Buddhist temple.
The film project—and the Everest project—had changed. Cameras still rolling, Morrison, now doubly cursed, continued the quest without Nelson, while her boys, the ones I’d met in Puerto Rico, became motherless young men. It took three attempts, in the three years after Nelson’s death, to get it done. This is the heart of Chin and Vasarhelyi’s new film, “Everest: The Other Side,” which comes out this week.
Perhaps a spoiler alert is in order, but the news did travel far and wide last fall. On October 15th, Morrison’s team put a dozen climbers, including Chin and several of his film crew, on the summit, more than tripling the historical total of Super Direct summiteers in a single push. This time, it was Hilaree, rather than Wyatt and Hannah, whose presence came to Morrison on top, amid the summiteers’ celebration. He scattered some of her ashes, clicked into his skis, then set off toward the Hornbein, on the least hospitable snow he’d ever encountered. He took four hours to descend. A World Cup downhill race is two minutes. It’s hard to contemplate the burn, or the concentration, or the work and time and luck and loss that went into the effort. Here was four hours alone with the task, and with the sense that, if he fell, he’d consider his life to have been well lived. At the bottom of the face, he wept and shouted, in the conviction that he’d done right by Nelson, and by himself. But it would be a while before Morrison could get his own head around the accomplishment. “It dawned on me at a rate of about one per cent per day, for a hundred days,” he said. “But it was pretty damn satisfying, and it still is.”
