Reviews

spoiler warning -- I reveal everything about what happened I'm a huge fan of skiing and mountain climbing, and if you're like me there's always this urge to combine the two, it's this itch that you just want to scratch. I'm also tired of the whole climb mount everest because it's the tallest mountain thing.

What a magnificent goal. To climb 3/4 of the way up Everest and then ski down to the bergschrund (the huge crevasse between the mountain and a glacier). Just the idea tantalizes.

Of course, if you do any skiing you have to realize, the actual ski event is nothing much. For instance, Blackcolme/Whistler has a vertical drop of somewhere around 5,000 feet, and I've done it a couple of times, the peak to creek trail, back when it was still out of bounds, it's an utterly magnificent run, and then I took the chair back up to the top and did it again! Anyway, the run on Everest would be less than 3,000 vertical feet, it would be all ice and rock, it would be quick and fast, and deadly. If he missed his stop he would fly into a crevasse. Needless to say he lived. Now the event itself was a mess, he got started, tried to do a plow, tried to do some turns, nothing would slow him down, so right from the start he realized he was in a hell of a position, so he just sat on his edges to try to stop, this ice was just as slick and hard as rock, of course his skis popped off, flying off into the air. He lived.

Wow. He was the first to try. Since then a dozen skiers and snowboarders have attempted to shred their way down mount everest. On Oct 7, 2000 Davo Karnicar succeeded skiing from the top of everest to base camp, including skiing over the khumbu icefall. But someone had to be first, and that someone was Yuichiro Miura. I'm pretty sure nobody since Miura has used a parachute, it doesn't do anything useful, but I guess he had to try it out.

If you have to ask yourself why spend weeks and months climbing a mountain, only to ski down it in minutes, then this movie is not for you.