Morrison Completes First Ski Descent of Everest North Face — SkimNews
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- National Geographic's "Everest: The Other Side" premiered at Telluride with Oprah Winfrey hosting a Q&A with subject Jim Morrison, and will screen three times at TIFF before its October 30 theatrical release.
- Morrison lost his first wife and two children in a 2011 small plane crash, later partnered with ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson, and the film captures her death in an avalanche filmed by cinematographer Pemba Sherpa during their training for Everest.
- Morrison completed a first ski descent of the 29,000-foot North Face — a 9,000-foot route previously scaled only five times — in four hours and five minutes, summiting with a team of Sherpas and three cinematographers led by co-director Jimmy Chin in 2025.
- Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Oscar winners for "Free Solo" (2019), directed the film; Vasarhelyi stayed in New York to edit while Chin, also in his 50s, climbed and supervised filming, and the couple separated in 2025 but continue running Little Monster Films.
- Morrison told interviewer Anne Thompson he "almost regrets" having the avalanche footage of Nelson, calling it a "bittersweet, double-edged sword" of the kind of raw documentation he and Nelson signed up for when working with Chin and Vasarhelyi.
- National Geographic footed the bill for what Chin described as a logistics-heavy operation requiring 25 years of accumulated filmmaking and athletic experience, with Chin noting the couple's age gave them the judgment to "know when not to go" on Everest's rarely-climbed face.
Why it matters: The film documents what climbers call the ultimate high-altitude ski mountaineering line — the first descent of Everest's North Face — achieved by a 50-year-old athlete carrying grief from losing his family and partner Hilaree Nelson. National Geographic bankrolled the production, with co-director Jimmy Chin physically climbing alongside Morrison at the same age, making it both an athletic milestone and a meditation on loss, partnership, and risk calculus that comes with experience.
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