Hilaree Nelson, a pioneering ski mountaineer known for carving artistic turns in unlikely places with dozens of first descents of both major and lesser-known peaks, died in an avalanche on Monday while descending from the Himalayas’ Manaslu peak, the eighth highest in the Himalayas World Skied Mountain. she was 49
Jim Morrison, her living and climbing partner who accompanied her to Nepal, confirmed her body was found well below her crash near the summit on Wednesday.
Ms. Nelson was the first female captain of the North Face Athletic Team, a global crew of sponsored adventurers spanning mountaineering, rock climbing, backcountry skiing and other activities. In 2018, she was named Explorer of the Year by National Geographic. In 2019, Outside magazine called her “the most successful ski pioneer of her generation”.
She was as adept at climbing as she was at descending. In 2012, she became the first woman to climb both Mount Everest and neighboring Lhotse, the fourth highest peak in the world, within 24 hours.
In September 2018 she returned to the 8,516m summit of Lhotse to ski down the famous Lhotse Couloir alongside Mr Morrison.
“It’s so hard to put into words,” Ms. Nelson said after that expedition. “I put on my skis while looking at the highest peak in the world. There is no soul on it. It’s airy and beautiful and at the same time intimidating and scary.”
Mountaineer Conrad Anker, an occasional expedition partner, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that the Lhotse expedition was as momentous a mountaineering feat as any in the past decade. While Ms Nelson was considered a pioneer for women in adventure sports, her achievements did not merit a gender qualification, he said.
“She was equal to men,” said Mr. Anker. “She was there with the strongest men, Jim’s equal. In that sense, her ability to embrace gendered perceptions was quite remarkable.”
The Lhotse descent cemented Ms Nelson’s status in the mostly unsung world of ski mountaineering, where pursuits are conducted in remote, high corners of the world under dangerous and changing conditions.
“People have been trying for decades, and she and Jim got it,” Cody Townsend, another top ski mountaineer who sometimes shared adventures with Ms. Nelson, said by phone. “And they kind of made it look easy, which was Hilaree’s signature.”
Ms Nelson is known for both her artistry and her patience, Mr Townsend said. She pursued some projects for many years, waiting for the right time to complete them.
“She was a climber who didn’t just drive it to drive it — she was there to get it when it was perfect and do it,” said Mr. Townsend. “Because of that, she had a 20-year track record.”
But the consequences were always a misstep or a failure. On Monday in Nepal, a particularly cold and windy morning, Ms. Nelson and Mr. Morrison scaled the 8,163-meter (26,781-foot) summit of Manaslu. After strapping on the skis they’d carried upstairs, Mr. Morrison said, it was downhill for the two of them.
Mrs Nelson was soon knocked off her feet by a small avalanche. Mr. Morrison was unaffected by the increasing landslide, but was helpless to see Ms. Nelson disappear down the mountain.
Immediate search efforts by Mr. Morrison and Sherpa guides were unsuccessful. A full search and rescue mission was delayed until the following morning by bad weather.
Mr Morrison and Mingma Tenzi Sherpa found Ms Nelson’s body after spending parts of two days searching the mountain by helicopter. An avalanche apparently blew them off a cliff onto the south face of the mountain, said Sachindra Yadav, an expedition liaison officer from the Gorkha district, which includes Manaslu. The body was taken to Kathmandu.
“My loss is beyond words and my focus is on her children and her steps forward,” Mr. Morrison wrote on Instagram. “Hilaree Nelson is the most inspirational person in life and now her energy will guide our collective souls.”
Ms. Nelson was a longtime resident of Telluride, Colorado, where she frequently ran and exercised in the surrounding San Juan Mountains and worked as a waitress for years. Most of her greatest adventures happened after she became a mother to two boys.
“I got home[from Nepal]on Sunday night,” she once said, “and on Monday morning I was freaking out making lunch for the kids and trying to get the kids to school on time.”
Hilaree Nelson was born and raised on December 13, 1972 in Seattle to Stanley and Robin Nelson. She and her siblings took the bus to go skiing at Stevens Pass in the Cascades over the weekend. But water was the focus of the family. Her mother restored wooden boats and her father, who ran a family car dealership, took the family on week-long sailing trips.
“By the time we were 5, we had a lot of independence,” Ms. Nelson said a few years ago. “That was a big part of learning to be alone, which is a surprisingly big part of mountaineering.”
Alongside Mr. Morrison, she is survived by her parents; her sons Graydon and Quinn, now teenagers, from her marriage to Brian O’Neill, which ended in divorce; and her siblings.
After attending Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Ms. Nelson went to France to hone her skiing and mountaineering skills over five winters near Chamonix.
She soon gained sponsorships, most notably with North Face, with a current roster of outdoor athletes that includes rock climber Alex Honnold and explorer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin.
In 2014, Ms. Nelson received a grant from National Geographic Explorers to lead an ultimately unsuccessful expedition to Hkakabo Razi, the highest peak in Myanmar. The journey was fraught with troubles and became the basis of a short documentary Down to Nothing.
But she joined the National Geographic Live Speaker series and later, along with Mr. Morrison, built her reputation with a string of successes.
In 2017, the pair, along with Chris Figenshau, made the first American ascent and ski descent of India’s 21,165-foot Papsura, a photogenic pyramid-shaped mountain known to climbers as the “Pinn of Evil.”
It was the culmination of a long-held obsession for Ms Nelson, who first photographed Mount Papsura 20 years ago and failed to reach the summit in an attempt in 2013.
“It was an image of the most aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, rugged, and powerful mountain I have ever seen,” she told National Geographic, which presented the team with the 2018 Explorer of the Year award. Mrs Nelson and Mr Morrison returned from India and climbed Cassin Ridge on Denali in Alaska and descended the Messner Couloir.
That same year, The North Face named her captain of their athletic team, an honor previously only bestowed on another climber: Mr. Anker.
The timeless appeal of the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range, brought Ms. Nelson and Mr. Morrison to Manaslu. For years, most climbers, led by guides, stopped at a sub-summit. But with the recent emphasis on accuracy, explorers are reassessing their peaks and, in some cases, returning to mountains to end any uncertainty.
From this precarious true peak, covered with fresh snow, Ms. Nelson and Mr. Morrison made their way down. Within moments, Mr. Nelson tripped and got lost in a swamp that became an avalanche.
“I’ve always had this crazy fear of being the same every day my whole life,” Ms. Nelson told Outside in 2019. “And if I dig really deep, that’s my motivation to get outside, work out, be in my sport and keep learning forever.”