Email
PrintAt the Top of Her Game
Jackson Hole resident first in the world to ski off the Seven Summits
DesLauriers passes a Buddhist stupa, or shrine, above the town of Pheriche, Nepal, on the trek to Mount Everest.
(page 1 of 3)
Extreme mountain skier Kit DesLauriers shares a certain sign language with others in her sport. The signal she was making to those above her on Mount Everest in October 2006—ski poles crossed above her head—meant “danger, don’t come here.” Then she made another signal, a more universally understood shrug of the shoulders: “But what option do we have?”
DesLauriers had just made the first turns onto the Lhotse Face, a virtually bulletproof blue shield of ice and snow that sweeps down at fifty-five degrees from Everest’s South Col, elevation 25,938 feet, to the Western Cwm (pronounced “coom,” it’s the Welsh word for valley). Taking a line never before successfully skied, DesLauriers was continuing a descent that made her the first person to ski from the Seven Summits, the highest points on each continent. Going ahead of her husband, Rob, and photographer Jimmy Chin, DesLauriers slid onto the mile-tall ice sheet. It pitched away into uncertainty.
“It got worse and worse,” said the thirty-eight-year-old DesLauriers, a resident of Teton Village. Some of the snow fell away in baseball-sized clumps that rolled down five thousand vertical feet when brushed by skis. If one slipped, he or she might have half a chance to stick in the pick of an ice axe. Otherwise ...
Perched on the icy slope, DesLauriers knew she was at the limit of human abilities and there was no going back. “Oh shit!” she said to herself.
She signaled to her companions. They started down, but off to one side, gambling on finding some semblance of purchase for the edge of their skis.
What was this woman doing leading a charge down Everest? She had enough natural beauty to be a ski model, possessed the toughness to work ski patrol, and had won national free-skiing championships twice. And as a stone mason in the rapidly growing West, there was no shortage of work to keep someone with her talents employed. Yet here she was, hanging it out over the Khumbu Icefall, where a single slip would mean death.
Was she driven by thoughts of her mother, whose dream of being a sportscaster went unfulfilled because she lived in a man’s world? Did her yoga, which taught her peace and balance, get her to this spot? Was it her secret financial sponsor? Was it her husband, another extreme skier? Or was it Lama Geshe at the monastery below, who had shown her the way with words that ran through her head with every step of the climbing boot, every turn of the ski?
DesLauriers then did something she’d rarely done in her many years of skiing. She stowed a ski pole and drew her ice axe from between the straps of her backpack like an arrow from a quiver. In a world where positive thinking is essential, she was on the defensive, at least a corner of her mind wondering about falling instead of making turns.
“We were in it,” she recalled. “We just focused.”
DesLauriers began a mantra: “Like your life depends on it—TURN.”
And she did.
Again; “Like your life depends on it—TURN.
“Like your life depends on it—TURN.”
And so, for an hour and fifty minutes, DesLauriers fought fatigue, altitude, nearly impenetrable ice, and bone-chilling cold. “We were like three climbers free-soloing at a super-high level, side by side,” she said. “There was nothing anybody could do for anybody else.”
