Jim Morrison Skied Down Everest After Losing His Wife & Two Kids

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The north side is an entirely different situation Not only were you one of the few people to make it to the summit from the north side But you're the first person to then Ski down from the summit. You have a unique relationship with all of this and you've suffered unimaginable loss in your life in 2011 my wife and children all of them were killed something happened in the sky and the plane fell out of the sky and in an instant my entire world just Evaporated. I did have a desire to fall in love again. And when I met Hillary we fell deeply in love The whole idea was that you and Hillary we're gonna do this on Everest together Hillary started skiing shortly after me and started a small avalanche and was swept off her feet and Swept out of sight from where I was and I've replayed that scene in my head Thousands of times I do think there's value in understanding that you can continue after the worst happens The North Face ascent of Mount Everest most people's relationship with Mount Everest what they see on Television or movies or on social media are People ascending from the south side the South Coal, right? That's where you see this long line of people this queue of people going up the north side is an entirely different situation and That's what we're here to talk about among other things today because essentially almost exactly a year ago You accomplished this Impossible first where not only were you one of the few people to make it to the summit from the north side from the China? side, but you're the first person to then Ski down from the summit and this is a situation That is difficult to get your head around and I remember when it was happening and reading about it and you know Kind of seeing photographs and stuff like that and thinking that I understood what you had done and then I watched Everest the other side the documentary that we're on You know We're on the precipice of it being widely released and realized like I didn't I didn't understand this at all I had the same experience with Alex because I had huddled on After he had free solo del cap But before the movie came out and I hadn't that you know I hadn't seen the movie and he's explaining it to me. I was like, yeah, I got it I got it and then I saw the movie and I was like, I don't know anything, you know And this is a very similar experience. I mean, it's just absolutely mind-boggling and astonishing Well, thank you. It was uh it was truly a magnificent effort by a whole lot of people to to get there and to pull this off and something we worked out for a better part of a lifetime and It feels pretty great to sit here today and and have those memories with me and have the success of Pulling it off and bringing everybody back safely. I Don't know who said it but there was some painter some artist who was once asked like how long did it take you to paint that painting and The response was my entire life and I think it's this holds true for you as well Like this this is the result of a lifetime relationship With the outdoors and with the mountains technically, it was about a six-year like formal quest to achieve this goal, but it's the summation of a lifetime of experiences in the outdoors Yeah, I came home and I showed some of the footage to a really small close group of friends at a birthday party a couple nights after I got back and My friend Jeremy Jones called me the next morning and he said Dawned on me this morning while I was thinking about what I saw I think he had a similar reaction to you like he didn't quite understand it until he visualized it on film And he said I think this took you 50 years to to put this together I don't think you could have been ready to do this any sooner in life and That really stuck with me and I think is is true. I I was ready mentally in some ways I was ready physically in some ways, but there's so much experience you get of putting these expeditions together building teams going into the mountains studying wind and weather and avalanche and all the hazards and Being able to have the the experience to aggregate everything into a successful ascent and descent It's pretty it's pretty cool to take 50 years to put that together The team aspect of it Can't be underestimated. I mean there were a lot of people You know in in support of this achievement in the movie you see like these tents and they're set up like Military operations with maps and all kinds of people behind the scenes you have the film crew, of course but you also have you know, just so much logistical support like all this attention to the weather and the patterns and You know people going up to set up camps in advance and you know the execution of this is one of the most complicated things that you can imagine and I think that that is in Contrast with people's idea who of Everest where like you sign up and you go on these expeditions You're some, you know private equity guy and you pay a bunch of money and it's kind of all sorted for you This is a very different thing like when you see the North Face and how dramatic it is It's very different from our association with Everest. So what is it about the North Face? You mentioned all these coolies and like what is a coolie like for the average person who just has a very casual relationship with the world's tallest mountain What is it that you want to say about? Attempting to summit from the other side Well, the North Face is just it's an entirely different version of the mountain it's it's the shadowed side it's the steep Precipice it starts at 20,000 feet at the bottom of the face at the Bertrand and it goes straight to 29,000 feet It's ultra direct from the bottom to the top You're not cruising around and going up the ridge and the longest sort of easiest circuitous way to the top top You're going the most direct route on the on the mountain and there's something really special and really aesthetically pleasing and really desirous to climb that route and for me to ski it and yeah to put that team together to do it took a lot of hard work and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to every single person involved and we built that team over many many years and Really? We failed twice trying this and then we really found success by building the dream team that I was sort of given the The opportunity and the demand of okay. This hasn't worked in the past What do we need to do different and I said we need to build the team the dream team we need to do it like this and that's what's gonna make the difference and ultimately It was clear as day. It was the ultimate team that Put it all together and kind of put the yellow jersey on me at the beginning of the race and carried me through a lot of the the difficulties and then I was able to Kind of stand up out of the saddle and race to the finish and ski back down to put it mildly The grades are insane like I think Jimmy at some point in the movie says, you know We're talking about like 51% grade or something like that like the steepness with which you're ascending especially from Where's the third camp like a 23,000 feet from like 23 to 29? I mean it is a sort of El Capitan kind of ascent Yeah, it's very it's very steep. And in reality, it's like 45 degrees And it's steeper in places But what's unique about it is it's just so unrelenting and it's you know The face is a couple of miles wide and it's almost a couple of miles tall so you're just in a more vast broader bigger longer landscape than anywhere else I've ever been and If you make a mistake if you slip or you fall at any point on the descent you're going to the bottom There's a zero question of what's gonna happen. You're There's nowhere to self-arrest nowhere to get lucky and stop you're You're going to the very bottom of the mountain. Yeah, it's called you call it a no-fall zone Yeah, no-fall zone a euphemism for one misstep and you're dead. Yeah, and that's that's something we've we've termed over many You know many different things you traverse across above a big cliff or you hike across above a big cliff You can't fall there. You could you could fall to your death. So we call it a no-fall zone and often that's there are a couple of no-fall zones on a on a climb or a ski or an adventure out in life, but this is a broader version of the whole things and no-fall zone For somebody to do what you do and have been doing for a long time You have to have a different relationship with risk death and loss But even amongst the climber the climbing community You have a unique relationship with all of this and this is the real story like the the feet is the opportunity to Talk about like your journey Through life to get to this place and to make this decision to make this ascent because you've suffered unimaginable Loss in your life. I wouldn't wish it upon anyone what you've endured. It's been you know, this unbelievable journey to places most people won't go so That's really what I want to talk about with you today. I want to understand that experience of loss that basically You know kind of upended your life back in 2011 so maybe start there and share that story Uh, well in 2011 my wife and children were down here in Los Angeles visiting some friends and my wife was flying from Long Beach to Henderson, Nevada to spend some time with a friend of hers whose husband was Going undergoing some cancer treatment and just to support her and in the course of that flight from Long Beach to Henderson, Nevada There was she was flying a small airplane a Cessna 210 and Something happened in the sky some tremendous catastrophic air mass and the plane fell out of the sky and all of them were killed and I I Was skiing and Palisades Tahoe and I hit a piece of ice and hurt my ankle And I kind of limped down to the car and I called Katie looking for her support and her guidance and she didn't answer the phone and I started driving and I called her again and I called her again and and then I finally looked up her flight track and The flight track had just kind of gone off the the radar so to speak and I Eventually just before I got to my house, I called the FAA which is Sort of akin to calling the police on your wife Saying she must have done something wrong. She's not where she's supposed to be. I need your help and I got a call from a friend shortly thereafter who was in the air traffic control world for part of his life and had friends there and had reached out to people and He called me and he just said they're Jimmy and I answered the phone he said they're gone and I Was You know, I said to him. What do you mean? I I didn't understand what what that meant or had never been able to visualize that and in an instant my entire world just Evaporated everything that I had worked for everything that I cared about Was literally just gone in an instant and I Was completely broken by it and didn't know what to do and didn't started Simply just trying to understand. Am I gonna evaporate? Is this all like am I gonna just fall to dust on the floor here? and I I took a breath and I took more breaths and eventually I drank water and, you know, kind of like you're on an endurance run, going the longest distance you've ever been at your worst spot. You just start trying to focus on how, what do I need to do to keep existing? And I went through a really long traumatic period of time where I was crushed and day by day I put one foot in front of another and I had a profound moment, they highlight this in the film, where I was on the laundry room floor one day and I looked out the window and I saw these beautiful pine needles on a tree and I was screaming. I was in like a blood curdling, just broken state. And I looked at those pine needles with this beautiful blue sky behind them and I just visualized that moment for a second and I appreciated that beauty in nature and I used that to sort of help me get back on my feet and stand up and take a step forward. And eventually I walked up my driveway and I walked into the street and I gave myself tremendous accolades for just stepping over that crack in the asphalt. And I've just been carrying that forward one step further at a time. How old were your kids when this happened? My kids were five and six. Hannah, my daughter, was five years old and Wyatt, my son, was six years old. I was skiing with them a couple of days beforehand. My son at six years old drew the fingers at Palisades Tahoe, which is this proverbial like really hardcore ski run underneath KT-22 and we were just getting to that age where I was doing things with my kids that I love to do. I called my wife the night before and we talked and I was pinching myself and I told her about this deal that I just landed with our business and I felt like we had the world by a string and we were going to live this really fruitful life and our kids were growing up to be magical little people and then it all came crashing down. You mentioned the pine needles as this sort of catalyst into some form of self-care action, which is a symbol for nature writ large, right? Like this relationship with nature that you have as a healing modality. It's one thing to look at the pine needles and divine some degree of inspiration to get up off the couch and go outside. It's another thing altogether to have this relationship with the world's largest peaks. But essentially, it's the natural world that animates you and I want to understand the profundity of that relationship because I think this is at the crux of the conversation around the movie. What is it about these ascents and these mountains that move you to take these risks and put yourself in positions where life and death are a very real gamble? What are you getting out of it? Hilary speaks to it directly in the movie, but what is your relationship with that? I think at its essence, the true core of what I experienced and what I'm chasing is presence and is being focused on now and what's happening right in front of us. What I began to learn through this grief journey was that the past was the past and there was nothing I could do about it. It was over. No matter how much I lied on that laundry room floor and screamed and cried, it wouldn't bring them back. Yet I had this incredibly beautiful moment right in front of me that I was just ignoring and I was choosing to stay stuck in that awful, devastating place. I had to force and choose to take a step forward and go into that nature. For me, the communing with nature, the stepping outside, the going for a walk in the forest or climbing up a mountain days or weeks or months later just became the greatest source of healing and forward. Eventually, that led to bigger and bigger endeavors and bigger challenges. Like many of us, we put a big target of a big race or a big mountain or a big endeavor on the board and then training for it becomes the journey. All the work that goes into it helps us stay focused on what we think is important in the world. For me, that time outside walking uphill with friends and with Mother Earth brings me closer to my kids and lets me think about and have times to connect with my wife and Hillary and lots of other people I've lost in the mountains and just has given me that opportunity. I think I've used the term, it's a forced presence. I spent a lot of time reading and learning from Eckhart Tolle. My guess is his take on what I'm doing in the mountains would be like, okay, you could just be present without going to the mountains. That's someone who's not as good at the spiritual practice. They're having to do it, they're using something to force them to be present. For those of us that aren't as good at the spiritual practice, I think he's done such a good job of helping people see and realize and learn about going for a walk or climbing a mountain or going for a run can be really helpful. For me, it's just kept me alive, kept me going, given me the opportunity to do my best work. The enlightened view is that everything is available in the present moment and your facility to understand that is a function of just how present you are in the moment, which is all there is actually. There's this story about the past and things that have happened and what it means. There's the time that we spend thinking about the future, ruminating. Essentially, the only thing that is real is right here and right now. When we're right here and right now, everything's fine, but we are wired to not be present in the moment. We seek out these experiences to connect with the ineffable or something that is divine that can provide us with a wisdom around what does life mean and what does it mean to live a meaningful life and what is my purpose? Hillary in the movie, when asked this question, basically says, when I'm on these mountains and I'm on the summit of these big peaks, you're in this liminal space between the material world and the spiritual world. It's almost as if there's this thin layer between God and man, and in that space, there's a sense of connection that is just not available in everyday life. Yeah, and Hillary referred to that as the netherworld. She asked me before I went to Everest in 2018, I was going to climb Everest on the north side of the mountain via the standard route up to the north side, and she said, what do you think about when you're up there and when you're close to the netherworld? We had a whole conversation about it, and I went on this trip, and I was up high at like 28,000 feet, climbing ahead of my team by myself, and you truly feel like you can reach through to the other side. It's just almost this invincible line, all of a sudden, that you feel like if you just were to walk over there, you'd fall to your death, or if you were to sit down and get exhausted, you might perish, and you're existing at the sort of edge of what's possible, and I had this incredible spiritual moment with my children, where for like 30 minutes, they were with me. I felt their presence that I had been searching for and dreaming about and looking for and praying for for many, many years, hopeful that they would come out of the forest on the other side of the river when I was in some really remote place, or when I was looking out at the ocean at sunset, I would see them on the other side of the waves. I would get some sign that they were okay, that they still existed in our spiritual world. And for 30 minutes, they were with me, they were laughing, they were encouraging me, and I felt them so strongly, like I never imagined, and it was an incredible situation, and I connected with Hilary about it afterwards, and I think she's talking about something that just has always been for her, this desire to get back to that edge of, and I think you can do that in all sorts of aspects of your life, and it's really just surrendering to some of what we spend all our time, like I got to get there, I got to do what's next, I got to go, I'm in the line at the grocery store, and I've got to hurry up and get through this and get home and get the to-do list done, but if you just stop and slow down and focus on being present, you might notice something spectacular, and you might, for me, I had moments where I was in the grocery store, and I looked at a child in someone's arms, and I started flirting with a 12-month-old child, and got them to smile, and just found a tremendous amount of joy out of that moment, mixed with this awful reality that I'd lost my children, and it was those moments that started to help me realize I don't have to suppress the memories of them every day, I don't have to push them away, I can live in those moments and celebrate who they are every day, and doing that in a remote place in the Himalayas at extreme altitude, in many ways, is easier, because you strip away everything else, and you get to focus on just what's right in front of you, and maybe it helps you connect with being present. Well, also realizing you can have an analogous experience in the grocery store flirting with an infant. You absolutely can. I've been trying, you know, in so many acts of my life since 2011, to connect with those moments, and to do little things in my day-to-day existence that make my life better, and make other people's lives better. I used to think adventure meant something specific, a summit somewhere far from home, but these days, it's just as likely to be taken the long way home, because the light's good. Driving a Rivian changed what I count as an adventure in the first place, and that's really the idea behind the new R2. Adventure isn't just one definition, it's whatever you call it, and R2 is built to show up for all of it. The city, the ski hill, the trailhead, the school pickup, also the random Tuesday, and the range question that used to stop people doesn't have to anymore. A DC fast charger gets you back to nearly full in about the time of a coffee stop. 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It's supportive without being soft, and it's free of all the polyurethane foams and fiberglass and off-gassing I personally would rather not be breathing all night. Birch also makes a kid's natural mattress built to the same standard that also ships free, rolled up in a box, and goes together in minutes. Plus, you get 120 nights in your own home to see how your body responds, and every mattress comes with a limited lifetime warranty. The best gift you can give your household this season might just be a Good night. Go to birchliving.com slash richroll for 27% off sitewide. The Hillary that we're talking about is the late Hillary Nelson, your life partner who I had the good fortune of knowing just in the tiniest bit. I had her on the show several years ago. When did she enter your life? How many years after the tragic airplane accident? The accident was in 2011 and I met Hillary in 2015 on an expedition to climb and ski Makalu, the world's fifth highest peak. I think I met her in the Kathmandu airport on the way to this expedition. We became fast friends climbing the mountain. She got me to open up and talk about things that I hadn't spoken to other people about. Spending time talking about my wife and my kids and life and what I'd been through in those four years just really propelled me a step further. She shared some of her life stories and tragedies that have happened in her life that we commensurated about. Then we just started looking at the mountain and the conditions and snow and ski lines in a very similar light and realized we shared a lot of similar passions. After that trip, many months later, we started dating and started going on adventures together. We just kind of went on a tear and found a ton of success, did some incredible things in the mountains and shared a lot of joy in the mountains and a lot of amazing moments. Prior to meeting her, did you have a sense that you would be capable of allowing yourself to fall in love again? Yeah, I think in the months and years after losing my family, I really wanted to recreate what I had. I wanted the future and I was always yearning for the future. How am I going to get that back? How am I going to find someone and meet someone and have a family and recreate this thing? I did a lot of work to realize that nothing ever happened in the future. That's to quote Eckhart. He told me that face-to-face, nothing. In his sort of Yoda voice, nothing has ever happened in the future, ever. You met him. You had FaceTime with him. I did. I really enjoyed his book, The Power of Now. I read it and listened to it. Then I went to Vancouver and met him and sat down with him and spent some time with him. The way he said that to me, and it was just so clear and simple and factual to him, really made an impact in that it's just never happened, Jim. It was the vibe he was giving me. Stop trying to manifest the future because you really just have what you can do now. It just made a really big impact on how I started moving forward. I did have a desire to fall in love again. When I met Hillary, we fell deeply in love and I built an incredible life with her. I feel really fortunate for not just doing that once, but doing it twice. I'm sort of entering that third chapter of my life now where I have every intention of going back out in the world and sharing what I have with someone and building a life with someone. You know, hopefully living happily ever after, sailing off into the sunset. The predominant theme in the movie, and you articulate it at the end, is that what you have learned from navigating such tremendous grief and loss is not that you have to learn how to live without them. It's about bringing them with you. I mean, that's a profound insight. I'm sure you had to climb a lot of emotional mountains to arrive at that as your kind of life philosophy, but I think it's powerful. I think that the achievement of summiting the North Face and skiing down is essentially just a platform for you to be able to share what you've learned from these extreme experiences, not just physically but emotionally. If you look at life as a waveform, you have these insane peaks and valleys. It's going like this. The thing is just jagged as all get out. A normal person has gradual dips and ebbs and flows or whatever. It's like you're just compressing the waveform, but nobody gets out of life alive, and everybody at some point is faced with grief and loss. We all have these experiences. I know Oprah kind of contextualized this to you as we all have our own Everest, right? So the wisdom that you've gleaned from your life and from these adventures, you now have this opportunity to share that in service to other people who are navigating their version of what you have endured. Yeah, and I really relish that opportunity. I think it's my purpose here at this point. I sat down a few days after my wife and kids passed away, and I had a memorial service, and I decided I wanted to get up in front of everyone and say something. I sat down to put words to paper, and at that moment, all I wanted to do was end my own life. I had this profound moment where I just decided either I'm going to end my own life, or I might as well just do it right now, or I'm not, and I'm going to try to do my best, and I'm going to try to live my life in their honor. I think that helped me get through that moment and through that day. I've taken that forward, and I've been through so much loss and grief, but in sharing that story with others, sometimes I meet someone who I've had an impact on, and it does feel valuable and positive. I hope this film and eventually a book that I write will help people figure out that there is a way through their own Everest story, whether it's a tremendous loss, or a bout with depression, or a bout with sickness in themselves or their family, and we all are going to go through these highs and lows. I think you can say that mine are more dramatic than others, but when you're in the gutter and you're in the bad place, for whatever reason it is, it feels pretty awful, I think. Yeah, your pain is your pain. Yeah, and it's often just such a small turn of the dial to take you from, I'm mad, and I'm upset, and I'm depressed, and I feel terrible to, I'm great, and everything's wonderful, and I'm having a great time. It's like somebody can make the right joke and create the right vibe, and all of a sudden you're having a great time at the party versus, I don't like it here, and I want to go home. I think if we can figure out how to infuse ourselves with more of what brings us happiness and joy and gets that volume turned up a little bit, then we're all going to live a better life. For me, a lot of that is just stepping out of my normalcy and going outside and taking a walk with nature and meeting new people and doing new things. I think so much of us feel like we have to do something dramatic to get us out of our life situation, but it doesn't start with the hardest part of the climb at the top of the mountain where the crux is. It starts with just deciding you're going to go on that journey and starting to pack your bags and starting to plan for the expedition. Eventually, you step over the crack at the bottom of the face, and eventually you make your first step up the mountain, but you don't climb through the crux until you get there, so you don't have to focus entirely on that. You have to plan for it, but you don't have to do the hardest part of the journey all at once. You just have to get started. There's a moment of levity in the movie when you and Jimmy are in a tent. I don't know if it was you or Jimmy. You're like, I thought this was supposed to be fun. Isn't this supposed to be fun? You're like, no, the fun part is afterwards when you tell this story. It illustrates this point of this being this huge journey. If nothing else, the movie affirms this theory that I have that 90% of climbing is people packing their gear. The amount of gear is insane. I think I made this joke when I had Emily Harrington on. All you guys do is spread all your shit out all over the floor, and you just spend hours and hours with these ropes and the carabiners and packing all this stuff. There's something ritualistic about that. Yeah, absolutely. We obsess over making sure we have just the right amount of stuff, maybe a little bit extra, but concerned about how much weight it is, and should I take this or should I do that? Some part of that is just putting yourself in the mindset of getting prepared to go into this battle you're going to have with the mountain and putting on your own armor to prepare yourself. When we get like six feet off the ground, everything changes. You get more than 12 feet off the ground, all of a sudden you feel like you're going to get really hurt or really worse if you are to fall. We have to put ourselves in a mindset of how to prepare for that fear that's going to come into us and how we're going to move through it. For Emily, that's having just the right tools to stick in the crack, the right rope, the right outfit, the right earrings, and all the right things. What is your relationship with fear? When people ask you, how do you manage your fear? How do you channel it? How does it show up? I think my relationship with fear is I've learned to use the fear that comes. It's something that's going to happen. When I was at the top of Everest and I was looking at what was in front of me, I was very afraid of the consequences of making a mistake or having something not go the way I had planned it to go. But I used that fear to say, wow, this looks really icy and this next turn looks really dangerous for this reason. The snow is not smooth and there's a rock right there, and you better be perfect with that. I use that fear to help me understand you have to work really hard to make this next turn. The part of the fear that says, oh my gosh, you should panic and you should run and you should hide, I don't find a lot of benefit from that, so I just sort of bifurcate those two and stick the other one, let it go out the window, focus on the part of fear that helps me be more focused and more in the zone and more alert. The part that says you should run or fight or flight, I try to just turn off and not pay attention to. If I am paying attention to that fear, if I do feel that anxiety fear or that shortness of breath, then I know something's gone horribly wrong. That would be a place to just stop and say, I either need to calm down and get rid of that sensibility or just stop altogether and say, I can't do this anymore. I would imagine that ability to compose yourself in that way just comes with the amount of experience that you've had in these high-risk environments. Yeah, for sure. I've had that sense where that anxious fear is creeping in and I'm able to push it back and overcome it, and I've had that sense of just, no, that isn't helping me, so I'm not going to listen to it. I'm going to listen to the part that says, watch out for what's next or you're going to regret it. You fall in love with Hillary. You guys are building a life together. You inherit her sons from her previous marriage. You're helping to raise these boys, and you're going out on these adventures. Not only is she your life partner, she's also your partner in adventure crime. You guys are just going on all of these expeditions as a joint unit. And what you share is not only this love of the mountains and being mountaineers, but it's the ski aspect of it that is unique in the mountaineering community. You're not just climbing these mountains. The whole thing is like, we want to ski down them. Talk about how that differentiates you from how people think about climbing, and what is the experience of skiing from the summit of a gigantic peak? Well, I guess I'll just tell a story to talk about that in it. We climbed Denali, Hillary and I, and we went there with the desire to climb the Kassin Ridge. I really wanted to climb this route on the south side of the mountain called the Kassin Ridge, which is 9,000 feet. thousand feet long and technical and and just has some reasonably hard rock climbing and ice climbing and snow climbing and when we got there the mountain was in really tough conditions for that route and this Park Service said that three parties had done the Cassine that year all three of them had been rescued could you please pick a different route and our team name was called Cassine or bust and Hillary and I said well we'll figure it out we went up on the mountain we looked at the mountain and we saw really great conditions for skiing and we ended up climbing to the summit and skiing the Messner Couloir which was kind of a dream run for me at the time and something I've been chasing my whole life but I convinced her to go back and to go around the other side of the mountain and climb the Cassine and we did did that and finished that a week later which was amazing and really fulfilling but from the summit we had to walk all the way back to 14,000 feet and I just I'll never forget her her attitude walking into camp was like that was so dumb walking downhill like that is so hard it's physically just really hard to walk downhill and she just would prefer to ski downhill so we both I think our whole lives looked at mountains as like we want to go up the challenging way we want to climb the biggest peaks on the planet but I've always looked at those photos and tried to say well I don't want to climb this route there's nowhere to ski I want to climb this route because there's a pleasing and aesthetic way back down on skis which is just fun and challenging in its own way this episode is brought to you by whoop the not a the wearable health and fitness coach that gives you personalized and very helpful insights into your sleep recovery strain and how your daily choices are actually landing in your body we know how some choices land if we stay up too late if 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get 50% off your first subscription order to go brewings beer club so hence commences a series of expeditions where you guys are going to like gigantic peaks and skiing down you do a series of these and at some point you hatch this plan that you want to do it on Everest and you know the movie chronicles this phase of your life the whole idea was that you and Hillary were gonna do this together mm-hmm and I think it's something both Hillary and I looked at long before we met each other and knew about and followed and read about the north face of Everest and and then in 2018 we finally achieved the goal that we've had both had of climbing and skiing Lhotse and the Lhotse Kuar which is right next to Everest it's the fourth highest mountain in the world and we skied this sort of dream run of ours and got to the bottom and crossed the Bertrand and high-fived and pinched each ourselves and couldn't believe that we'd pulled it off and we had anyone ever done that were the first ones to ever to ever do it and it was for us a true achievement and the best run we'd ever done together or separately I think and at the same time at that moment and like often happens when you're out on a big expedition or a big life project we sort of dream up the next one and we were there was one thing left after that and it was the north face of Everest so we started talking about it and sometimes nervously talking about it because it's a much bigger endeavor and after Jimmy came back from Antarctica on a expedition he was on with Conrad Anker and others he was really high on life and really high on the mountains and we sat down to hear his stories about climbing Ovaltana and we pitched him on this idea of we want to go to the north face and we want to ski it and he'd been there himself trying to do it in 2003 so he was very familiar and intimate with what it was and what it would take and he just kind of had one of those moments where he I think said oh my god this is this is gonna happen and and then we just started started down the path originally planning to climb and ski it in the fall of 2020 and then kovat shut us down and the mountain was closed and the world was closed and we delayed until 2021 and year after year we just sort of delayed the trip so in 2022 you and Hillary go to Manaslu and the idea there was like this is sort of a training mission right like we got to get our ski legs going and let's climb this insanely high peak and you know get to work on practicing so that we're ready for Everest yeah I think Hillary really wanted to to get up high again and and stay fit and stay connected to what it physiologically would take to acclimatize to a high altitude and didn't want to have so many years between the last time she'd been at extreme altitude and and Everest and so we went to Manaslu to climb and and ski that and it was really Hillary's trip it was her her passion and her desire to go of course didn't take much to get me to leap at the opportunity and and go with her and we climbed through some pretty adverse conditions and made it to the summit and we started skiing and Hillary started skiing shortly after me and started a small avalanche and was swept off her feet and swept out of sight from where I was and I started a new chapter of my life at that moment trying to find her trying to rescue her trying to get to her I was at that moment certain that she was okay and alive and had stopped herself somewhere down the mountain and I skied down to try to get to where I thought I could see her and I was above a bunch of cliffs and I knew if I went any farther there was a really good chance I would perish which I was entirely willing to do and wanted to do I wanted to get to her so badly but I made the decision that I can't do that because if I if I die I won't be able to help her and she needs my help and so I climbed back up and skied off the other side of the mountain and look for a helicopter and I guess I want to stop and share that in that moment I when she slid out of sight I didn't want to be in the mountains anymore I didn't understand why we were there and why we would take this risk and how we could be in a position where she potentially wasn't coming home to her children and I had a real difficulty with the decision we'd made to come there and to do this and spent days searching for her and putting together the best team I could find and in Nepal and worked with the best pilot and some incredible Sherpa friends to go find her and rescue her and ultimately we found her deceased and dug her out of the ice and were able to bring her body back and have a cremation ceremony for her and I think bring a lot of closure to her family and her friends and her community and the world which was tremendous and awful and positive and transformational at the same time that we were able to find her I had no idea that this event had been captured on film and it's quite arresting to actually see this happen on a screen not only do we see the sort of snow shelf just basically dislodge and take her with it down the side of the mountain we see this like Pyrrhic choice that you have to make like am I gonna go down here and and truly like most likely perish in search of trying to recover her or am I gonna back up and take a moment and try to enlist the help of others and do this more responsibly and the pain on your face it's it's a lot to watch for anybody but now it's on a huge iMac screen what is that like for you to have to relive that it's pretty awful to be blunt it's something I clearly wish never happened and had I known it was gonna happen I would have said no let's go to the beach let's do something different but it did happen and I think the filmmakers decided to share it as part of a visual understanding of what happened and you know we spent six years of our lives with cameras around us and Hillary and I made the decision that we were going to do this and we agreed to be filmed and we got used to it and it became normal and commonplace and I wasn't sure what they were gonna put in the film or not put in the film and it's certainly part of the film that I don't want to watch over and over but I've replayed that scene in my head thousands of times and when you go through a traumatic event and you're part of it you it's part of certainly part of what I do is just visualize that situation and replay it over and over and over and over and try to figure out how you can affect a different outcome and the fact of life is you can't you can't change what happened no matter how many times you obsess over it or cry over it or replay it and I have done that enough times that I'm now able to watch it and it doesn't totally bring me back to an awful place and I think what I have done is I try to to accept what's happened to Hillary and I'm trying to carry her forward with me and I have over time gotten to a place where I feel like she's there with me and I had a tremendous interaction with her on the summit where I felt like her her spirit and her soul and herself where was there supporting me and encouraging me and that she was proud of what I was doing and I feel like I can channel that grief and that negativity and the hard hard stuff that I have over time packaged up and decided to carry with me and I can I can access a little bit of it right here just to sort of answer your question of how is that how do you do with with watching your you know your life partner your loved one perish right in front of you it's it's not something I would wish on anyone or want anyone to experience but I do think there's value and understanding that you can continue after the worst happens after the worst happens a second time a second time yeah I would think for almost anyone that's a point of no return to have to weather that again it's just it's unimaginable dude you know I mean I like how do you get up out of bed after that well I I have the unfortunate experience with losing your your wife and I'd spent 11 years waking up every day and going through life every day knowing what it was like to lose your children and lose your wife and I tried to tell myself that some of that experience we're going to help me through this unimaginable event with Hilary and there were things that I had learned that helped me through those many years and there were things that I tried to not repeat like I I stayed away from alcohol afterwards I I don't think that really helped me diving deep into a bottle of liquor and seeing you rating myself maybe helped ease some of the pain the first time around but being a bit older and I just made the decision okay I'm not going to do that and there were little things that I did that made it more possible maybe but then there were all kinds of things that just were new and different and I didn't expect and wasn't prepared for and hit me in a different and unique way and I've just been treating every day like it's a like it's a new day and it's a journey and I'm just doing my best to to get through it and and also celebrating this one and unique life that we get to live as a gift and I'm happy to be here and I feel really fortunate to be living the life that I'm living and I have tremendous and beautiful things happen to me all the time and if I didn't if I didn't allow those to happen to me I think I would just be living in this broken and crushed and depleted place and it's really just a you know my life is much like an endurance run and there's this thing in an endurance sports where like if you're going a long way don't worry it'll change if you're feeling really good and you should probably take in some calories and drink some water because you're you're not gonna feel good later and if you're feeling really bad you should probably take in some calories and drink some water because you'll get better and I've taken that approach to my life in many ways and just you know know that I'll come through some of the troughs and I spent a lot of time talking to my therapist about my life feeling like a stock chart like the ups and downs of the S&P 500 and if you just if you're an investor and you know that eventually it's gonna come back you don't always sell at the bottom and you know panic you you realize things are gonna move forward with the vast vacillations of your stock market ticker or waveform or whatever you want to call it that's set against this sort of unspoken assumption that your life would be better if that curve was flattened like and and you're living a more balanced life and you know Hillary the movie is like talking about getting the balance question and saying she wants to punch people in the face around that like that's a whole other side side question but one difference in these two tragic incidents in your life is that is that what happened with Hillary was very much a public thing like at this point your public figures and she is this just absolutely beloved person not just in the climbing community but she touched so many people that are way outside of this community and you know I had the good fortune as I said earlier to have met her only once and you know maybe we spent a half a day together but that's one of the podcasts and experiences that that you know I reflect on the most of the thousand that I've done like she just was that kind of person so for people that aren't familiar with Hillary Nelson like what was it about her that made her this indelible figure that inspired so many people all over the world well she was she was beautiful in mind body and and energy she she carried a incredible smile she was incredibly fit she was really strong and independent and I think at the same time really really humble and really kind and really desirous to just uplift the people around her and and live a good life and live a really independent driven passionate life I think she said something about having a passion as a compass in life being really important and I've latched on to that and I think that really defines who Hillary is and she picked something that she was really passionate about and she just drove forward with that that passion is something that helped guide her and all her ups and downs and she had a tremendous impact on people all over the world and the outpouring of love and support for her after she passed away was truly remarkable and I I think that she you know has helped so many young women and men decide that they can they can go do their own Hillary moments and I don't think she quite understood the impact that she had on you or on the world she was just doing her best and as you see in the film just trying to get frustrated with how do I pack my bags and finance and prepare for this big expedition and this big goal in my life and yet get my children fed and off to the bus on time because every single day at home is a new challenge of just getting them awake and clothed and out of the house and off to school and all the things in between that and I think she juggled a lot in her life and really did it with it a lot of mastery although looking into herself she was constantly like am I am I good enough am I doing okay I'm failing it at all these parts of my life but in reality she was she was crushing it and succeeding because of the way that she lived her she became sort of an avatar for this broader discussion around the tension between like adult responsibility and fidelity to authenticity like she is a mom of these you know adolescent teenage boys she has responsibility to make sure that they're taken care of but she's just this person who in order to be her has to go and do these things and how do you square that equation and lots of people have lots of opinions about this on the one hand like she is the model of the strong woman who's not going to be told that she's got to be in the kitchen like she's gonna go do Hillary come hell or high water and not only is she gonna go do it she needs to do that in order to be able to show up as the best mom that she possibly can on the other side of the equation like how dare she do this like how irresponsible of her to put herself in these risky situations and create a scenario in which these boys no longer have a mother yeah and Hillary struggled with that internally a lot Jimmy at her memorial service called her Athena in Gore-Tex for people that don't know who Hillary was she was she was kind of Athena in in an outfit ready to go climb a mountain and she was incredibly strong and powerful in her own right and she got there through a incredible parents a really strong childhood where she was brought up in Seattle and spent a lot of time on a boat had a lot of time by herself had an older brother and older sister a lot of independence and a lot of freedom outside but also grew up in this sort of normal patriarchal society and didn't didn't want to be that woman in the kitchen didn't want to be that person that needed to listen to this is what you do and this is who you are and she was really driven to show herself and I think in many ways to her more importantly show her children and the world that you can have a passion and you can live your passion while you still exist in our society and on our norms of being a mother and you know she would go on these expeditions and she'd come back and she'd read the comments about how dare you how dare you as a as a woman with children go do something that were that would risk you not coming home and she was dumbfounded with the fact that the men that were on those trips that didn't have children weren't receiving the same comments or that did have a data right right and she just she just couldn't understand why are we as a society so focused on there's only you know the woman has to be the one that needs to stay back and needs to stay behind and I think she endeavored to have a true balance in in that even though balance is hard she would go to these mountains and she would go up along the route and she would find somebody that was struggling and she'd say let me carry that for you let me put the tent in my pack let me put the group group stove in my pack yes I are also have this other group gear and she would historically typically have the heaviest pack man or woman on the expedition and that's why everyone was so blown away by her strength and her fortitude in the mountains and her being in front still breaking trail for the Sherpa and for me while we're going up modestly to the summit she's in the front of the pack breaking trail and then she would come back to telluride and she would be thrust back into being a mom and going to drop off and interacting with her friends in this normal everyday world of of life at home and that balance was was always hard for her but she did her best so we'll walk a fine line through it and the manner that she thought was the right way to live it's sort of the version of the special operator who returns home after you know spending time in a conflict zone and and has trouble acclimating to daily life like I would imagine returning from some of these extraordinary expeditions there is a version of that that that you her and just your fellow climbers experience yeah you come back from this you know edge of possible existence pushing yourself in a really inhospitable world and environment and pushing yourself really hard physically mentally and and doing it with a team that you endow yourself to you commit to and you know you put your lives in each other's hands and then you you're back home waiting in line for a sandwich and you see the girl at your sandwich shop and she says how's it going Jim and you're just like well I I just had this crazy event in my life and now I'm trying to reassimilate into normalcy and we call that PTSD which is post-traumatic stoke disorder it's hard and it's it's also wonderful you know I think we're really fortunate to be able to push ourselves in a way that takes mundane life and makes that a challenge and something worth living for and takes the opposite of mundane and makes it a challenge and worth living for and tries to force us to we try to force ourselves to find a balance in all that in the wake of Hillary's passing you now inherit this role in the boys life a different type of role the boys appear in the movie their screen time isn't very much but I think they're really the centerpiece of the discussions that are happening around the movie this relationship that Hillary had to her sons your responsibility to these boys and the decision that you are going to continue in in this quest to summit the North Face of Everest and ski down, which is somewhat understandably, I suppose, difficult for the average person to get their head around. Like, haven't these boys suffered enough? Why would you put yourself in a position for them to have to suffer this again, potentially, especially after you witnessing Hillary's passing and having this realization, like, I don't even want to be on this mountain? And having your relationship with the mountains be rearranged by that traumatic event. Well, when we lost Hillary, I felt compelled to do whatever it took to go as far and as hard as I could to find her and to find her body. Which you did. Which I did. Then I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility of what to do next and how would she want to be taken care of in the afterlife, which resulted in us creating this cremation ceremony. And then I came back to Telluride, and I figured out what do I do next. And I wanted to plan a memorial service. And in that thought process, in that journey of what to do, throughout the whole thing, my overarching goal was those boys. Was how do I find, I wanted to find her for her parents. I wanted to find her for her brother and sister. But more importantly than anyone else, was for those boys. And then I wanted to celebrate her so that the boys could see that impact that we talked about, that she had on the world, that they didn't truly know and understand. To them, she was just mom. To them, she was mom that dragged them up mountains and made them go on mountain bike rides that they didn't want to go on and dragged them through the mud, so to speak, to build some character in them. And they loved it, and they hated it. And it was sort of a typical relationship with mom. But to the world, Hillary was this Athena-like woman who broke barriers and moved mountains, so to speak. And I wanted the boys to know and understand that. And so I started trying to plan just a celebration of her life, where I wanted people to speak about who Hillary was to them. And I think that involved really influential, amazing people that had spent time with her in the mountains, that involved senators, that talked about how she made things change in climate and in Congress, and talked about the tremendous impact that Hillary had left on all of us. And then next became day-to-day life of, how can I keep that going forward? And a friend of mine, Timmy O'Neill, said at her memorial service that people die twice. They die when their soul leaves their body, and they die a second time when spoken word or stories about them cease to be told. And I took that as a direction and a demand to celebrate who Hillary was. And going back to Everest became a endeavor where we could tell the full story about who she was and share that with the world and finish this film that we were working on. And we were going to finish either way. And it was either going to have one outcome or a different outcome. And I just felt like it was the right and honorable thing to do was to try to keep going. I thought she would want me to do that. And I sit here today proud of what we did. And I totally think it's fair and understandable that some people will watch it and disagree, and some people will be threatened by the concept of taking those risks and pushing yourself that far. And why would you do that? And shame on you. Well, not only did you succeed in the goal of summiting and skiing down, you've succeeded in creating new interest in her story. We're sitting here today talking about it. This movie's going to come out. Everybody's going to be talking about her. So she lives on in that way. And she lives on in that you committed to seeing through this thing that you were going to do jointly with her. Yeah, and I did that through the selfish act of climbing a mountain and skiing down. And there's no other way to describe what you do with your free time to fuel your body and fuel your mind and go out a little farther than you were on your last run than saying it's selfish. You leave your family behind. You leave your kids behind. You leave your community behind to go spend those time putting in those miles on the trail and climbing your proverbial Everest. It is selfish. So I don't want people to think that I don't think that it is such an act. There's lots of things we do that are selfish. And there's also things that we do that are of necessity, like getting up in the morning and eating breakfast and fueling your body is a necessity. And then on top of that, the high-risk aspect of this, that people struggle to truly understand. We were talking before the podcast. And I was saying that part of that is premised upon a misconception around the certainty of life. Life is uncertain. There's no guarantees. And we sort of say that flippantly while also believing that if we live our lives in a kind of traditional way, that we then are in control of the future in a way that we're not, that is truly an illusion. And so people like yourself and Alex Honnold and these sort of like individuals who have a different relationship with risk are confronting for the average person who is living their life in a way where they're trying to create security through predicting the future and this sort of illusion of being able to control outcomes, what's going to happen tomorrow. Well, if I do this, then I'll be safe tomorrow. And your life is a testament. I mean, it's in the context of taking tremendous risks. But your life is a testament to this uncertainty. Like things happen. They're bad. But we still have to move forward, get up every single day. And the best way to honor these people who have passed that we love is to bring them with us and to live the best life that we can, rather than ruminate or become a victim or isolate from community and humanity and nature. I appreciate that. I think I've been given the opportunity to move forward with life after tremendous loss. And I've taken it as just that. I could say woe is me every day and say I wish my kids were here. I wish I was going to parents weekend like friends of mine are in their respective colleges this weekend. Or I could wish I still had them like the two infants I held in my arms last night, a couple friends that had baby girls recently. But I don't have them here. And I didn't make a choice to not have them here. I make a choice of how am I going to spend my time and how am I going to move forward. Sometimes I take unnecessary risks. And there are those that don't think unnecessary risks are worth taking. I was walking to a rock climb recently. And this is somewhere I go often. And there's a tree that fell down across this ravine of granite. And I kept looking at that tree, thinking I could walk across the tree instead of walking down into the bottom and back up. But it was like a teeter-totter. And one day I walked across it. And it teetered until the other end of the tree hit the rock on the other side and stopped. And then I was able to continue across it. And it looked a little sketchy. It looked like maybe you would fall off if you did it. And I was walking up there with a friend. And I did it with her. And she said, that's an unnecessary risk. She walked around. And I was like, wow, that is a really good name for a rock climb. I really like that. And I've thought about it a lot since. And I'm a person that likes to take unnecessary risks. I realize that in myself. And I don't think there's something inherently wrong with that. I wasn't endangering anyone else. And I like pushing myself a little bit, whether it's in this conversation with you or in walking to the crag. Instead of doing the same normalcy of what I normally do, I like trying to find a faster way across that little ravine and shave a few seconds off and do a little more. You just can't help it. It's just who I am. I saw some panel discussion. And it was you and Alex and Jimmy. I don't know what event this was. I was watching it this morning. And there was a question around motivation and drive. And Jimmy was like, Jim doesn't have an issue with this. You just wake up every day with this feeling like I have to do something. Not necessarily crazy, but I have to push myself. And where is that edge? And what am I trying to accomplish today? You don't have a problem with that. You just wake up animated. No, I'm an achiever. There's a book called Strength Finder. And I did that many, many years ago. And if you fill out a form, you do it online, you take a test, it tells you what your strengths are. And there's a book full of all these great, wonderful attributes that all of us humans have. And my number one was Achiever. And what I read in that description of what Achiever means is you start every day at zero. No matter what you did yesterday, you're starting over today. You've got to achieve something. You've got to get there. And it's a blessing and a curse. But it's just how I am. How am I going to maximize what I'm going to get out of this day? When someone turns to me and says, it seems like you're just trying to figure out how you can fit more into your day, and do even more, and get more out of it. You're driving me crazy. And I look back at them like, what else would you do? If we can get this done, and go for a run, and have a wonderful dinner where we meet some new people and have a great time, and do something we've never done, and before we go to bed tonight, that seems good to me. If we can solve cancer, and help somebody across the road, and do something else, I'd much prefer to do that than less. I'm with you. I'm wired the same way. But I think Eckhart Tolle might have choice words for that. Absolutely. It's a Zen koan. Because you want to wake up excited about life, and you want to chase things, and achieve things, and build things, and be of service to people, and have that relationship with life that is invigorating, while also at the same time recognizing that stillness is actually the place to be. And if that impulse to climb the giant mountain is being animated around a story of whatever happened to you when you were a kid, and this misconception that that summit is going to make you feel a certain way about yourself, or fulfill a need, or like a hole in your soul, then you're kind of on this hamster wheel that you can never get off of. And the exit ramp to that hamster wheel is the path that Eckhart is talking about. And these things have to kind of live in tandem with each other. For me, that's what I've found they have to do. Not only does he talk about stillness being important, he talks about standing in line at the grocery store and seeing that infant, and flirting with her, and getting the joy out of that. And he talks about not sitting in your backyard watching the seagull come and land perpetually. There has to be a balance in that. You can't just say, OK, I'm going to focus on accepting all the good in my life, and I'm going to sit outside in my backyard, which has this incredible view, the place that I live in Lake Tahoe. And I have been given so much by that environment, and that sublime view that I have. And I've taken so much from being there, and it infuses me with a lot of good things. And it's allowed me to slow down, and accept, and process, and just be still. But for me, I can't do it perpetually. I have to continue to challenge myself, and I have to continue to put myself out there in my society, and not just go build a house in the woods and do nothing. That doesn't feel like the right path for me. And it is a constant struggle of, am I present, or am I just trying to create a new problem to go solve? After seeing Free Solo, I didn't think it was possible for Jimmy or anyone else to create. An adventure documentary that could compete with what he achieved in that film. This movie does that the visuals are so arresting and i just watched at home on my television i can't imagine what it looks like in i'm ax i can't wait to see it in the theater in that way. On some level it's a sports documentary you're seeing avalanches you get a sense of how precipitous the great is when you're skiing down and how i see it is and. Just one small move and it's over with like i just my palms were sweating i just couldn't believe. How compelling and arresting and gripping it was i really felt like i was there. Like in lockstep with what was happening. It's expertly rendered and it's also a really difficult watch. And it's been interesting to gauge this early reaction to the movie and the conversations that are percolating up around it even though the only people that have seen it today. Are people who have attended these festivals venice film festival telluride film festival toronto right those are the big three. I'm a huge movie buff i listen to all these movie podcast i have a favorite film commentator this guy sean fantasy he co host a podcast called the big picture. And he said. This movie looks incredible it has pulverizing emotional moments. It's one of those movies like everyone was talking about at all of these festivals like you gotta go see it's a must see it's a must see i'm not gonna tell you what happens but like you have to see it. He also said it's about people who psychologies i don't understand at all like i have no idea what compels people to do the things that they do in these films. And i also had some frankly like ethical misgivings about it like should this movie even exist well also weeping three times. During the movie and i think that crystallizes how many people are going to feel when they see this movie there is this internal conflict i'm seeing this arresting thing it's so astonishing. There is something celebratory about you seeing this through and having this cathartic moment at not only achieving your goal but. As a symbol of reconciliation for all of the loss that you have endured well also having these. Emotions around the risks that you have taken. And the people who are in the crosshairs as a result of the risks and it's not just you the movie does a good job of going into the homes of so many of the crew members and the people in the shirt etc all of whom also have families sometimes children. Spouses newly there's a newly married couple and you get a real sense of the wager that's taking place for not just you but all of the people that have bought into you realizing this dream. And i think it's really difficult for the average person who like we were talking about earlier who has a different relationship with risk who isn't. Call to the mountains in the way that you and hillary are to get their heads around this. So what do you want to say to that person who is feeling that internal tension and is unsure. About how to feel about this film and and not just the film but like the actual lived events that transpire on the phone. There's a really profound and deep question that i think will take the rest of my life to fully think about how to answer and i hope i will sit down and write a book about it at some point but i think you said something earlier about. Painting painting a line and then at that moment i thought about. Climb in a ski that hillary and i did on a mountain in india where she had been for. Twenty plus years trying to get to this mountain this and she carried a photograph of it and she made a life out of trying to get to this mountain and we skied it. And we made the first descent of it and the next day it snowed and our tracks the lines we painted on it were erased forever. Like a mandala like the monks who do the sand mandalas yeah and i guess to some degree this would be our passion and in our art. I feel compelled to do what i do it's it's not something that i'm making just a conscious decision to do it certainly i am i am a very fortunate. Human being that has everything i could need and want and i can do what i want to do and i it's not lost on me that i have tremendous good fortune to put me in this chair. What. I'm just living who i am and i have i have this calling and i've gotten good at it i found it along the way and it's it's what i do it and i don't really believe in. You are what you do i'm more of the of the mindset of you do what you are and this is who i am and i'm compelled to do it and. I'm good at it and i know i can do it i knew i could accomplish this goal and i struggled a lot with should i keep going not only after losing hillary but after going there and failing and going back and failing again. And it was never lost on me that there was a tremendous amount of risk not just for me but for the entire team that was there. Supporting me but they wanted to do it too and that's who they were they were collectively joined in this effort to try to achieve this goal of getting to the top of the mountain so that i could ski back down. I understand it if you just can't look at that and find meaning in it or or find hope or find joy. Or see the music that we're trying to play or or appreciate the art that we're trying to make. And there be plenty of people that listen to that that's just. Poo poo it and disagree and and i think that's okay we're all we all have different passions in life and we're all here for different reasons and. I've from a very young age was compelled to ski off the off the piste off the side of the run and felt a tremendous satisfaction of going somewhere that i felt like people hadn't gone before and exploring and whether that was in my backyard or in the game i was playing in my room or on everest and i think for me that's provided a tremendous amount of. Drive and and passion and self-worth and i've tried to honor that and push it forward you mentioned the art of it. And when you use that word i can't help but think about dean potter. And this dark wizard series that you know came out recently because he very much inhabited the artist spirit in terms of his relationship with adventure and risk and was somebody who. Who leveraged his darkness to achieve these amazing things in both healthy and unhealthy ways like he was trying to reach. Some sense of purity of existence like that was the kind of event horizon of. Of his quest but while he was motivated by some really like challenging emotional dark. Inspirations i see yours is very different i mean first of all i would dismiss people who want to look at what you have done or just your relationship with the outdoors. At large as some kind of ego driven stunt thing like this isn't like. A red bull situation you know where you're just trying to do an insane thing for the laws and the likes. Nor is your motivation one that comes from from that like really grisly dark place like i feel like your why. Is deeper and more profound like you're trying to make sense of these things that have happened in your life you're trying to reconcile your grief and your loss you're trying to. Connect with the divine or the ineffable or try to have a spiritual understanding of your place in the world and come to or arrive at a place of peace. With all of this so that you can come down from the mountain and share for the benefit of others what you have discovered. By dancing at the very edges of what's possible like that's how i see the whole thing. And it puts you in a powerful position to speak to people who have suffered loss and grief and share some inspiration and some tools. For how to process this and how to move forward and how to continue to engage with the beautiful temporary aspect of being in a human body. I appreciate that um i think that my my journey through. Climbing mountains and and taking risks is is certainly different than dean potter's. And that i'm not coming from a place of of darkness i i would like to think i'm coming from a place of light and i've always wanted to do this i've always been the person that i am today since i was a small boy. And losing my family losing my children brought me back to the mountains my life sort of came full circle back to. Pushing myself on skis and going uphill and that that came through the physical effort of of enduring what it takes to go up bringing like. Breaking me down to a more raw self where i was able to connect with them in a better way. And i was able to break down my own barriers and choose to sort of package them up and take them with me and i. I think i have this belief that. When you lose someone you're draped in this incredible grief and i've often said that it feels like a big heavy wet blanket that you put on yourself. And you don't ever get rid of it you don't you it doesn't go away it's not something you move past or move on from or get over those are these are words that people when are you over it yet or are you good now. And you learn to to package that up and to take it with you and. I have this this visual sense of that and i've enacted it in the mountains by like packing that up into my backpack and putting the backpack on my shoulders and walking up the. Sort of syphilis health rolling the rock up the mountain and going through the suffering which. Has helped me myself my ego. Get through to the other side and and put one foot in front of another and do my best and it is all those things it's a bit there is selfishness in it there's selflessness and there's ego in it and there's a lot of things that i'm doing that aren't for the ego i. I learned from a car about the ego and that it's something we all have no matter what and if you can take it and put it in a box and i've sort of visualize it right here on my shoulder. And if i know that that's part of what's going on in myself then i can understand okay how do i make sure i don't let it drive where we're going but. I just live this life that i'm living to i'm just doing my best along the way and. I hope that i can sort of encapsulate some of the why for. For some people of how they can move forward after they had a hard day at the office or they lost their their cat or they lost their children in an accident and. We're all gonna lose things and you said it earlier and i think it's worth bringing up again nobody gets out alive that's a jim morrison comment no one here gets out alive and i've i've known that my whole life i've. From a young age embodied that spirit and i think i feel like. We're in this magnificent place called planet earth and it's the it's the best it's ever gonna be today it's not it's not gonna get better tomorrow we're. We're hurting our planet we're degrading our world i don't think our society is going towards better as a collective being i think. We should relish where we are and appreciate where we are and do our best to celebrate the good things in life. The day that you summited it was just a gorgeous day i mean the sky was completely blue. At one point i don't know if you were at camp three you're like oh it's it's gonna go down to like thirty below tonight so it's cold but then like. Is it that cold during the day like when the sun is shining you guys have your gloves off like it strikes me as fair. early temperate. I don't know if that's really what it is, but maybe like relatively. But the point being like it was this amazing day and it was literally the last day before your permit was going to expire, right? And Jimmy's like, why is it always this way? Like you start this in August and you're in mid-October, right? By the time you're like summiting the amount of time that you guys are up there and waiting for that weather window. But the ski conditions were absolutely horrific. I mean, it was just a sheet of ice. So the prospect of you skiing down that was total insanity. I mean, that meant less likelihood for there weren't going to be any avalanches because it was locked in, but it just raised the risk element of the ski part to like 11. And watching you do that and the way it was filmed where you can really see and feel the grade and the risk had me on the edge of my seat. I mean, that's where it did feel like this sports documentary. Obviously you succeed in this descent, which takes you four hours and you emit this cathartic like primal scream that almost feels like a bookend to the scream when you're in your laundry room and you feel like you can't go on and you see the pine needles. Like there's a thread from that moment to this moment that feels like something has been completed. Yeah. And I did really complete something there. I had a tremendous moment on top of Everest with Hillary where I felt like all of the effort that was put into this, all of the loss, all of the tears that were shed over losing her for me personally in our collective drive to do this thing. I felt like she was there with me and we saw it through and we made it to the top. And then I had to turn and take off my extra big down layers and turn into a skier and stand on the top of Everest like I was at home and the sun was shining on me and I felt pretty good in that moment. I felt like I had about five minutes before I'd have severe frostbite and I needed to get out of there. And I skied down and I was in the most present form I could be for those four hours, laser focused on exactly what was right in front of me and nothing else. And I wasn't thinking about Hillary and I wasn't thinking about anything other than exactly what I was doing that whole time. One tiny slip up and you're going down to your death. I think you say, if I'm a half inch off in these turns. Yeah, it was really consequential skiing and really, really difficult conditions, 11 on the condition scale. And then I crossed the Bertrand at the bottom and I got to safety for the first time in that whole descent. And I just had this tremendous release of immediate connection to Hillary, immediate like we did it. We did it, Hillary. We pulled it off. I think what is really interesting for me personally is looking back up at the mountain the next day and the following day from our advanced base camp and staring up at this giant proverbial goal and weight and difficulty that I was always trying to overcome. And I was always trying to build an arsenal and a team and go to battle with this huge, challenging thing called Mount Everest in my case, but everyone has their own version of this. And I thought about and dreamt about and visualized all the different things that could go wrong and how I could good my best day and my worst day. And then after I achieved it, I skied down and I looked up at the mountain and now it's just this, I see Hillary on the summit. I feel her energy and I feel this through line from the laundry room floor to today where I feel a sense of peace. I don't think there's a better word for it. I did my best to see this thing through and we pulled it off and it was really, really fun and really, really hard. And just like some of your career as a runner, you get a lot of satisfaction out of making it across your goal and getting to the finish line. But doing that with Hillary and celebrating her life and seeing her larger than life on the screen and watching her son Quinn see her for the first time on the screen and breaking him down to just incredibly raw and emotional state of just sobbing for a period of many, many minutes after he watched the movie for the first time and then talking to him about it afterwards and celebrating who she was and having it be something that, you know, it hurt him so much because it was so real and just her voice for him brought him back to who she was and that she's not here anymore. And I think we are at a challenge of whether when we lose someone, whether we ignore those feelings and suppress them and push them away so that we can get to breakfast and move through our day or whether we take them with us and celebrate who they are. And I think that Quinn's starting to find a balance through that on his own and I think there's some positives that the film will help him do that. And the other boy, Graydon. Graydon. Graydon's a senior in high school. He's doing really well. He's in Costa Rica right now at surf camp, mixing school with surfing and put in a lot of hard work in the first three years of high school and applied to school already and hopefully he's gonna, he's very, very studious and excited about what's in front of him and both of the boys are doing well and I'm really proud of them and they both live with their father full-time when they're not in school and I think they have a tremendous community around them trying to support them and this challenging thing called life with one parent and one great community and no Hillary. I'm glad to hear that. You're familiar with a certain kind of high altitude existence but not the one that you're currently occupying which is not a base camp. It's like the Venice Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival. You've traded one extreme experience for another and now you're on the press circuit with the film. That is disorienting in a different way. How has this experience been for you to be doing this red carpet thing? It's pretty wild. It's been pretty unique and different and I'm just trying to take it as a new and interesting life opportunity and celebrate it where I can and then I've also found myself back home in Lake Tahoe going to the same old cliff to go rock climbing with the same old friends I've had for multiple decades and turning to them and being like there is nowhere else on planet earth I'd rather be on this Saturday than right here right now with you guys and it really has helped me appreciate those rare moments where you're having dinner with John Malkovich and talking to him about who you are and telling him about this film and then seeing him at the film the next day and he decided to go and then seeing him at a party afterwards and having him be so excited about what he got out of the film and how powerful the story is for him and you're going to be in Toronto, I'll see you in London and it's been fun to have those interactions and it's also really not lost on me that I'm very fortunate and very proud of and appreciative of this community that's put their arms around me the moment my wife and children crashed and has done so much to to help me through this this challenge we call life. I'm fascinated by this friendship that you have with Oprah. How did this start? I mean you were she threw like a like a big thing for you in Telluride at her does she have a house there like at her house you did her podcast but from what I understand there's like a real friendship here like she is very drawn to you like how did that start what is that about like I want to know everything about this well whatever you're comfortable sharing I mean I'm I'm very comfortable with with the whole thing she's just an incredible person and just has a a way about her of of lifting the room up lifting the world up lifting humanity up and she's got a tremendous amount of energy and just her aura is spectacular to be around and I'm I met her essentially doing her podcast I was asked to be on her podcast I was at the same time I was going to be in Santa Barbara speaking in an event and they asked me if I would do it on a Tuesday because they knew I was speaking on a Wednesday and I said no I can't do it and the reason I said no is because I wanted to watch have her watch me tell my story and then I would go to her podcast afterwards and she leapt out of her chair and I pointed at her and I said I'll see you tomorrow and I went to her house the next day and did this podcast and she just she's just a very real and special woman who I connected with and I love talking to and love sharing stories with and and we both had homes in Telluride so she told me when she was coming to Telluride and we had dinner and uh you know just sitting at a table with Oprah Winfrey sharing a meal was is one of the true joys of my lifetime and hearing her stories about how what she did in her business and how she built her business and what's what's just how she works in her mind is is truly magnificent and I think she just spends every day trying to figure out how she can make the world a better place one little incremental step at a time and she lifts a few people up and those people lift more people up and I think she's just made a tremendous impact on on humanity and to be around it I for me it's just it's a gift it's pretty cool like she has gone out of her way like she's she's enamored with you like for you know like this is just such an interesting thing you know she's gone out of her way to like really celebrate you and celebrate this film and what it is I think she she understands what it is that you're trying to communicate um and if you had to put that in your own words how would you articulate that what I'm trying to communicate yeah like what she like how she's translating her understanding of you and the movie into something that is helpful and of service to her audience because that's what she's a master at like she can take a story and then she can identify that kernel of truth or that important piece and she knows exactly what to say to her audience to make it impactful in a positive way for them what when I call her she answers the phone like on the first ring and she's like I was just about to call you it's it's one of those sort of connections that feels divine in the universe and I think she has a way of seeing the emotional arc of my life and my story and saying this is important and this is something you need to figure out how to share and she has a unique way of encouraging me to do it certainly as someone who I respect and if if Oprah tells me to do something I'm gonna do it she's helped me sort of see the the path of how I can share that story and and tell it and and help people that have suffered loss or grief or are going through something really hard in their life and and see a way to to get through it and get to the other side of it and I know a tremendous amount of gratitude for her and it's it's certainly as you said not just with me it's what she seems to do in her day-to-day existence I think she can just walk into a room and walk into a room and she just finds that energy she wants to sort of find the kernel and uplift it and she's going to help me by pushing me to tell my whole story and and write a book and I really appreciate her for that it's very cool there must be moments where for example you're you know at one of these film festivals seeing yourself on screen or you're you know hanging out with John Malkovich or whatever and thinking like how is this my life like there's a surreal aspect to it but also this bittersweet because of all of these things that happened to create these situations and the choices that you made to be able to be in this position like what is the interior experience of like celebrating the fact that like you've done these great things and you're carrying this powerful message that's helpful to other people and now there's this amazing cinematic event happening around you while also recognizing that in many ways it's a function of the of this tremendous loss that you have endured two edges of that that I think about I guess I'll put the bad one first and then we'll end with Oprah you know going to these festivals and seeing the film for the first time and and having this tremendous reception from a crowd and so many people congratulating you congratulations and it's there's part of me that in a really tough way wants to say congratulations on losing Wyatt and Hannah and not having them here for all these years congratulations on all the things that I missed out on because they passed away and it's hard for me and then there's another side of it that is just really wonderful and really positive and the reason I mentioned Oprah's I had a really tough weekend the the weekend that I showed the film to Quinn and Graydon and I came back from that and I thought a lot about where I was at in life and what I had been through and I had been dating a amazing woman and I broke up with her for other extenuating circumstances and I was just in a really tough place on Monday morning and Oprah called me and she wanted to ask me to do something and she said she realized the situation I was in and she said I'm not gonna ask you to do it and I was like look I'll do absolutely anything for you tell me what it is and through the course of our conversation she she read something to me and she told me something that I I stood outside I was in the Tetons in Jackson Hole and I looked up at the Tetons and I'm standing on this little deck and Oprah Winfrey's in her just immaculate prose is talking to me and I'm visually climbing like my hands are on the rock of the Tetons and I'm infused with Hillary's energy like I feel like I'm completely connected to her and she's not gone and she's not unaware of where we are or what we're doing she's right here and she's with me and I'm carrying her through this journey through the highs and lows of this whole circuit that we're on and it was just a really tremendous moment that I tried to say okay stop put this in the memory bank and make sure you can access it later and take note of this magical moment you're in which I've had the opportunity to do a bunch of times recently and I'm just I feel really fortunate for being in this position. With that awareness and in closing here what is the message that the distilled crystallized message that you want to communicate to the person who is watching or listening to this who is in the midst of grief and loss and trying to make sense of how to move forward I wrote this for for Oprah she asked me to to write something down that she could give her guests at this parties that she threw for me and I started with this idea of that for a really long time in my life I've thought that losing someone meant you had to move on from them and you had to move forward without them and that I've just come back to a place that I don't believe that anymore I believe we can lose someone and decide to move forward with them and if you just lost someone or something that's so near and dear to you it's really hard to visualize that today but if you just take the time to day by day put one foot in front of another we get to a place where not talking about my children is not what I want to do I want to talk about them I want to bring them up and I want to carry them forward with me and I want to celebrate them here and every day into the future and I want to do the same with Katie and Hillary and all the other people I've lost and I feel like their energy is what has helped me get to the top of the mountain and with and helped me be my best and helped me make the ultimate ski run for me on planet Earth and in the best form that I could make it in and I don't think I could have done it without them and that energy that they are fueling me with has helped me be my best self and I guess I'd like to say to the person who's lost something like accept that today is hard and celebrate the small wins that you have of just getting through today and sometimes that's just taking a moment to drink a glass of water and look out the window and keep going and eventually you can package that person or that thing up and carry it with you and take them to the seashore and have them look out through your eyes at that horizon instead of only feeling like they need to come be the ones to save you they can actually come with you and they can watch the sunset with you thanks for coming and sharing with me today thanks for having me it's a really powerful message it's a beautiful film it's confronting film there's gonna be a lot of cultural conversations around the film so I'm so glad to be able to sit with you and get your perspective up front before all those conversations kick off and I think that you are as I said at the outset and throughout this conversation are in this really powerful position to be of service to people who are enduring hardship right now I think Oprah saw that in you and I would encourage you to stand up and take the reins of that I think it's a real purposeful mission it's a beautiful one I appreciate it I look forward to it and I'll I'll do my best one day at a time to get through this journey of putting this big film out into the world and then taking all the packaging it all up and figuring out how to retell my story in a way that hopefully will will help those people that have been through hardship and loss and the film is just another full-spectrum you know kind of experience another episode in your in your like you know wildlife that's crazy yeah and there will probably be many more so come back and share with me what you learn along the way my friend I really appreciate your openness and the time you took to share with me from the heart I appreciate it thank you for having me right on Jim thanks peace you before we continue with the show I want to point you toward an award-winning podcast I think a lot of you will get something out of if you're a parent you know this feeling you want real trustworthy guidance but most of what's out there either overwhelms you or makes you feel like you're failing that is exactly the gap that raising good humans fills and why I'm thrilled to welcome this show into our voicing change family it's hosted by dr. 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