Within the tight knit community of ski mountaineers,��a handful of descents stand alone in terms of sheer difficulty. In 1980, Frenchman Jean-Marc Boivin became the first person to ski down the Matterhorn’s treacherous east face. In 1995, Canadians��Ptor Spriceniek and Troy Jungen pulled a coup on the north face of British Columbia’s 12,972-foot Mount Robson. And in 2012, Sweden’s Andreas Fransson braved the Whillans Ramp on Cerro Poincenot in Argentine Patagonia.

But the line considered by some ski mountaineers to be the most difficult on the planet has yet to be skied. This epic descent starts 29,035 feet above sea level—dropping in from the highest point on earth.

The Hornbein Couloir on the north face of Mount Everest is a 1,500-vertical-foot gully whose maw opens just 1,000 feet below the peak’s summit, and then spills mercilessly onto the 5,500-foot slope beneath. The narrow gully��teeters between 45 and 60 degrees in steepness, bends gently in the middle, and then narrows to about the width of a standing human body. This is how American Thomas Hornbein described it, anyway, after he became the first person to ascend it.

Hornbein and fellow American Willi Unsoeld climbed the couloir in 1963 as a serendipitous detour after a failed attempt on the mountain’s west ridge. Less than a dozen climbers have successfully repeated the ascent since, which Hornbein wrote about in a memoir called Everest: The West Ridge. To this day, it remains one of the most technically challenging climbing routes above 26,000 feet in the world, an altitude known as the “Death Zone”.

Has Anyone Attempted to Ski the Hornbein Couloir?

A thin ribbon of white suspended from the heavens, the Hornbein Couloir poses a fantasy ski descent that only two parties have ever attempted. First was the Swiss duo of Jean Troillet and Dominique Perret in 1996, then French snowboarder Marco Siffredi in 2002. Neither group succeeded, and Siffredi died during his attempt.

Though the north side of Everest features several potentially skiable routes, the Hornbein Couloir is the most direct among them, draining into the Japanese Couloir below it to comprise the nearly arrow-straight, 8,000-vertical-foot North Face Direct route (sometimes called the Super Direct)—which, though seldom climbed, is where climbers sometimes establish three camps.

Jean Troillet used exactly none of those in 1986, when he and climbing partner Erhard Loretan made one of the few successful climbs of the Hornbein, in alpine style—using no fixed ropes, porters, or supplemental oxygen, and carrying everything they needed with them in one 43-hour push from Advanced Base Camp and back.

The ascent is widely considered one of the greatest achievements in modern mountaineering, setting a speed record, and offering a mind-bending new perspective on the viability of going fast and light at extreme elevations. But it offered another perspective to Troillet, too.

He and Loretan sat on the summit alone for an hour-and-a-half, and he couldn’t help but note, “The north face was covered in perfect powder, and we told ourselves it would have made a beautiful descent.”

After sliding back down the entire route “on their butts” for three hours, Troillet postulated that a snowboard could be a great mountaineering tool. So he went to Canada and learned to “surf,” as he calls it, and began incorporating it into his craft.

Ten years later, Troillet returned to Everest with Perret and an idea to ski what would then have been the first descent of Everest—via the Hornbein Couloir.

The 1996 Attempt Leaves More Questions than Answers

With two cinematographers, a photographer, and a team of Sherpas to help maintain Base Camp��and shuttle food by yak from a monastery at 18,000 feet, Troillet and Perret spent 76 days on the mountain, waiting out the late-summer monsoons for the perfect moment to attack the north face.

While the more popular south side of the mountain requires navigating the treacherous Khumbu Icefall, the north side has a much simpler approach. Its 8,000-foot face erupts from the head of the Rongbuk ice flow at 21,000 feet in one straight push to the top of the world. This allows climbers to confront it head-on from Advanced Base Camp.

Perret, a 1990s freeskiing phenom who is now 62, remembers making two attempts to ski the Hornbein via the North Face Direct. On the first, he told ���ϳԹ���, they turned around at about 23,300 feet. On the second, they bailed at 27,230 feet—near the bottom of the Hornbein. He distinctly remembers getting to peer up the daunting couloir before turning around.

“You’re below it and you see this little mouse-hole opening in a giant wall of cliffs,” he recalls.

On both attempts, Perret says, violent winds, massive snow and ice fall, and multiple avalanches made it impossible to continue. He remembers skiing back down the Japanese Couloir to return to Advanced Base Camp, with Troillet on a snowboard.

There are, however, no photos or video of their��descent. Google Earth places the ascent elevation he claims near the top third of the couloir, and not the bottom.

Other accounts of the expedition offer conflicting narratives. Troillet, now 72, doesn’t recall either attempt on the Hornbein, nor having descended the Japanese Couloir. To his memory, he and Perret climbed the north ridge to about about 27,890 feet, and skied from 26,250 feet, after some down-climbing.

Videographer John Falkiner recalls the north ridge and the first effort on the Hornbein, but not a second, and remembers it requiring a combination of crampons and skis to descend.

Photographer Mark Shapiro says no significant skiing happened at all. But one photo of his that appeared in a 1996 Powder magazine article shows the team��ascending the North Face Direct, to the climber’s left of the Japanese Couloir, confirming at least one attempt on the Hornbein.

Any definitive records are sparse, belong to the analog era, and are imprecise. First-hand memories are also nearly 30 years old by now. Troillet, for his part, made his last go at a 26,000-foot peak when he was 68 and suffered a stroke while waiting out a week’s worth of bad weather in base camp, which he says took him years to recover from.

In 2000, a jury of French sports journalists proclaimed Perret “the best freeride skier of the century,” partly citing his efforts on Everest.

The ski history of Everest’s north side since then has remained short. In 1996—the same year as Perret and Troillet’s expedition—Tyrolean ski-alpinist Hans Kamerlander also ascended the mountain’s north ridge, skiing back down from 28,030 feet. He isn’t believed to have completed the whole descent on skis, however.

In 1997, Troillet returned without Perret, and managed to snowboard the north ridge uninterrupted from roughly 28,540 feet—650 feet higher than where he and Perret had made it.

Jump to 2001, and 22-year-old Siffredi pulled off the first and only complete descent of the mountain’s north side, solo, via the Norton Couloir, a wide gulley perpendicular to the Hornbein Couloir, guarded by massive seracs. It marked the second-ever complete descent of Everest, after Slovenian Davo Karničar skied the first complete descent of the south side in 2000.

Siffredi returned in the fall of 2002, with a notion to snowboard the Hornbein. He climbed the north ridge once again, but this time tried to ride down the convex hanging slope from the summit to the entrance of the couloir: a needle in a haystack of deadly cliffs, according to Perret. Siffredi was last seen somewhere around 28,000 feet. He was 23 at the time of his death, and his body has never been found.

Though the south side of Everest has been skied many times now, Siffredi’s track remains the last one down the north side, and the Hornbein remains—to the best of anyone’s knowledge—unskied and unridden.

Red Tape and Bottled Oxygen

Despite the failed attempts, Troillet still believes the Hornbein Couloir can be skied.

“If there’s enough snow, it goes, but it might take one rappel,” he figures. “And then to do it in proper style you would ski the Japanese Couloir after, which can have really great snow in it. It did when we were there in 1986, and it would have made for great snowboarding.”

Enough snow to fill in the Hornbein, but not wipe out the face below it, is the formula that Troillet describes.��But therein lies the rub, since too much snow is exactly what turned Troillet and Perret around in 1996, according to Perret.

The Himalayan monsoon season ends in late September, leaving the mountains primed for skiing. However, more snow also creates more��challenging��climbing conditions and higher avalanche danger.

Hazards in the Himalayas have been ratcheting up with climate change. Crevasses in the ice falls are getting wider and deeper, while warmer temperatures have made rock and ice fall more frequent. Historical routes have become more technical, including over the Khumbu Icefall, the most common way to the summit.

Traffic jams from commercial expeditions on the south side of Everest have likewise compounded the dangers there. The Nepali supreme court recently ordered a on permits for the mountain, for which the Nepali Department of Tourism is responsible for, but has yet to meaningfully enact. Skiers climbing Everest from the north side will still encounter a crowded summit from guided parties climbing the Khumbu route.

Conversely, the Tibetan, or north side of the mountain, is controlled by China, and nowadays is mired in restrictive bureaucracy that makes a modern-day attempt on the Hornbein Couloir even harder.

Climbers hopeful for permits for Everest’s north side have been navigating an opaque permitting process since China officially reopened it to foreign nationals in 2024 after the pandemic. Multiple parties from around the world have reported being denied permits, splintering some groups, and shutting down others outright.

The China Tibet Mountaineering Association issues both climbing and skiing permits, without a clear quota. However, the Chinese government states that, “In 2019, a total of 362 people climbed the north slope of Qomolangma [Everest]: 142 foreign climbers, 12 Chinese ones, and 208 Nepalese Sherpa support personnel.”

In addition to climbing and skiing permits, plus a Chinese visa, authorities also require a Tibetan travel permit, and an alien’s travel permit for the Tibet Region. None of which are cheap. It costs tens-of-thousands of dollars just to look at the north side of Everest.

Then there are other new rules that make it even more complicated to try the Hornbein. There’s a one-to-one guide-to-client ratio required at altitudes above 23,000 feet, and supplemental oxygen is also now mandatory, which can be tough for skiing—the extra weight and face mask are cumbersome and claustrophobic.

Americans Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison did however ski the Lhotse Couloir with oxygen masks in 2018—a formidable 2,500-foot 50-degree hallway dropping from the summit of the fourth-highest mountain on earth—so it’s not impossible.

The Greatest Line Never Skied

If you ask Perret, he’d tell you that rules are meant to be broken.

“It’s the most magnificent and challenging line,” he beams. “I hope whenever someone does it, they do it in alpine style. … You carry oxygen to basecamp to keep up appearances, and no one’s going to chase you up the mountain from there, you can just leave them behind.”

Of course, testing the forgiveness of the world’s most authoritarian super power by eschewing porters and supplemental oxygen to ski in alpine style is a daunting extra layer to fold into an already perilous and costly expedition. But, the world’s most ambitious ski line is out there, dangling in the Death Zone, and that’s what it might take.

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The peak of Mount Mackenzie was slammed that morning. A pane of blue sky lit up April powder all around as a conciliatory parting gift from a long, dry winter. A guy with a 360 GoPro was tee-ing up the east face. There was a group of teenaged German exchange students, one with skis clumsily hung in an X rather than an A-frame on his pack. I was there with my buddy Mark, a pair of middle-aged men vying for a piece of the caked mountainside that had framed our younger years. And amongst a gaggle of two or three others, there was one lone snowboarder in military green pants, a camo fleece, and a camo jersey pulled over it for good measure.

“Where are you guys going?” the guy in green asked me, his impressive duster of a mustache dancing over his lip.

“Over to Spilled Milk,” I answered.

“I’m going to follow,” he announced.

It was a self-invitation I would normally protest. But something about his nature felt unimposing, and there was a highway of people hiking up— everyone was coming if we didn’t go now. “OK,” I said, and we shoved off while the peak piled up like an escalator was letting off.

The traverse to Spilled Milk, a sidecountry run, is exposed and intimidating, but the guy in green gripped the ridgetop sun crust unfazed and held strong. When we reached the north-facing zone we sought, it rolled over and out of sight, as always. I had assumed he knew the run, but he told me he didn’t. There was a time when I would have said something rude and left him in my tracks. But if middle age has taught me anything, it’s that being a dick has gotten me nowhere.

“Well, Mark’s going into a cliffy area,” I offered, “and I’m going to take the most straightforward line. So if you want to get rowdy follow Mark’s track, if you want to keep it simple follow mine.”

“I’ll follow you,” he replied.

“Alright, you’ll see me out the bottom once I’m done.”

“OK, I’ll be up here until then.”

Mark went first, nailing his line, then I dropped in, poking through a small choke to emerge on a wide-open apron that was all for me. It was deliriously good. I fist-bumped Mark at the bottom and watched my new green friend trace his own smooth run down the same heavenly slope. He slid up next to us, out of breath and grinning.

“How was it?” I asked,

“Great!” he exclaimed.

We bumped fists, too, and he told me his name was Nick. I paused a moment before asking… “Are you in the army?”

“Yeah,” he answered softly as he unbuckled his board.

Most Canadians don’t have much interaction with our military. It’s tiny, with under 100,000 troops—including reservists—for a country of 39 million. Compare that to the 2.8 million Americans serving in the United States Armed Forces. With the exception of going into Afghanistan after 9/11, the Canadian military has almost exclusively been a peacekeeping force for the last half-century, lending its minor might to the United Nations and other allies while tending to things like natural disasters at home.

I have never had much reverence for the military. Those from my high school who joined tended to be the same types of hockey jocks who tormented me in gym class. There was a willingness to violence and an attraction to authority in these people that always befuddled me. That resentment only entrenched deeper in college when I became decidedly anti-war and thus anti-soldier. We were well past the age of conscription, after all.

In Canada, at least where I grew up, there wasn’t such a big disparity between the rich and the poor. I hadn’t ever known anyone who enlisted because it was their best job option, but I did know some guys who signed up to pay for university.

I assumed Nick was stationed in Rogers Pass, 45 minutes west, where the army does avalanche control with Howitzer cannons to keep the Trans-Canada Highway safe (these guys call themselves “snow punchers”). But Nick is in the infantry, he told me. He is stationed in Edmonton, Alberta, about seven hours north. He was simply snowboarding in Revelstoke on some time off. It’s where the rest of the 20-somethings were, I guess, though he didn’t quite mesh with them.

He said he specialized in mountain operations. So had my grandfather. Two generations ago, he learned to ski in Norway as part of his training before eventually landing on Juneau beach for D-Day in a Sherman tank. I visited that site when I turned 30, about the same time I started to understand the world was more complicated than my ardent idealism. The Canadian flag is proudly hung outside many seaside French homes, and it has been waving there since 1945. I walked the Canadian graveyard to learn most were between the ages of 18 and 22 when they died. Then, when I shifted to the American graveyard, I saw tombstones consume the horizon with no visible end. Later that day, a French server wearing a scarf emblazoned with the stars and stripes at a restaurant on Omaha Beach asked me, “Are you American?”

“Canadian,” I said.

“Oh, well thank you too,” he answered.

Back in the free hills of Revelstoke, a universe away from any past or present conflict, Mark invited Nick to join us for another lap. I interrupted the carefree air to ask Nick if he’d been deployed. Yes, he said. He had spent a lot of time in Europe, training Ukrainians.��

“Do you keep in touch with any of them?” I further inquired.

“Yeah, I try. But a lot of them die,” he said. “They’re running out of people over there, most of them are either dead or injured. All this stuff I’m wearing, they gave me.”

The landscape seemed to morph around me just then. I felt momentarily stuck in an inverse world. It was as if being confronted by the physical incarnation of the disembodied news—of the chaos at the bloody fringes of Western life, held back by some invisible force so that I could have a very different relationship with the mountains. For his part, Nick just stood there, still unfazed, ready to squeeze in one more run.

“Thank you for your service,” I said. It was the first time in my life I’d ever used the phrase.

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Walking the rows of pro skier Chris Rubens’s Revelstoke, B.C., farm with him under a punchy May sun, it’s hard to square the subdued and pensive character before me with the high-octane hero he plays in ski movies.

The first ever images I can recall of him, cut together in Matchstick Productions’ 2006 film Push, showcased an eager newcomer pinning the throttle, throwing 360s off 40-foot cliffs, and beaming at the chance to go heli-skiing—a privilege afforded to him by virtue of having “made it” as a pro.

His segment sold a dream come true: powered by helicopters, snowmobiles, and a super-human dose of gumption.

Eighteen years later, the 39-year-old has all but grown out of that ideology, foregoing the stereotypical trappings of pro skiing for simpler pastures. He travels less, prefers pillows to do-or-die gnar, and does everything he can to keep his carbon footprint low; that includes hardly using helicopters or snowmobiles anymore. And while on its face that sounds like winding down, he is still charging hard, still filming, and, he says, it’s better than ever.

That’s the message at the heart of a career-spanning biopic set to release about the long-tenured star freeskier this fall. Looking back on a filmography propelled by combustion, Rubens’s self-produced new movie seeks to tell his story but also give pro skiers a dream to strive for that isn’t just heli-skiing.

As a guy who helped cement many fossil-fuel-powered shooting techniques that depict the modern sport, that’s no small walk back. Neither is leaving institutions like Matchstick Productions and Blank Collective Films behind to go your own way. But then again, he’s no stranger to fighting the current.

Rubens was instrumental in persuading Matchstick to start shooting at ski-touring lodges 15 years ago, opening up an entirely new mode of ski-movie production without helicopters. In the wake of that revolution, he also had a big hand in developing sturdy ski-touring gear like the .

More recently, he revamped the ski into an ultra-light, super playful freeride ski that also charges. He likewise popularized expedition skiing in movies like Sherpas Cinema’s ALL I CAN and in many short films by Salomon TV, in which he tested himself in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the Himalaya, amongst other locales. But throughout it all, healso did a lot of snowmobile and heli-skiing.

“It seemed like the prerequisite to being a pro freerider was you had to have a sled,” he recalls. “It was either that or heli-skiing. And heli-skiing you’d blow your whole season’s budget in two weeks.”

He and childhood friend Eric Hjorleifson, who opened pro-skiing’s door to Rubens, spent many seasons flailing together on their machines as they learned and eventually mastered them. That made Rubens one of the pre-eminent athletes of his day—he could go anywhere and do anything. It was a position that afforded him a status worthy of more and more heli-skiing trips from sponsors and film companies, which was the goal of any pro skier back then, as he tells it.

“It was exciting, there’s no doubt about it,” he says.

Though he was aware of the effects of fossil fuels (modern two-stroke snowmobiles emit about five times more carbon per mile than the average car and spit unburned oil into the snowpack), work was work. And this was how work was done.

“Until that point I was like most people,” he admits. “I wasn’t a climate denier, but it was such a big problem I was like, ‘How am I going to do anything about it?’”

Putting that aside, he steadily rose to the ranks of the world’s most filmed and famous freeskiers. Then came a 2016 trip to Greenland with Salomon TV for the short film Guilt Trip, in which he and other pro skiers help a climate scientist collect glacier core samples. The film is a lighthearted soliloquy about adventure skiing loosely pivoting around the issue of climate change, but it mostly takes advantage of the destination as a setting. When it went on tour to New York and Toronto, skeptical audiences saw through it.

“They were like, “So, what are you doing about [climate change]?’ And we were like, ‘Well, we made this movie.’ And I was standing on a stage, and I wasn’t prepared for that. I felt like a fraud,” he says. “So I was like, ‘OK, if I’m going to talk about this stuff I need to walk the walk. And I need to have some tangible things that I’ve done.’”

He leaned into his ski-mountaineering skill set, which he realized was a tool as good as any helicopter. Many of his Salomon TV trips from that point began to bear a self-powered ethic and focus on story. There was a road trip to ski volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest in an early electric car and then a traverse of the Monashee Mountains’ Gold Range that helped reveal a new way forward.

This was around the same time fellow Revelstoke was also making an environmental transformation, giving Rubens someone to collaborate with. Eventually, Rubens started dating Hill’s younger sister, Jesse, a fiercely intelligent woman with a degree in environmental science and lots of ideas. One of them was to start an organic farm to fight food insecurity as the climate shifts. She and Rubens did just that during the pandemic, and the ever-expanding farm is thriving today.

“I’m an old skier but a young farmer,” he likes to joke.

The decision to have a kid, though, was a little harder. As he and Jesse watched the glaciers around them shrink, winters become wetter, summers drier and more choked with wildfire smoke, they wondered what kind of world a child would grow up in.

“We’re going into year three of a serious drought in British Columbia,” he tells me soberly. “And I really thought we were sheltered from a lot of the effects of climate change here. We’re in a rainforest and it feels like we’re growing in a semi-arid desert now.”

But, as happens, a child came nonetheless. Huxley’s arrival further solidified the need for even more action, prompting Dad to double down and work harder to make a better future. It also made Rubens reflect on his influence on current and future generations.

“Back in the day when we would go to a trailhead [by snowmobile], it was just film crews. You go to the trailheads now and they are absolutely packed with everybody because we showed how rad it is,” he says. “I think when you’re younger, and someone’s giving you money to go skiing, you’re just like, ‘Holy, I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this sport, this is the sickest thing ever!’ And you don’t realize how much influence you have, per se.”

As to whether this film is an all-out correction on those images, Rubens says he doesn’t like to think of it that way—he’s not big on regrets. He just wants to show a different way forward now.

“You can still achieve crazy lines and push your ski limits and also be a little kinder to the Earth,” he insists. “I’m not trying to make the world’s best ski movie, but I am trying to showcase that foot-powered skiing is really fun and attainable. It’s not a struggle, it’s fun. I can still remember every ski-mountaineering line I’ve done to this day; I can’t remember all the heli lines.”

Shot and directed by longtime collaborator is clear-headed about the limits therein. He says if it had been any other athlete, the quality of skiing in the film might not have been equal.

“It was actually really hard,” Bonello explains, “because you hike for three hours just to get to the elevation that you’re going to start shooting at. But Chris is just so dialed on every front. He just knows where the good snow is, knows what’s happening with safety, knows how to get a good shot, knows how a story works. And he has the legs.”

Bonello asserts that, of all the athletes he’s worked with over the years, Rubens has fundamentally changed his life the most according to his values. Even though it’s not easy, working this way is evidently viable for him. Which means it could be for others as well.

“All of this stuff is about going to extremes to prove that something isn’t as impossible as everybody makes out,” Bonello continues. “Whether that’s jumping off a 100-foot cliff or ski touring to everything.”

For Rubens, there’s one more dimension to that. “It’s an opportunity to focus on what you want people to take away from your career,” he explains. “Were you just a model, or did you have something to say?”

Rubens and Bonello’s yet-to-be-titled film will be released online this fall, presented by Picture Organic Clothing, Atomic Skis, Tourism Revelstoke, and Revelstoke Mountain Resort.

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The line before us didn’t seem all that intimidating—a subalpine couloir with walls that were almost more gully-like than a traditional, rocky pinner’s would be. But my two partners and I still paused for a solemn moment before dropping in that day. This was the Polichinelle Couloir, where Doug Coombs fell and died in 2006. I had moved to La Grave, France, for a season in my late 20s to follow in the tracks of giants like Coombs and learn to ski mountaineer. This is where I came to understand that the most deadly terrain is not found on the mountain but in the mind.

The trick with ski mountaineering is you can do everything right and still get it wrong. It’s like getting hit by a car; you never think it will happen to you. In Coombs’s case, a simple patch of ice above a cliff proved fatal.�� Yet, these stories haven’t deterred other professional freeriders from transitioning into ski mountaineering and thriving. Chris Davenport was one of the first, with his 14ers project. Snowboarder Jeremy Jones followed with his Deeper, Further, Higher trilogy. And today, some of the biggest skiing heroes are Christina Lustenberger, Jérémie Heitz, and Jimmy Chin.

Enter Cody Townsend, a big, blond, lovable personality with more downhill ski talent than just about anyone on Earth. After reaching the stupefying limits of his freeride career in 2014—when he won “Powder” magazine’s coveted Line of The Year award for flashing an impossibly tight, aesthetic couloir in Alaska—he found himself at a crossroads, contemplating what lay ahead. In the throes of ski mountaineering’s new pop appeal, he discovered a book Chris Davenport co-authored, “50 Classic Ski Descents of North America,” celebrating some of this continent’s most underground self-powered feats on skis. Townsend, who was not then a ski mountaineer, announced he would repeat every line in the book and Here we are five years later, with Townsend, an ice-axe-wielding viral sensation and only four lines remaining on his daunting list.

The problem now is he’s backed himself into a corner, and what’s left is insane. University Peak has only been skied a handful of times, Mount Robson and the Comstock Couloir twice, and Saint Elias has a short, messy history that’s sent two to their graves. Meanwhile, Townsend is at the height of his powers, with more eyes on him than ever. There are already many dangerous cultural trappings within ski mountaineering, like one-up-manship and summit fever. In Townsend’s case, these kinds of psychic traps are compounded by the pressure of his livelihood—not to mention being the sport’s biggest sweetheart. People love him and want him to succeed; I’m one of them. I love the show.

Sure, like any star, his reinvention has sometimes been cringey to watch. There’s been self-congratulation, like when he praises his own triage of a rescue on Mount Joffre. Or, there was the nail-biting near-miss on Mount Saint Elias, in which his team skis down a close-out line by mistake and hikes back out only minutes before a planet-shaking wet slide tears down it. Throughout the series, Townsend also regularly professes ski-mountaineering techniques or philosophies right after learning them himself. But then again, he’s found a winning formula that’s built him one of the biggest followings in skiing. And, more to his credit, he has indeed climbed and skied almost every line he set out to. Plus, he’s made a reasonable effort to show his mistakes, whether he understands them in the moment or not.

On that note, fans of the series will have noticed a change recently. as he’s tackled the more complex lines on his checklist and wrestled more closely with death. In the Polar Star episode, for example, despite doing everything in perfect style and nailing a triumphant first descent, he narrowly misses being crushed by a random rockfall.

This is the handshake you make to ski these lines: much will be out of your control. As Townsend has run up against the edges of that contract, showy social-media vanity has all but disappeared from his episodes. Instead, he now reveals a tortured process of traveling for thousands of miles and days on end only to have to turn around, exhausted, as he tests the limits of his endurance at the tender age of 40. All for a project he may not enjoy as much as he once did.

Nonetheless, season five of “The Fifty” delivers a version of him operating at the top of his game. At this point, few could argue Townsend is anything less than a full-fledged ski mountaineer, and a good one at that. But if you know how confidence curves work, that is a terrible inflection point with four dangerous mountains left to go. Despite his success, there’s a risk of overconfidence, given the nature of the remaining descents. Townsend has skirted disaster enough times that the statistical truth of what’s ahead of him might be at odds with his expectations.

Still, there are differences between him and other ski-mountaineers. Most notably, he is one of the best skiers in the world. But that difference is also expressly what puts him at more risk. I’ve tried to ski Mount Robson twice and turned around each time because warming temperatures made it unsafe. That wasn’t easy for me, but it’ll be all the more difficult for him. If he chooses to walk in instead of using a helicopter, it takes at least two days to approach the mountain, let alone walk back out. The deeper you go, the more invested you feel. Like Saint Elias and University Peak, Robson has almost no beta available before you get there—you can take your best guess, but you find out the conditions once you arrive.

In the second Comstock Couloir episode, Greg Hill asks him if he would still be trying to get up it despite the fact it’s clagged in that day if it weren’t for the project. Townsend answers no, and it’s a perfect allegory for the entire élan of “The Fifty.” You’re in a bad place if the point is the objective, not the experience. Fate has stepped in to impress this fact on the very best. Not just Doug Coombs but also Andreas Fransson, and to name but a few.

In my correspondence with Townsend, he told me he would not die for this project, and I believe he believes that. But he was clear he was going to try to finish. That said, he’s given himself no specific time frame and might not even film the last few lines (which is hard to believe). For many of us in the audience, however, his most impressive feats have not been brazen descents but when he’s wrestled with tough decisions. Backing off of the Comstock twice was painful but brilliant. Bailing on Saint Elias was precisely right (though executed poorly). And his patience and perseverance on Split was perfect. A lot of times, adversity is just as compelling, even if what you need to overcome is yourself.

Ski mountaineering is about listening and taking what’s on offer when it’s on offer. If he tunes into that, Townsend can bring his audience on any adventure he wants. But some lines left to go in “The Fifty” only come into shape a handful of times a decade. The chances of parachuting in from afar and nailing the conditions are too slim to quantify. How many years does he want to spend leaving his family to travel for days and weeks to test his willingness to turn around? He has grown so much and has our community’s respect, but I’m worried he still has to navigate the biggest hazard ski mountaineers face. Not crevasses, rock falls, or avalanches, but believing there’s only one ending to his story. In reality, he can write it any way he wants.

Matt Coté is a writer and editor who’s spent nearly two decades continually mesmerized by British Columbia’s peaks and people.

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In 1991, a crusty climbing bum with a gap-toothed grin named John “Vermin” Sherman published the , introducing his open-ended V scale for grading. As practitioners pushed the outer limits of the sport, Sherman’s Hueco system soon replaced mathematician John Gill’s limited three-tiered system, in which B1 was equivalent to the top sport climbs, B2 was harder, and B3 had only one climber who had ever completed the route.

In the decades since, Sherman has said that “judging the quality or importance of a boulder problem based on a difficulty grade is bullshit.” While we admire Sherman’s insistence that the sheer beauty of a problem is its own reward, we’re nonetheless compelled by the way the sport has advanced since Hueco Tanks. Here is ���ϳԹ���’s timeline of the most impressive sends of the past quarter-century.

January 1996, Radja, V14

, a stout 27-year-old ex-competitive Swiss sport climber, was at the tail end of a summerlong tear ticking off the most complex boulder problems near his home when he came to Radja, in the Valais region of Switzerland. It took three days for Nicole to successfully send the world’s first V14, at a bouldering locale called Pierre à Grosse Branson, under the scrutinizing eye of a new video technology called DV tape.

October 2000, Dream Time, V15

In the four years since his Radja climb, Fred Nicole’s afro had been photographed everywhere, from South Africa to California. But it was back in Cresciano, Switzerland, where he’d complete the world’s first V15—a nagging problem Nicole first noticed in 1991 that took him an entire season to complete. Doing so indoctrinated scores to the growing sport. It also heralded other marquee V15s, like Markus Bock’s Gossip, in Germany, and Nicole’s own Black Rock SD and Monkey Wedding, in South Africa. Dream Time became so popular that the holds eventually wore bigger, downgrading the problem to V14.

November 2003, Byaku-dou/The Road to Heaven, V15/V16

It was midautumn when a spry five-foot-five Japanese champion climber named Dai Koyamada took up Nicole’s torch while developing V13s and V14s around his native Japan. When the 27-year-old eventually announced completion of a 22-move roof problem in Hourai, it marked not only Koyamada’s personal best, but also purportedly the sport’s. His proposed V16 grade went unchallenged until 2015, when fellow Japanese climber Motochika Nagao repeated the climb and called it V15. In the seven years that followed, a handful of other problems would tickle V16 without confirmation, most notably Daniel Woods’ 2010 The Game, in Colorado, and Paul Robinson’s 2010 Lucid Dreaming, in California.

May 2008, Pura Vida, V12/13

Austrian climber Babara Zangerl was only 16 when she first saw the moss-covered gneiss boulders of a developing area soon to be dubbed Magic Wood. Freshly cleaned, a problem called Pura Vida called to her but seemed impossible. Three years later, just days before her 20th birthday, Zangerl’s send of this strength-intensive line marked the hardest boulder problem achieved by a woman at the time. Eventually, Zangerl would injure her back and transition into sport climbing, but her completion of Pura Vida remains a standout benchmark in women’s bouldering.

August 2010, Automator, V13

Between 2004 and 2010, Angie Payne was the first female sender of 17 bouldering problems graded between V10 and V12. By this point, the budding multidisciplinarian (Payne is also an accomplished photographer) had already won three American Bouldering Series National Championships. During the hottest month of 2010, the Ohio-born Colorado transplant began leaving veterinary school each night to work to do a different kind of homework: After seven nights of attempts lit by headlamps and lanterns, Payne became the first female to send a consensus V13.

October 2010, Hypnotized Minds, V16

In spring of this year, a 21-year-old named Daniel Woods began working on a project in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. As a breakout pro, Woods’ intense schedule of climbing trips around the world allowed only two days on the serrated and striped boulder—it proved not enough time to complete it. Months later, he returned and finished the problem after an additional six days. Though , many suspected his grade was too low. Only Russian climber has managed it since. In 2016, Woods himself repeated and upgraded Hypnotized Minds to V16, stating he didn’t initially have enough reference. The second climb retroactively made it the world’s first confirmed V16.

November 2011, Terranova, V16

In 2011, a lean 18-year-old kid from the Czech Republic with an already long list of climbing accolades turned his attention to bouldering. , who started climbing when he was six, spent ten days sorting out the 12 moves comprising , in the Holstjen region of the Czech Republic. It was his first V16, and one of very few in the world. Ondra remains the only person to have completed it.

December 2011, Gioia, V15/16

Originally climbed by in 2008 and graded V15, this Italian line outside Varazze is an enduring controversy. Adam Ondra to send the problem, in 2011, when he upgraded Core’s grade to V16. In February 2014, Finnish powerhouse Nalle Hukkataival to do it. Hukkataival, nearly a decade Ondra’s senior and with an impressive résumé of first ascents, has since proposed that it is indeed a V15.

October 2012, Catharsis, V14

Tomoka Ogawa first started climbing at 22 and soon ditched the idea of graduate school to pursue her passion professionally. That same determination eventually led her to Catharsis in 2009—a V14 problem in Shiobara, Japan, opened up by Dai Koyamada and confirmed by Daniel Woods. Three years and countless hours after dedicating herself to the 15-move roof problem, Ogawa, at the tender age of 34, became —and only the third person ever to climb Catharsis.

January 2015, The Process, V16

Hailed as one of the scariest “highball” lines ever opened, Daniel Woods pieced together this problem (pictured above) after several days of preparation. The crux is an overhang near the top of the 50-foot boulder, and the route adds a terrifying third section to two already established and successive smaller climbs. Named for the focus it took, the Process remains unrepeated. It also sparked a period of strong V16 development, including Woods’ own Creature from the Black Lagoon, in Colorado, and Dai Koyamada’s low start to Story of Two Worlds, in Japan, signaling the growing efficiency of new techniques and training regimens.

March 2016, Horizon, V15

In December 2015, 14-year-old Ashima Shirashi was already the second woman to achieve V14 and rapidly emerging as the strongest female climber in the world. From her home in New York City, Shirashi traveled to Mount Hiei, Japan, after getting an invitation from Dai Koyamada, who wanted her to try a problem he opened in May of that year. Shirashi fell three times on the final move, and then had to go back to school. Four months later—during her spring break—Shirashi returned and nailed each of the 30 moves that originally took Koyamada three years to piece together. Shirashi became the second person ever to climb Horizon, as well as the first woman and youngest person .

October 2016, Burden of Dreams, V17

Born in Helsinki, Finland, Nalle Hukkataival proved himself as the most dedicated boulderer in history with this problem. In 2013, when a friend showed him the “unclimbable project” in Lappnor, outside Helsinki, Hukkataival became obsessed. The relatively short overhang looked like a blank wall, with barely a protrusion or crevice. For four years and more than 4,000 attempts, Hukkataival plugged away whenever conditions permitted—even flying home from other travels when weather was ideal. But it wasn’t until Daniel Woods pointed out an unused hold in 2016 that Hukkataival finally managed to put together . Like all unrepeated problems, it remains unconfirmed, but the community appears to have faith in its difficulty.

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Ever wonder why there are roughly 35 commercial heli-ski operators in North America but not a single one for mountain biking?

It comes down to a transportation issue: bikes have to be either disassembled and brought into the helicopter, limiting the number of passengers and ramping up the price per person, or slung underneath an empty second machine, an expensive effort that has a tendency to snap brake lines and other crucial components you want intact at the top of a 6,000-foot descent. Turns out the mountains known for ridiculous, steep skiing also offer ridiculous, steep mountain biking, far from crowds.

That’s why we’re excited about the new . Developed by a Powell River, British Columbia–based aviation company, the device holds up to six bikes: three per side, maximizing the value per seat (five in the back, one in the front, plus pilot—letting the outfitter get more out of each bird and lowering the cost per rider) and profoundly simplifying logistics.

“A lot of heli-ski operators were looking for something to do in the off-season,” says , president and general manager of Aero Design. Rekve’s company builds most of the cargo, or ski, baskets for helicopters in North America—200 machines currently use Aero basket fittings. The new bike rack can be swapped for a basket in less than a minute, using the same connections.

The rack’s not all that different from any tray-style rig you’d put on your car. “It’s one single-cam lever to take the bikes off,” says Rekve. There’s no lifting required; you just lean and pull. Any adult bike on the market will fit.

A single Aero rack weighs 65 pounds and costs about $4,739 if the helicopter already has the company's fittings, or $8,021 if it does not. Considering that a helicopter costs upwards of $2 million, it’s a small investment to unlock an entire summer of work for an otherwise dormant bird. Currently, the rack works only with Airbus AStar (AS350) models, which account for the majority of recreational machines in British Columbia. But Aero Design is working on a model for the Bell 407, another prolific mountain workhorse.

Other companies offer similar racks, but all use permanent mounts, meaning you can’t swap them for ski baskets in winter. And they aren’t certified in North America or Europe. Aero already has certification from Transport Canada and Europe, and a stamp from the FAA shouldn’t be far behind. American and overseas operators are already placing orders.

“Western Canada is going to be the hub for heli-biking,” Rekve says. The booming winter industry brings in $73 million per year—over the course of a few months—and operators are eager to expand into the other months of the year. Already, five British Columbia heli outfits have ordered the racks.

, for its part, has such faith in the new possibilities that it has applied for a recreational land tenure to build its own heli-accessed bike trails. The company eventually envisions a “multi-drop experience for the same day, and even a lodge.” The timeline will depend on if and when tenure is approved, but within the next couple years, there could be a series of new trails tracing obscure, hard-to-reach volcanic peaks into the loamy rainforest down to the pastoral valley bottom, with an average vertical drop of 6,500 feet.

Another six hours east, in Revelstoke, Arrow helicopters will launch its own bike drops this summer, offering a fixed price per person of $200 to $250 to access the similarly blistering descents of Mount Cartier and Joss Peak—lengthy, technical, multiuse trails that have long been popular with a small faction of local hike-a-bikers. There will even be dedicated daily departure times. And thanks to the rack, Revelstoke is getting a brand-new race: the heli-assisted Revelstoke 3-Day, or R3D. The race has yet to announce its trail, but it’ll likely be one of those two, hints race organizer Ted Morton.

“Two years ago, if we were to do this event,” explains Morton, “we’d be looking at long-lining 130 bikes over about three hours.” With two helicopters and four racks, now it’ll take less than half that time and half the money.

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