See You Tomorrow: The Disappearance of Snowboarder Marco Siffredi on Everest 1493053035, 9781493053032

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See You Tomorrow The Disappearance of Snowboarder Marco Siffredi on Everest

Jeremy Evans

Guilford, Connecticut

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200 Lanham, MD 20706 www.rowman.com Falcon and FalconGuides are registered trademarks and Make Adventure Your Story is a trademark of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK Copyright © 2021 Jeremy Evans All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Evans, Jeremy, 1977- author. Title: See you tomorrow : the disappearance of snowboarder Marco Siffredi on Everest / Jeremy Evans. Description: Guilford, Connecticut : FalconGuides, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Marco Siffredi was the first person to snowboard Mount Everest in 2001 and was regarded by many as the world’s best snowboarder. Jeremy Evans explores the 23-year-old’s mysterious disappearance as he descended Everest”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020052108 (print) | LCCN 2020052109 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493053032 (cloth) | ISBN 9781493053049 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Siffredi, Marco, 1979-2002. | Mountaineering accidents—Everest, Mount (China and Nepal) | Snowboarders—France—Biography. Classification: LCC GV857.S57 E85 2021 (print) | LCC GV857.S57 (ebook) | DDC 796.93092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052108 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052109 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992. The author and The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. assume no liability for accidents happening to, or injuries sustained by, readers who engage in the activities described in this book.

To my parents, Mike and Jan, who taught me right and wrong and encouraged adventure And to Philippe and Michele Siffredi and parents everywhere who lost a child too soon

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Chapter 1: Death Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 Chapter 2: Pimp Poulet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Chapter 3: Shooting Star . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Chapter 4: Base Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter 5: Making History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Chapter 6: The Waiting Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Chapter 7: Himalaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Chapter 8: Rainbow Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Chapter 9: Return to Everest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Chapter 10: The Decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

193 201 205 207

Introduction

But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. . . . He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live. Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom. Only a person who risks is free. —William Arthur Ward On September 8, 2002, a twenty-three-year-old snowboarder mysteriously disappeared on the north face of Mount Everest. His name was Marco Siffredi. The gap-toothed son of a mountain guide from Chamonix, France, Marco stumbled onto the summit at about 2:00 p.m. after twelve hours of climbing through waist-deep snow. He spent an hour there in relatively calm, comfortable weather. When his climbing Sherpa and friend Phurba Tashi greeted him at the top, Marco was hunched over and could only speak in fragments. Frustrated at the difficult conditions and at his exhausted state, he told Phurba: “Tired . . . tired. Too much snow. Too much climbing.” Phurba was concerned about his friend. The previous year, Marco had reached the summit in four hours from high camp. He climbed at the pace of Phurba and other fast-climbing Sherpas, the ethnic group that lives in the Himalaya of Nepal and Tibet and is renowned for its strength and stamina at high altitude. But on this day, Phurba noticed this was a different version of Marco, fewer smiles and more grimaces, less relaxed and more focused. Dressed in a yellow down suit, Marco scanned the horizon and surveyed the vast brown expanse of the Tibetan plateau, ten thousand feet beneath him. His spirits lifted somewhat, and a light wind pushed colorful prayer flags into Nepal. It was the same vantage point as the vii

Introduction

previous year, when Marco had become the first person to make a continuous snowboard descent from the world’s tallest mountain. His route that year was the Norton Couloir (or Great Couloir), a wide cleft that slices through a limestone wall on the 29,032-foot peak’s north face. As impressive as his 2001 descent was, his descent route in 2002 was much more serious: the Hornbein Couloir. Named after Tom Hornbein, who, in 1963 with partner Willi Unsoeld, was part of the first American team to summit Mount Everest, the Hornbein Couloir is unrelentingly steep, difficult to access, and has a high failure rate. By Everest climbing standards, the route remains ignored by commercial expeditions that focus on the two most popular routes: the Northeast Ridge in Tibet and the South Col in Nepal. Of the mountain’s more than ten thousand ascents since New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were the first to summit in 1953, only eleven have been via the Hornbein, the last being in 1991. An Everest ascent by any route is an accomplishment, but a Hornbein ascent is a rare feat only a few climbers worldwide possess. Marco was flirting with a great unknown when he intended to snowboard the Hornbein. Everest historians considered it a wild and dangerous human act, no different than landing on the moon or exploring the Marianas Trench. Yet, they were intrigued by his objective. It was a gauntlet that, if conquered, would reveal what is humanly possible. In 2002 few skiers or snowboarders had the stones to consider such an act, let alone attempt it, but if anybody could do it, it would be Marco Siffredi. Like Mozart, another child prodigy, Marco was special. He was so talented, his riding style so smooth, his trajectory of success so unparalleled, it was as if a divine power put him on Earth for one reason: to snowboard. By 2001, just six years after learning how to snowboard, he was considered the world’s best by those who would know, but outside his home valley, not many people knew him. He separated himself by climbing and snowboarding steep faces in the Alps, and then expanded his objectives to the Himalaya and the Andes. He didn’t distinguish himself by making the safest decisions, but every decision was a calculated one. Marco never climbed without understanding and accepting what was at stake. Risks were considered, but so were the rewards. viii

Introduction

His father, Philippe, admired Marco’s ambition but never quite understood his son’s fascination with the impossible. Philippe routinely quizzed Marco for an explanation. The most accurate one he received remains in his father’s basement workshop. Before leaving for Everest in 2002, Marco wrote his credo on a piece of scrap wood that’s attached to a concrete wall. In ballpoint blue pen (translated into English), he penned: “The more you think, the less you move forward.” Some pleaded with Marco to be more patient with his Everest plans, citing his age as a reason to hold off until he was older and more experienced. In the book Marco Siffredi: Dernier Everest, he responded: “If we don’t do stuff that is a bit crazy at 20, we’re not going to start at 50.” Marco’s biting honesty and antagonistic tendencies were reflective of his convictions and daring nature, but not his naïveté. For an athlete to descend the Hornbein Couloir, they must be an excellent skier or snowboarder, they must be an excellent high-altitude mountaineer, and they must have the proper mental wiring. The blending of these skills seems like an implied fusion of sorts, but they couldn’t be more disparate. The best high-altitude climbers often can’t snowboard or ski steep faces, and the best snowboarders and skiers often can’t climb at high altitude. Marco, though, had the requisite combination. But more than that, an athlete would need bravado. Lots of bravado. Marco had that too. The Hornbein Couloir was Marco’s objective the year before in May of 2001, but scant snow coverage in the spring convinced him to attempt another route. Descending the Norton Couloir was an important achievement in the progression of the sport. The feat elicited showers of praise from the outdoor community, but it didn’t satisfy him. Despite the setback he returned the following year determined to etch his name into the annals of Everest history. He figured there would be more favorable snow conditions in September (post-monsoon) than May (pre-monsoon). Sixteen months later, he was rewarded for his patience with sublime conditions on Everest’s north face. As Marco stood on the summit, his energy slowly returned. Clouds billowed in the late afternoon, and the snow was as stable as one could have hoped. He may have trudged through waist-deep snow and it may have taken a difficult twelve hours for him to reach the summit from ix

Introduction

high camp, but Marco stared at an endless powder field that was set up for success. As is common during the transition between the monsoon and post-monsoon seasons, it had snowed daily for weeks, covering the mountain with deep snow that is ideal for snowboarding but increases the risk of avalanches. It hadn’t snowed at all, however, in the previous twenty-four hours, which allowed earlier avalanches to wipe the north face’s most unstable snow and reduce the avalanche threat to the lowest possible level for a descent of this magnitude. There is a litany of things that can go wrong on an Everest summit day, but looking back, there were no storms that day, there were no signs of avalanches, and there were no crevasses on the section of the mountain where Marco’s tracks ended. In other words, if there was a day to descend the Hornbein Couloir on a snowboard, September 8, 2002, was the one, which makes what happened that day all the more confusing. Before making a series of turns from the summit, still high above the entrance to the Hornbein, he spoke with Phurba. Assessing Marco’s physical condition, Phurba urged him to descend via the Northeast Ridge route and, for the second straight year, abandon his Hornbein attempt. Marco declined Phurba’s suggestion and made his final adjustments. In the mountains, there is a fine line between hubris and confidence. Marco never lacked confidence. His convictions and beliefs were peculiar for an athlete of his caliber. He didn’t desire sponsors, he rarely participated in competitions, and rarer still did he allow photographers to document what he did in the mountains. To him, snowboarding was about freedom and purity. He viewed self-aggrandizement as poisonous and distracting. For most of his career, it was just him and a few friends spending time together in the mountains. By the time he climbed Everest in 2001, he had notched several first descents around Chamonix, some of which have never been repeated. He progressed to bigger faces in the Andes and Himalaya, including a descent of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixthhighest peak at 26,906 feet. He climbed Shishapangma, the fourteenthhighest peak in the world at 26,289 feet, with the intention of snowboarding down but chose not to as he deemed the conditions too dangerous. This was at an age before most people graduate college. Marco may have been physically weaker on summit day in 2002 than in 2001, but he had x

Introduction

accumulated extensive high-altitude experience and had ridden steeper, more technical lines and on considerably worse ground in the Alps than what he encountered on Everest in 2002. He had always exercised good judgment and turned around before on big mountains, although his family and friends admit he seemed more serious in the weeks leading up to his 2002 Everest trip. Nevertheless, he would have to lean on mental fortitude and his previous experiences to survive the Hornbein, which narrows to barely more than shoulder width at its uppermost shank. Depending on conditions, a sixty-foot cliff above twenty-eight thousand feet is the route’s technical crux and guards it from Everest’s summit pyramid during ascents. For Marco, it guarded his entrance into the couloir. The mere mention of this cliff section rattles climbers. It’s a point of no return on the ascent because, once climbed, there is no safe way to descend. For Marco, who would have approached the cliff from above, it was a gate he’d have to unlock to succeed—assuming he found the entrance. If he was fortunate, monsoon snow would have filled in parts of the cliff area and created a series of ramps that would lead him into the couloir proper. If not, he would have to unstrap from his snowboard and downclimb, or set up a rappel, to descend. If he were to make a technical mistake, it would most likely be in this section. To complete the descent, Marco would ride through the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs, two distinct features that slice through Everest’s north face and link its summit with the Central Rongbuk Glacier, which slithers toward the brown Tibetan plateau. The slopes directly beneath the summit measure only 30 degrees in steepness, barely that of an advanced slope at a ski resort. But the Hornbein itself averages 47 degrees over its eighteen-hundred-foot vertical drop and tilts to about 60 degrees near its notorious cliff area. Once Marco exited the Hornbein he would have to negotiate a 45-degree snowfield before entering the Japanese Couloir, the lower of the two clefts and one that presents its own set of challenges. The more avalanche-prone gully starts out manageable enough before steepening in sections to nearly 70 degrees, an angle that even Marco would have to be at his best to descend. The entire descent measures nearly two vertical miles of exposed terrain. A fall anywhere along the way would result in almost certain death, yet it was exactly this type of xi

Introduction

commitment that attracted Marco to the route in the first place. It’s also why the Hornbein/Japanese Couloir route remains the world’s ultimate ski or snowboard descent line, and nobody has been there since Marco. Once safely at the bottom of the Japanese Couloir, Marco would meet a Tibetan yak herder who was tending a tent on the upper reaches of the Central Rongbuk Glacier at 19,200 feet. He would spend the night at the camp, descend the gently sloping glacier the following morning, and return to base camp that afternoon. From the summit to the glacier camp, Marco figured it would take about two hours to reach the yak man waiting for him. It was a tight schedule considering his late afternoon start, but if everything went as planned, Marco would be sipping tea by sunset and possess more ammunition to silence his critics. While he was revered by many in France, especially the younger crowd, he hadn’t earned the complete respect of his hometown’s hardcore climbing guides, who trumpeted style, ethic, and respect as much as achievement. Many guides feel it is their job to regulate routes and tell others what they should or should not do, whether asked or not. Back home in Chamonix, “he’d tell the guides ‘Fuck you’ in the cable car and do it right in front of their clients,” said René Robert, who chronicled Marco’s career and was one of the few Marco allowed to photograph him. “Marco didn’t care. The guides were taken aback by him. They didn’t like him, and they didn’t respect his methods.” Marco was publicly amused by some of the guides’ disdain, but privately it bothered him. Many climbers and guides in Chamonix are adored: streets, parking garages, businesses, and roundabouts are named after famous alpinists. The town’s most photographed piece of art is a mural of climbing guides adjacent to the town’s principal walking path. Regardless of country affiliation, Chamonix is where achievement is lauded and where ego is powerful, omnipresent, and celebrated. But here was Marco, one of Chamonix’s native sons and the first Chamoniard to climb Mount Everest, the first person to snowboard routes that guides would struggle to climb, and some viewed him as a leper. He didn’t care about celebrity status, but acknowledgment and respect mattered to him. “Marco was highly respected by most everyone, but not at first,” said Chamonix resident Craig Calonica, a former US Ski Team member who xii

Introduction

attempted to ski Everest three times in the 1990s. “He was a big climber, obviously an excellent snowboarder, and had the full Chamonix spirit. But there were some people here who were saying he was young and foolish and over his head. I know the mentality of the guides and some of them have big egos. All of a sudden here is this teenager going out there and doing stuff that they never would even consider doing, so they are going to feel threatened and they are going to give him a bad reputation. That’s typical here. Chamonix is an egotistical place, but Marco overcame that. By the end, everyone respected him. They had no choice.” Even his staunchest critics couldn’t ignore a successful ski or snowboard descent of the Hornbein, which is considered the most stylistic and daring feat imaginable, and on the biggest stage. American Stephen Koch, who attempted to snowboard the Hornbein a year after Marco in 2003, called the route “the most beautiful line in the world, the perfect line.” American Jeremy Jones, who is considered the best big mountain snowboarder in the world, said: “I understand the lure of the line he disappeared on. Anybody who is serious about mountains knows that it is the dream line . . . that thing needs to be ridden.” Marco was drawn to the route for similar reasons. If successful, he hinted that the Hornbein Couloir could be his last major objective. Before leaving for Everest in 2002, he told a friend that maybe he would settle down after he got back. Maybe it was time to marry his longtime girlfriend, Stephanie. Maybe it was time to father their first child and raise a family in the Alps and stop terrorizing his mother with his antics (he was a mama’s boy). All that was in the future. On September 8, 2002, Marco was ready to snowboard. Shivering in his yellow down suit, he knew the temperature had dropped, and he had to get going. At 3:15 p.m., Marco checked that his bindings were secure and ratcheted the straps tighter. Phurba exchanged an empty oxygen bottle with a full one. Three Sherpas were with him on the summit that day, and all of them wished him luck and waved goodbye. Marco started down and made an arcing toe-side turn that aimed his snowboard toward where he thought led to the top of the Hornbein Couloir, then he disappeared into the void. Nineteen years later, nobody has seen Marco since. xiii

Introduction

New Zealand’s Russell Brice, one of the most experienced Everest expedition leaders, spent six years searching for Marco and gathering clues about his disappearance. Marco’s 2001 Mount Everest snowboard descent was as a member of Brice’s expedition. Besides a series of snowboard tracks that ended at 28,125 feet, slightly above and to the east of the cliff guarding the Hornbein Couloir from its summit pyramid, there are few clues to work with. Did he stop on the descent, rest, and succumb to exposure? Did an avalanche sweep him away to his death? Did he fall into a crevasse? Did he fail to safely negotiate the cliff at the top of the Hornbein? Did he grow concerned about his physical state, never encounter the cliff, and fall while traversing toward his descent route from 2001? Or, as some believe, did he succeed and slip into society and has been living a reclusive existence in rural Tibet? Since Marco’s disappearance in 2002, six climbing parties have attempted the Hornbein Couloir. None were successful or reached the location of Marco’s final tracks (two of the teams intended to ski or snowboard the route). Everest historians remain baffled by his disappearance, and most consider it the mountain’s greatest mystery since George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared in 1924. Mallory’s body was found in 1999 on the north face; Irvine’s body remains undiscovered. Many people wonder if Mallory and Irvine were the first to climb Everest, nearly three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were credited with the first ascent in 1953. “On a mountain like K2 and in the rest of the Himalaya, disappearance is the No. 1 cause of death,” said Alan Arnette, an Everest journalist who’s written about the mountain for Outside magazine. “But on Everest, disappearance isn’t a leading cause of death. Out of the 295 people who have died on Everest, there are ten climbers we don’t have any idea where they are, but most of those are from the pre-2000 era. There are plenty of bodies left up there where we have no idea exactly what happened except that they died, but post-2000, with all the people on the mountain and all the attention it receives and all the technology out there now, it’s rare for a body to have never been found on Everest.”

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Introduction

Tom Hornbein, now in his nineties and living in Estes Park, Colorado, called Marco’s story a “fascinating mystery” that he would like to see solved. Hornbein sees a bit of his younger self in Marco, a rebel soul whose compass led him in a direction many dream but never dare to venture. During the 1963 American Everest Expedition, Hornbein challenged team members and was aggressive in making a first ascent of the West Ridge. Hornbein and his partner Unsoeld dared themselves to step into a great unknown, not repeat a route that had already been climbed. Hornbein’s doggedness led to a new route on Everest being established and the discovery of a couloir that was named in his honor. Had Hornbein and Unsoeld not found the couloir that led to the summit pyramid, they likely would have disappeared and perished on the north face. They only knew the couloir existed from a 1950s Indian Air Force photograph. And even if they found the couloir, they had no idea where it led or if they’d be walking into a trap. That’s the commitment required to enter a great unknown. “[Like Marco], when we were there, we were just a bunch of young guys out for an adventure,” Hornbein said. “We were just focused on seeing what we could accomplish. That’s it. That is no different than what hundreds of climbers still do all over the world. But since it happened on the fanciest stage, Everest, people react differently.” Mountains can be callous and mean, but for the Siffredi family that consists of Marco’s father Philippe, his mother Michele, and sisters Shooty and Valerie, mountains are executioners who gouge deep wounds and leave behind nasty scars. When Marco was eighteen months old his older brother, Pierre, died in an avalanche in the Aiguille Rouge outside Chamonix. Throughout time mountains have proven to be indiscriminate, not caring how strong or weak a person is, or how loved or respected they are. “We are a religious family, but once Marco was gone, I told myself there is no God,” said Marco’s oldest sister, Valerie. “I told myself that it’s not possible for there to be a God. If there is one, then God is not good. No God would take Marco away, not after what happened with Pierre. Both of my parents’ sons were taken by the mountains, both of my

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Introduction

brothers were taken by the mountains. The mountains are not fair. There is no closure, there is only pain. My mother is destroyed. My father is destroyed. What parent wouldn’t want to know where their son’s body is? My parents still want to know what happened to Marco.”

xvi

Chapter One

Death Valley

People die. Alpine climbers die. It is part of the game. However, we don’t shoot with the same dice our predecessors used. The equation is simple: as technological and psychological advances increase, the danger and difficulty of the routes must be raised as well to maintain an equivalent human experience. We are not satisfied by repeating what others have done. The risk young alpine climbers take today are justifiable in order to make the artistic statements of age. Don’t try to hold us back. —Mark Twight in Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber The sheets pulled tight against his chin, Marco listened intently as his mother read him his favorite bedtime story, The Little Prince. Outside his bedroom, the moon glowed gray as the silhouette of the snow-covered French Alps colored an otherwise inky sky. Many nights during Marco’s childhood were spent like this: his mother Michele reading stories to him as his bright blue eyes the size of marbles bounced back and forth between his mother’s lips and a window that revealed the world outside. As Marco grew older, he never grew tired of The Little Prince. He often took a copy of the book when he climbed and kept it in his tent for nighttime readings. “The story is beautiful, philosophical and so simple,” said Marco’s oldest sister, Valerie. 1

See You Tomorrow

The famous children’s book, written by French author/pilot Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, has sold more than two hundred million copies since its release in 1943. The story is about a young boy who leaves his planet and the thing he loves most, a rose. Despite the love for his rose, which he believes is the only rose in existence, the protagonist embarks on an adventure to other planets. Visiting his last planet, Earth, the Little Prince meets the story’s narrator, a pilot whose plane crashed in the African desert. The Little Prince proceeds to tell him what he’s learned so far on his journey. He’s realized that no matter the planet, adults are a sad species, and he discovers along the way that there are other roses in the galaxy. “People where you live grow five thousand roses in one garden, yet they don’t find what they’re looking for,” the Little Prince tells the pilot. “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.” The Little Prince further explains to the pilot that adults are the real problems in society. While they don’t understand the source of their sadness, the Little Prince knows it’s because they’ve eschewed the creativity, imagination, and curiosity of youth. For some reason, adults are convinced that kids are silly and thus blindly continue to embrace the ugliness of adulthood and discount the beauty of childhood. The Little Prince pities adults, but since they are oblivious to what ails them, he’s helpless to cure them. On his eighth day in the desert, the Little Prince is bitten by a poisonous snake and notifies the pilot that he must leave. The bite has changed the Little Prince, although the reader isn’t quite sure how. After an emotional final dialogue between the pilot and the Little Prince, whose naïveté about the evils of the world clouds the reality of what’s about to happen to him, the Little Prince disappears and the story ends. As with most fables, figurative elements suggest different outcomes. Some believe he returned to his rose and his home planet and became a wise and cultured man; some believe he committed suicide because he couldn’t handle the strain of becoming an adult; and some believe he had to die because childhood innocence and the simple love of a rose would be defeated by the poisonous bite of adulthood.

2

Death Valley

Whatever one’s interpretation, Marco loved the story. He told his mother he would like to look like the Little Prince, even be like him. Michele, a secretary and ski instructor, already knew her son looked like the Little Prince, who had a mop of golden hair. She knew he acted like him, innocent and excitable, observant and discerning. But what she didn’t know was her son’s life on this planet also wouldn’t last long. Like the Little Prince, Marco was a shooting star, here to shine brightly and vanish quickly, no goodbyes. Had Michele known her son’s fate, perhaps she wouldn’t have read him the story. No, that isn’t true. Michele loved reading stories to Marco, especially that one. It made him smile, made him ponder life, and made him dream. No mother would deprive a child of that, although the story’s ending often made them cry. After he established himself as a snowboarder who flirted with dangerous, steep faces on big mountains, Marco told his father, “[Papa], if I have an accident, no one will come looking for me unless I fall to the bottom.” Even if spoken flippantly and on a teenager’s dim level, it’s a pity to expect one’s exit to be a lonely one; to spare one’s elders a chance to say goodbye is sad, but to die alone is misery. If Michele could have spoken to her son during his last moments on Mount Everest in 2002— just as she was there to speak to him during his first moments on Earth in 1979—one could imagine their dialogue being similar to the final one between the pilot and the Little Prince. When it’s clear the Little Prince is suffering from the snake bite, the end of the story unfolds: Little Prince: It’ll look as if I’m suffering. It’ll look a little as if I’m dying. It’ll look that way. Don’t come to see that; it’s not worth the trouble. Pilot: I won’t leave you. Little Prince: You were wrong to come. You’ll suffer. I’ll look as if I’m dead, and that won’t be true . . . Pilot: I said nothing. Little Prince: You understand. It’s too far. I can’t take this body with me. It’s too heavy. Pilot: I said nothing.

3

See You Tomorrow

Little Prince: But it’ll be like an old abandoned shell. There’s nothing sad about an old shell . . . Pilot: I said nothing. . . . He was a little disheartened now. But he made one more effort. Little Prince: It’ll be nice, you know. I’ll be looking at the stars, too. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out water for me to drink . . . Pilot: I said nothing. And he, too, said nothing, because he was weeping . . . Little Prince: Here’s the place. Let me go alone. Pilot: And then he sat down because he was frightened. Then he said: Little Prince: You know . . . my flower . . . I am responsible for her. And she’s so weak! And so naïve. She has four ridiculous thorns to defend her against the world. Pilot: I sat down, too, because I was unable to stand any longer. He said, “There. . . . That’s all.” He hesitated a little longer, then he stood up. He took a step. I couldn’t move. . . . There had been nothing but a yellow flash close to his ankle. He remained motionless for an instant. He didn’t cry out. He fell gently, the way a tree falls. There wasn’t even a sound. . . . Now I’m somewhat consoled. . . . But I know he did get back to his planet because at daybreak I didn’t find his body. The mystery of Marco Siffredi may end on Mount Everest, but it begins in Chamonix in an unlikely place: a cemetery pressed against a waterfall-laced hillside in the shadow of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. After the 15,781-foot peak was first climbed in 1786 by a crystal hunter and a doctor, deaths began accumulating in the Alps and the bodies had to be buried somewhere. Cemeteries typically display lush, manicured grounds with tidy rows of gravestones decorated with flowers. They are designed to be an attractive resting place for an ugly reality: Death is tragic but part of life. Chamonix’s cemetery, it seems, can’t produce such an orderly and polished layout because the bodies pile up so fast. This is where tragedy and beauty intersect and produce an ode 4

Death Valley

to another reality: Death is tragic but, no matter how brief one’s years are, living without a purpose is the greatest tragedy of all. Adorned with ice axes, skis, and climbing ropes, the gravestones and their inscriptions are more eulogy than elegy. They are glazed with an intense pride that permeates a place that is considered the birthplace of mountaineering. The inscriptions list the accomplishments of the deceased: the mountain they died on, the route they died on, the glacier they died on. The inscriptions state if they were an official mountain guide or an aspiring guide. Some deceased “explored” or “conquered” mountains, as if the death was the result of a gladiatorial contest that, one day, became the climber’s last. Some families couldn’t quite come to grips with their sons’ deaths and emphasized they were “now with the mountain” or “no longer with us.” Such euphemistic language masquerades the truth, but what can’t be disguised are the ages. Many deceased were buried in their twenties and thirties; some were teenagers. No matter their age, the mountains were their preferred dance partners. American author and climber Mark Twight recounted a conversation in his book Kiss or Kill that he had with a mother from Sweden whose daughter was killed while skiing in Chamonix. She told Twight, “In Sweden, you rarely see a headstone for someone under 40. What kind of sick place is this?” Mountains are beautiful and dangerous, but in Chamonix part of the reason they are beautiful is because they are dangerous. Those buried in its cemetery aren’t just mourned and remembered; they are celebrated. Death is accepted, tolerated by some and glorified by others, and is part of the deal there when a person commits to a life in the mountains. If man questions too much, nature will remind man of their handshake agreement where the consequences were clearly outlined. There is no reneging on such arrangements, thus mountains and peril are forever intertwined and ingrained into the residents’ consciousness. Some speculate that after dealing with all the mangled corpses and bloodstains on glaciers, the townspeople suffer from a sort of low-level post-traumatic stress disorder. “People are numb here,” said Craig Calonica, who’s lived in Chamonix for three decades. “To talk about the deaths and what happens here is painful, and nobody wants to hurt like that. It’s how they cope, by not talking about it.” 5

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The entrance to the cemetery is marked by two stone pillars and a black wrought-iron gate. Baskets of geraniums hang near the rectangular and square-cut granite blocks. One of the first headstones is that of Maurice Herzog, a former Chamonix mayor who was part of the first team to summit a major peak in the Himalaya (Annapurna in 1950). Herzog, who died in 2012 at the age of ninety-three, went climbing in the Chamonix area for the first time as a college student. In 1952 he wrote an article in the New York Times and described the feeling of climbing in this way: “I believe what I felt that day closely resembles what we call happiness.” Next to Herzog’s gravestone is that of Edward Whymper, a recalcitrant Englishman who is famous for being the first to climb the Matterhorn in 1865 in nearby Switzerland. Whymper accumulated other important first ascents in 1864 and 1865, including the scaling of 13,523-foot Aiguille Verte in the Mont Blanc massif. One author called the “Green Needle” the most beautiful peak in the Alps, and it makes a strong argument with its smooth, rounded, icy summit that becomes a complex puzzle of steep chutes and serrated ridges that stretch toward cracked glaciers below. Chamonix guides didn’t like that Whymper, a foreigner, was the first to climb what they considered their mountain. Then the guides really didn’t like it 135 years later when Marco Siffredi’s snowboard descent of the Aiguille Verte’s Nant Blanc route cemented his status as more than a young punk that disrespected them around town. (Whymper died in 1911 at the age of seventy-one after falling ill in a Chamonix hotel.) Near the gravestones for Herzog and Whymper, on an outer stone wall, is a display of rectangular marble and granite plaques. It’s as if the cemetery has no more space to memorialize the dead or missing climbers unless it digs into the forested hillsides tilting toward Mont Blanc, so a makeshift memorial wall was created. On the top row of this collection of plaques is a peppered granite stone with garnet-colored cursive lettering that states: Marco Siffredi, 23ans, Le 8 septiembre sa trace disaprait en le summet de l’Everest. Lors de la descente du couloirs Hornbein en snowboard. “See you Tomorrow” 6

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There is a picture of Marco in the upper right-hand corner of the plaque: yellow-collared jacket, blond hair, signature gap-toothed grin, and head cocked slightly. He looks serious and contemplative as if he knew his fate and was resigned to it. His eyes move beyond Herzog’s and Whymper’s gravestones and toward Pierre’s reddish gravestone, positioned twenty yards away below a concrete wall. As he stares toward the final resting place of the brother he never knew, Marco’s expression is one of contentment and acceptance. If Marco’s blue eyes were filled with regret and in search of an accomplice, they would shift downward toward a lower row of plaques where there is a memorial for Jean-Marc Boivin, whose death-defying stunts inspired Marco and an entire generation of Chamonix youth. “I hate this place,” said journalist and skier Laurent Molitor, who wrote about Marco’s life. “I hate coming here. It smells of death. My friends have died in these mountains, some were found, and some weren’t. In the cemetery nobody ever dies because they are with the mountain. It’s like families in Nepal, in the Khumbu. You can’t meet a family who hasn’t had a family member die on Everest or in the mountains. It’s the same in Chamonix. Every family in Chamonix has a brother or a son or a dad, someone, that’s died in the mountains. The difference is that people in Nepal are poor and they climb because it’s a job. They survive by helping others climb mountains, they climb for their families. In Chamonix, death is sport.” Nobody walked a finer line between living life and tempting death than Boivin, who was Marco’s childhood hero and a veritable star in France for his daring feats that covered a range of athletic pursuits. In 1988, Boivin was the first to paraglide from the summit of Mount Everest. Upon returning, he was featured in films and books and mentioned he would like to return to ski a direct line on Everest’s north face that was beautiful and daring: the Hornbein Couloir. Marco couldn’t have known it, but his fateful seed was planted. Marco Siffredi was born on May 22, 1979, in a hospital less than a mile from the town cemetery. His parents, Michele and Philippe, were descendants of mountain-raised families in the Alps. Michele was born 7

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in Chamonix to relatively wealthy parents who inherited a sprawling property south of town in the Les Barrats neighborhood. She was a good student and progressed to college after high school. Philippe grew up in a more hardscrabble Franco-Swiss family near St. Gervais, fifteen miles away from Chamonix in a wide, verdant valley crisscrossed by farms in the shadow of Mont Blanc. Philippe’s father, Marco’s grandfather, worked as a mountain guide and introduced mountains to his son, who also became a guide. Philippe and Michele met in the late 1950s when they attended college in St. Gervais, down-valley from Chamonix. Philippe was attracted to Michele’s athletic build, vibrant smile, and warm, bubbly personality. To a man who was uncertain of his direction in life, Michele instilled in him a confidence assuring him that, whatever path he chose, he would be okay as long as Michele was with him. The two fell in love and moved to Paris where Philippe trained under the most famous hairdresser in France. His discovered his professional calling was cutting hair, not climbing mountains, and eventually was named the best hairdresser in France. Philippe was a guide but not with Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix Mont-Blanc, the oldest guiding company in the world and the most difficult with which to earn official guide status. Not only do aspiring Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix Mont-Blanc guides need to pass numerous tests and endure years of apprenticeship, they also must have been born in Chamonix. Besides several honorary members, this has been the case since the company formed in 1821. The mission of the company has been to create an opportunity for guides to earn money but also use fees to create an emergency fund for accidents involving guides. Of the thousands of deaths or disappearances that have occurred in the mountains surrounding Chamonix, guides have been involved in nearly one hundred of them. As much as Philippe loved the mountains and could have earned a living from guiding, his father persuaded him to pursue a safer, more reliable profession. Mont Blanc is the most heavily guided climb in Chamonix and the consistent source of income for local guides. It also happens to be the world’s deadliest mountain. Since physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard and crystal collector Jacques Balmat first climbed Mont Blanc in 1786, there 8

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have been an estimated eight thousand fatalities on the massif (about twenty-five times more than Everest), which includes the ice-covered summit and its assortment of satellite aiguilles or “needles.” Each year, about one hundred people die on the massif. The first death occurred in 1820 when five guides were caught in an avalanche. Two guides survived and the other three disappeared; their bodies were discovered more than four decades later at the bottom of a glacier. In response, the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix Mont-Blanc was established. Soon, other guiding companies formed in the area and a generation of mountain guides was born. Philippe Siffredi was a descendant of this spawning generation. Mont Blanc’s routes aren’t necessarily any more dangerous than other glaciated peaks, but the volume of climbers on its routes, many of whom are novices, compromises everyone’s safety. (In 2017, it was estimated that between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand people attempted Mont Blanc, and it’s not uncommon on a summer’s day to share the summit with two hundred other climbers.) Philippe’s father scoffed at the idea of having his son thrust into harm’s way to usher an otherwise incapable person to the top of Mont Blanc or other peaks. His father further derided the industry when he argued clients don’t always pay when they should and explained to his son that the guiding season is short, volatile, and not well-paying. He encouraged Philippe to find a more promising profession. As much as he loved mountains and the idea of making a living from guiding, Philippe was neither disappointed nor dejected at his father’s advice. He respected his father’s opinion and, about the time that he met Michele, had developed a serious interest in cutting hair. Good with his hands, he also had a knack for carpentry. Even today, in his seventies, he builds furniture for family and friends in his basement workshop. Philippe found his life’s calling as a hair stylist and carpenter, and both professions kept him satisfied and busy. Philippe vowed that, if he ever had children, he would not shield them from the mountains or dissuade them from pursuing their own calling. He couldn’t have known that he would have two sons that would test that vow. But until that moment came, Philippe cut hair and framed real estate projects, two professions 9

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that generated significant business in the rapidly growing resort town of Chamonix. Fifty miles from Geneva, Switzerland, Chamonix first attracted tourists in 1741 when Englishmen Richard Pococke and William Windham found what they called the “Chamouny” valley. The beacon that led to their discovery was Mont Blanc, which they saw rising above the azure waters of Lake Geneva. Pococke and Windham were enthusiastic travelers who had been to the Middle East and decided to explore glaciers of the Alps. Their visit to the remote valley was considered the first by outsiders for recreational purposes. They encountered a population of farmers whose lone industry was the harvesting of oats and rye. Pococke and Windham visited numerous glaciers during the summer of 1741, when glaciers pressed against the valley floor, but it was their visit to Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) that sparked a tourism boom. Impressions of their visit were published in journals and piqued the interest of other travelers. In the decades between then and when the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix Mont-Blanc was formed in 1821, hotels were built to accommodate several thousand visitors each year. It was also during the 1800s when the valley’s economic engine turned from farming to outdoor recreation. Buoyed by the success of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix Mont-Blanc, a popular trek was through pine forests to the Mer de Glace, which twists five miles from the hulking mass of Mont Blanc and forms the largest glacier in France. Guides led all types of tourists, from aspiring climbers to Victorian women wearing dresses and high heels, over glacial crevasses and introduced them to an alpine world. Europeans were inspired by images of people in formal attire frolicking on a glacier with a backdrop that remains one of the most impressive mountain amphitheaters on Earth. The images displayed this beauty, but more than that, they convinced the masses that anybody could access this landscape, when before it required years of apprenticeship. Not only did guides lead clients to the summit of Mont Blanc and Mer de Glace, they escorted them to nearby glaciers and other lesser peaks, then ushered them back to town where they dined on foie gras and drank wine. By 1860, a road capable of handling traffic connected 10

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Geneva to Chamonix, and five years after that every major peak in the valley had been climbed. There was no shortage of people drawn to this verdant narrow canyon split by the rushing waters of the sixty-two-milelong L’Arve River. With waterfalls, glaciers, and peaks rising twelve thousand feet above them on either side, there was little need to search for Shangri-La in the Himalaya; people found it in the increasingly accessible Alps. The next seismic shift in the town’s tourism history came in 1901 when a railway linked Chamonix with the rest of Europe. This transformed the valley from a summertime destination to a year-round one. Then, over the next two decades, Chamonix and winter sports became such an attraction that the town was awarded the first-ever Winter Olympics, in 1924, which turned the town into a global icon. Tourists filled the valley throughout the year. Local entrepreneurs and officials had to accommodate the athletically inclined as well as those who couldn’t climb stairs. Celebrities—movie stars, musicians, and fashion designers— visited Chamonix and it became an important place to visit in the same vein as London, Paris, and Rome. This led to the critical phase of development that made Chamonix both the birthplace of alpinism and a new sport that included Marco and would become known as extreme skiing and snowboarding. From 1924 to 1956, four cable cars were constructed and whisked anybody with a pulse thousands of feet above the valley floor in a matter of minutes. These cable cars reached heights and vantage points that previously only the fittest and most committed climbers could reach. The first two were built before World War II, and the last two were completed a decade after the war. Their completions created unfettered access to expansive terrain that provided a significant head start for climbers looking to scale Europe’s iconic peaks. Before long, skiing and climbing blended together in Chamonix. None of the cable cars was more emblematic of Marco than the one that scales the Aiguille du Midi. Built in 1955 it is Europe’s highest cable car, topping out at the peak’s 12,600-foot summit, and remains an impressive engineering feat. When standing outside Chamonix’s stone St. Michel Church, the sun passes over the peak’s summit at noon. The Aiguille du 11

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Midi (Needle of the Mid-Day) scratches the sky as few peaks do and not only symbolizes Marco—daring, dangerous, and beautiful—but was the final piece of the Chamonix tourist puzzle that led to its consistent growth in tourist figures and its permanent population, both of which created a robust economy. Today, the Aiguille du Midi attracts over five hundred thousand of the town’s five million visitors each year, which makes Chamonix as popular as the Grand Canyon. With ten thousand residents and five million annual tourists, Chamonix is different than it was in 1741 when the valley was inhabited by wheat farmers. But the town’s economic explosion allowed Michele and Philippe to start a family in a place that attracted adventurists, one of whom influenced their baby boy. As soon as Marco learned to walk, he was running, and once he learned to run, he was sprinting. He never kept still and broke things out of curiosity or sheer carelessness. Marco had an infusion of thick, blond hair and was solidly built, but was never mistaken for being tall. He developed a noticeable gap between his front two teeth that never closed. One January day in 1981, when Marco was eighteen months old, his brother Pierre went skiing in the Aiguilles Rouges, a craggy row of peaks opposite the Chamonix valley from Mont Blanc. Pierre went skiing outside the resort boundaries, like he often did, and left his family that morning by saying “au revoir,” the French way to say goodbye when a person intends on seeing that person again. “It was a good day to go skiing, lots of snow,” said Hervé Cocco, Marco’s childhood friend and a neighbor of the Siffredis. “Unfortunately, the best days to go skiing are also the most dangerous days.” While the Chamonix valley had been experiencing deaths in the mountains for decades and many had become numb to the reality, Pierre’s death was the Siffredi family’s first. Marco was too young to understand the emotional weight of his teenage brother’s death. He just knew one day his big brother was there and the next day he wasn’t. Philippe and Michele never spoke with Marco about Pierre, thinking that he was too young and wouldn’t understand. Even when Marco became a teenager, his parents rarely spoke of Pierre and rarer still did they speak with Marco about him. 12

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“That was probably a mistake,” Philippe said. “You can’t hide the truth from kids. Of course, we should have known that Marco would want to know about his brother, it was his brother, but we didn’t know how to explain it to him so that he would understand.” It wasn’t long before Philippe and Michele discovered that Marco knew his brother died in an avalanche. When Marco was about six years old, the family was watching television in the living room. Flashing on the screen were images of a massive avalanche in the Swiss town of Zermatt, about ninety miles away and wedged in a tight valley under the watchful guard of the Matterhorn. Marco was mesmerized at the footage of plumes of snow. He pointed at the screen and said, “Pierre.” Michele and Philippe looked at each other, stunned, but continued to keep the details surrounding Pierre’s death hidden under a blanket of pacification. Michele took Pierre’s death particularly hard. He was her first child, born shortly after the two returned from Paris where Philippe had apprenticed as a hairdresser. Although she earned income by teaching skiing to help the family finances, she felt betrayed by the mountains and was worried anytime her children were in them. After all, she was a mother in Chamonix, where there are two things mothers are guaranteed to hear each day: church bells and the sound of rescue helicopters. Depending on if the helicopters are taking off or in flight, it’s either a bata-bata-bata-bata or a chakk-chackk-chak-chak. When mothers hear those rotors a tsunami of emotions envelops them, and their immediate thought is: Where is my son? Once they hear the helicopter is headed toward foreigners on Mont Blanc, mothers relax until the next helicopter. Some days there can be nearly two dozen helicopter rescues, which results in a disconcerting all-day concert of bata-bata-bata and chakkchackk-chak-chak. One professional snowboarder said that Marco himself had to be rescued by helicopter twice in a single day, although that report could not be confirmed. It’s estimated that 360 people a year are rescued from the mountains in Chamonix—an average of about one a day—and the activities leading to these deaths can range from a grandma walking on a nature trail to someone parachuting off a mountain. There are no rules prohibiting anything. There can be up to sixty parachutes in the sky on a summer’s 13

See You Tomorrow

day (there is a designated landing area outside the town center). The top of the Aiguille du Midi cable car borders some of the most dangerous terrain in the Alps. Tourists in high heels can walk onto the glacier as easily as a seasoned climber; no official is present to monitor who goes where. Enter the mountains at one’s own risk, nobody will stop you; that is the unwritten policy. The exception to that policy came in 2016 when the Chamonix mayor outlawed wingsuit jumping after two athletes crashed into roofs of houses. Both bodies exploded on contact. The mayor decided deaths like that wouldn’t be good for tourism, so wingsuit jumping was banned. Other than that, everything goes in Chamonix (parachuting off Mont Blanc is also prohibited but rarely enforced). “Mothers tell me how upset they get when they hear the helicopters or don’t know where their sons are,” said journalist Antoine Chandellier. “They live in constant concern. Chamonix is a life in paradise, but it’s a paradise with lots of drama. Mothers live in fear for their boys because, in Chamonix, the mountains are their playground.” For Michele there was no helicopter rescue for Pierre, just the daily procession of church bells as the hours passed. There was silence at the dinner table that evening, a different type of silence the next morning, and then an eternal silence once the family realized that Pierre’s chair at the table would remain empty. A family of six became a family of five. Philippe, Michele, and their two daughters, Valerie and Shooty, knew people who had lost family members. Always sympathetic, the Siffredis were relieved to have avoided that feeling themselves. Now they were part of a club everyone, it seemed, joined in Chamonix and were no longer vaccinated from death. The silence waned, the pain eased, and smiles returned. With Marco, they had an electron of a toddler whose naïveté about Pierre provided some solace and “because people need to forget to continue to live there,” said journalist Laurent Molitor. Like most children in the Alps, Marco was on skis when he could walk. He skied during the winters and was good at it, but he didn’t like that skiing was focused on racing and competition. Philippe initially thought his indifference to skiing was because somehow Marco connected skiing to Pierre’s death, but really Marco was 14

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fixated on another sport, fishing. Skiing was something to do until the snow melted and the rivers and lakes were full of fish. To Marco, skiing seemed rigid and constrained. There were enormous granite spires and thick glaciers that created this idyllic mountain cathedral with limitless terrain to explore, yet Marco felt he was forced to slalom around gates and be controlled by finish lines and boundaries. Marco found freedom in fishing, not skiing. As a toddler he often escaped the property and wandered. At first his sisters would find him not too far away, usually picking leaves off nearby trees or hopping on boulders. Then he wandered farther and they would find him throwing rocks into the L’Arve River. Initially his escapist behavior was alarming, but they realized they were helpless in corralling Marco and keeping him in confined spaces. Marco’s wings grew wider from a lack of discipline. His parents were strict with Pierre. Perhaps out of guilt, they eased on Marco, not that it would have mattered. Marco was a bird who had no cage. While Marco couldn’t sit still inside the house, he sat for hours on riverbanks trapping fish or watching the movement of rapids. When he was about seven years old, he made his own fish trap and took it to the L’Arve River. By then he was wandering and exploring the valley on his own. By the time he was ten he would routinely fish by himself, even ten miles away at lakes in Vallorcine near the border with Switzerland. Marco had no problem entertaining himself with raw, untethered exploration. Since both of his parents worked, Valerie was responsible for Marco when he wasn’t in school. She discovered nature was Marco’s most effective babysitter. “He was like the bubbles coming out of a champagne bottle,” Valerie said. “His energy spread everywhere, and nobody could keep up. You could tell early on that, to Marco, life was meant to be lived, so Chamonix was perfect for a kid like Marco. He was most happy when he was in nature. You couldn’t keep him chained and inside and try to protect him, it just wasn’t possible, so you had to let him be free because that was Marco.” It became evident that if something captured Marco’s interest, he was intensely focused, almost entranced. On a family trip to Corsica, an 15

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island in the Mediterranean, Marco befriended a local fisherman. With the two sitting at a dock, Marco convinced the man to take him fishing. Marco set his alarm clock that night. At 5:00 a.m., he wiped the dust from his eyes and walked to the dock. He arrived before the fisherman, which rarely happened. When the two returned later that day, Marco had caught more fish. The fisherman, Marco pointed out, only caught fish once he listened to the eleven-year-old. Even at that tender age, Marco delivered facts and opinions with a blunt honesty, but he did it charmingly and in a way that wasn’t considered puffery. One summer, Marco spent weeks reading instructional manuals and acquiring necessary materials to build an aquarium to showcase fish he caught. Then one day Marco grabbed a shovel and started digging. Philippe came home from work and saw that Marco had destroyed his yard. He nearly lost his temper, then restrained himself and asked Marco what he was doing. Once he had learned that his son had conducted a tremendous amount of research in building the perfect aquarium, Philippe permitted the project to continue. After the aquarium was finished, Marco dotted its perimeter with flowers and bushes. The aquarium remained intact for more than a decade in the yard until, after Marco disappeared on Everest in 2002, Philippe tore it up. “It was too painful to look at it because it reminded us of Marco,” Philippe said. The aquarium wasn’t a haphazard project concocted by a devilish preteen. Marco’s was several feet deep and was a professional-grade aquarium, outfitted with a proper set of chemicals and plastic coating. Once his project was finished, he took his fish traps to lakes and accumulated what became a sizable collection of fish to swim in his aquarium. He placed them in the water, stared at them, and scribbled notes about them on paper. Marco called scientists and cajoled them into discussing fish with him. It didn’t take long for the busy professional scientists to understand that they were speaking to an adolescent, but it didn’t bother them. Like many who crossed paths with Marco, they were inspired by this young person’s intense desire to learn. That desire one day carried over to climb-

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ing and snowboarding pursuits, but before that happened, his family wondered if something was wrong with Marco. Here was this seemingly uncontrollable kid who couldn’t sit still in church, home, or school, but was entranced while staring at fish. For hours, his blue eyes never veered from the aquarium, but nothing was wrong with Marco. He was mesmerized by the fish’s activity level, their movement and ability to effortlessly avoid obstacles. To Marco, fish lived with a purpose. They schemed and navigated, and always moved forward. Fish were on a quest to explore every corner of their world. It was then that his parents understood that their gap-toothed, blond-haired electron of a son had deeply embedded roots of exploration and a personal conviction that might get him in trouble. It was also about that time they discovered that traditional academia wouldn’t be the place where Marco’s bottled-up energy would be released. Marco wasn’t interested in school. He was not necessarily combative or insubordinate, just disinterested. It was difficult to know if this was a result of nature or nurture, his parents’ relaxed discipline policy or the way he was genetically wired, but either way he had a hard time concentrating while sitting at a desk. Pierre, according to Marco’s sister Shooty, was the smartest and most academically gifted in the family. Had he not died in an avalanche, Shooty believes that Pierre would have become an engineer. “Valerie too, she was very smart,” Shooty said. “Me and Marco, not so much when it came to school.” The only time Marco could sit quietly for elongated periods at school was when he stared through windows at the mountains and daydreamed about fishing. He was thirsty for knowledge but was a kinesthetic learner at a time when students were expected to be obedient disciples of direct instruction: sit down, be quiet, and listen. But unless he was actively working with his hands to produce something, he was irritable. He preferred science and mathematics over language arts, but regardless, traditional school was never part of Marco’s future. Outside of school, his interest in fishing subsided as his horizons moved away from water toward the rock and ice high above that fed the area’s lakes and rivers. Marco still skied in the winter and Philippe, as a

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mountain guide, offered to teach him basic rope work and invited him to climb. Marco refused, electing to learn on his own if he wanted to learn at all. “When we would go on walks when he was a kid, he cried and complained the whole time,” Philippe said as he mimicked dragging a crying Marco along the trail by his arm. “He didn’t like being outside with us and didn’t like hiking or climbing, so we never climbed together, and I didn’t teach him. Anything he learned, he learned on his own. That was Marco.” Marco didn’t like climbing at a young age because he found it repetitive and the descents uninteresting, more laborious than glorious. With his interest in fishing subsiding, he hit a lull in his transformation from boyhood to manhood. Like most teenagers, he was finding his way. And like most teenagers, he did what his friends did. He became attracted to the bold, the daring, the rebellious, or basically whatever his parents didn’t want him to do. Marco and other teenagers in Chamonix found all those things wrapped into one person: Jean-Marc Boivin. The Siffredi family house is located in Les Barrats, a tranquil neighborhood a block from L’Arve River. Their wooden two-story house rests in the morning shadow of the Aiguille du Midi and was large enough that each kid had his or her own room. Marco’s room was not tidy but was purposeful in its scatterings. He could find what he needed even if nobody else could. By the mid-1990s, Marco was an impressionistic teenager and looking for an outlet. Like American teenagers who had posters of Michael Jordan, Marco idolized Boivin. He hung posters of him and watched his films on the family’s VHS player. By the time he left for Mount Everest in 2002, he had pinned pictures of the mountain to his bedroom wall, with elevations and routes clearly marked. When one of Boivin’s books went out of print and couldn’t be found anywhere, Marco obtained the library’s edition and convinced a company to Xerox the manuscript’s three hundred pages for him. “He did not like reading,” his father Philippe told Laurent Davier in the book Marco Siffredi: Dernier Everest. “But as soon as it’s books on fish or Boivin, he devoured books.” 18

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Marco’s heroes were reflective of his environment. It was bold adventurers like Boivin and Bruno Gouvy, then later snowboarders Jerome Ruby and Dede Rhem, who inspired Marco. In 1986, when Marco was nine years old and still fascinated by fish, Gouvy parachuted from a plane and landed on the summit of 12,316-foot Petit Aiguille de Dru, which towers three thousand feet above the Mer de Glace and is one of Chamonix’s most famous needles. Gouvy rappelled from the summit to a steep hanging glacier and snowboarded a chunk of it. Then, with a terminal cliff looming, Gouvy launched off the face and paraglided into town and disappeared into the clouds. Two years later, in 1988, Gouvy made the first snowboard descent of Mont Blanc and was the first to snowboard in the Himalaya. It was also in 1988 when Boivin recorded his career-defining accomplishment, a climb and paraglide from the summit of Mount Everest. These were the luminaries for the children of Chamonix. Their feats were wild acts, but even the most protective parents in Chamonix couldn’t shield their sons from them. For Philippe, protecting Marco from mountains wasn’t his objective: finding a way to harness all his youthful energy was. Gouvy was the reason Marco knew what a snowboard was, but it was Boivin who shaped what Marco did on a snowboard. After Gouvy died snowboarding on Aiguille Verte in 1990 (he fell in a crevasse), Ruby and Rhem took the baton from Gouvy and became the valley’s leaders in extreme snowboarding. Extreme skiing/snowboarding is a loosely defined term that is tossed around barstools in resort towns. In Chamonix, the definition of extreme is simple: you fall, you die. For that reason alone, one would think that Ruby and Rhem would be Marco’s beacons for inspiration, but Boivin spoke to Marco in a way Ruby and Rhem never could. “The problem with Marco is he didn’t like guides and he didn’t behave like a guide,” said his sister Valerie. “In Chamonix, people of the mountains are supposed to act a certain way. Marco didn’t act that way, and he never wanted to be a guide. He didn’t want to do things in the mountains for money. He wanted to do them because mountains were his passion and he could be free in them. He felt that money didn’t make the mountains pure, and to him mountains were pure and where he could be free. That’s why he liked Jean-Marc Boivin.” 19

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Marco’s logic could be interpreted as twisted. Boivin may have been his hero, but he was the first extreme sports athlete to gain megastar status from films and magazine photographs that documented his achievements. He made money because of media coverage of his pursuits in the mountains, so one could argue that Boivin made money off the mountains. In Marco’s mind, he could delineate between the two because, to him, Boivin’s acts were pure; the fame and money were not the purpose of his acts. Boivin, to Marco, found freedom in the mountains. That other stuff just followed others’ acknowledgment of a special person accomplishing special things. Conversely, Marco felt the act of guiding was a compromise, that guides wouldn’t be in the mountains as much if it wasn’t their job. But, really, Marco felt guides in Chamonix felt it was their job to regulate the mountains and what others could do in the mountains. Marco viewed them the same as schoolteachers who told him what he could do or not do. It was teenage logic, sure, but nevertheless Boivin opened Marco’s eyes to a world beyond his home in the Chamonix valley. Boivin began climbing and skiing as a teenager in the 1960s. By the 1970s he expanded his interests into ice climbing, hang gliding, and, eventually, Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth (BASE) jumping. He was credited with more than one hundred first ice climbing descents and ski descents around Chamonix. He combined these pursuits in the Alps and Himalaya, including a hang glider descent from almost twenty-five thousand feet on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain at 28,250 feet. A 1973 graduate of France’s national ski and climbing school in Chamonix, Boivin set the world’s altitude record for a hang glider descent in 1985 from the summit of Pakistan’s 26,632-foot Gasherbrum II. A few years later, in 1988, he became the first person to climb and paraglide off the summit of Mount Everest. On February 16, 1990, in Venezuela, Boivin completed the first-ever successful BASE jump from Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world. A French television program deployed cameramen to document Boivin’s feat. The next day the crew was filming other BASE jumpers when a female jumper injured herself at the bottom of the falls. Boivin jumped off the cliff with a first-aid kit to help her. His chute deployed but 20

Death Valley

he slammed against the cliffs and then tumbled hundreds of feet before landing in trees. He died of internal injuries and a loss of blood. Boivin was thirty-nine. Marco was eleven when Boivin died and was skiing regularly around Chamonix, but hadn’t found the pure joy Boivin elicited from the mountains. Beyond a nuanced moral battle between his Chamonix heroes, there was another reason Boivin meant more to Marco than the sum of Gouvy, Ruby, and Rhem. What Boivin did in his life was impressive, but it was what he didn’t do that eventually inspired Marco. Boivin believed the most beautiful, perfect descent line was the Hornbein Couloir on Mount Everest’s north face. Marco always dismissed climbing for the sole objective of standing on the top of something. Marco often refused to climb with his father, a guide, and he knew he would never be good enough to ski Everest. But when he picked up a snowboard for the first time, everything changed.

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Chapter Two

Pimp Poulet

One may tempt the devil for a good enough reason and get away with it once, but one cannot make a habit of it and last long. —Lionel Terray in Conquistadors of the Useless One early autumn day in 1999, the first rays of sunshine colored the verdant lower shelf of the Aiguilles Rouges. On the opposite side of the valley, still in the morning shadows, a dark glacial tongue spilled from the ice-encrusted summit of Mont Blanc. The summit flamed golden as another day in the Alps was about to commence. The Rue Dr. Paccard, Chamonix’s pedestrian walkway, was quiet. It was so quiet that the joys of mountain life were uninterrupted and on full display. Residents walked their dogs and used climbing ropes as leashes. If the dog tugged the leash too hard, the contours outlining the owner’s arm and shoulder muscles sharpened. Blooming geraniums exploded from second-floor window boxes under wooden eaves. Shop owners swept entryways, their weathered, wrinkled faces warmed by the rising sun. It was so quiet that one could hear the creaks of wooden doors swinging open, the clinking of ice screws on climbers’ harnesses, and the rhythmic tapping of joggers’ shoes. Rescue helicopters would soon fill the sky and tourists would soon fill the streets, lick their ice cream cones, and peer at the mountains with craned necks. Later that day, on the southern edge of Rue Paccard and under the valley’s granite needles or “aiguilles,” chatter emanated from cafes and pubs, and plans were hatched. One of 23

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these conversations changed the trajectory of Russell Brice’s and Marco Siffredi’s lives. Russ had received a call earlier that autumn day in 1999 from a Chamonix local who had just returned from Nepal and wanted to climb Mount Everest. Fair enough, that was a typical request. Russ, then in his mid-forties, regularly received such inquiries. The caller said his name was Marco. He seemed eager and young but not inexperienced, Russ surmised. It wasn’t until later that day Marco learned exactly what it would take to climb and snowboard Everest, but he knew enough that Russ was the person to speak with about his dream. Born in 1952, Russ had notched numerous ascents in the Himalaya, including Everest, by the time he founded the guiding company Himalayan Expeditions (Himex) in 1996. Two years prior, in 1994, the New Zealand native led his first expedition to the mountain, and in 1988 he attempted an unclimbed route with two others on Everest’s Northeast Ridge called the “Three Pinnacles.” Russ’s launching of Himex coincided with a surge of interest from non-climbers, or marginally experienced ones, who would seemingly pay any price for experienced mountaineers to usher them to Earth’s highest point. When eleven people died in one day in 1996, a tragedy that was chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb, guiding companies were unsure how the public would react. The future of their business seemed murky, at best, but people weren’t deterred by the deaths. Although the nascent guiding industry shared some blame for the 1996 tragedy, business increased exponentially. No company enjoyed more success than Himex, which became the most respected because of its founding principle: safety. “These people pay me to give them a chance to climb Everest and not die,” Russ once told journalist Alan Arnette, “and I take that responsibility seriously.” Before Marco’s phone call, Russ was a part-time resident of the Chamonix valley, skiing and climbing in the area since the 1970s, and he had permanently moved there in the 1980s. The climbing community in Chamonix has one degree of separation. Marco’s father and Russ shared common friends but did not know each other. For months leading up to his phone call with Russ, Marco had been pestering his father with a 24

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crackpot idea involving his snowboard and Everest. Marco had already pinned a map of Mount Everest on his bedroom wall and scribbled notes on it. Philippe grew irritated and eventually told his obsessed son: “If you want to go to Everest, find a way to talk with Russell Brice.” Russ had never heard of Marco before he received a call from him that morning in 1999. He was staying in the nearby hamlet of Argentiere, five miles up-valley from Chamonix. Marco spoke fast; his words jumped out of the phone with excitement. Russ knew these meetings often led nowhere once would-be clients fully grasped the physical and financial commitment to join one of his Everest expeditions. But three years into operating Himex, Russ needed the business and would never deny someone like Marco over the phone. Russ agreed to meet Marco later that afternoon at The Pub, a popular British-run establishment on the Rue Paccard. If it didn’t work out, it wouldn’t be the first time Russ shattered a person’s dreams, but he found that doing so over beers lessened the sting. Russ arrived early and sat at a small square-shaped table with four chairs. Sitting on the patio beyond the veranda stretching toward the Rue Paccard, Russ opted for a table in the sun rather than in the dark recesses of the pub. Russ, if possible, likes to get a good look at potential clients before speaking with them, but on this day, the procession of tourists made it impossible to sift through the humanity. Everybody looked similar: tan, trim, athletic, and dressed to draw attention to either one’s wealth or one’s physique. Typical Chamonix. Russ was enjoying his first pint, the late afternoon sun coloring his beer a bright amber, when two men appeared on the horizon. Upon further inspection, one of them wasn’t a man at all but a teenage runaway who belonged in a circus. Russ chose to never have children on his own volition, and this unsavory character convinced Russ he had made the right decision. Russ took another sip of beer. The two men approached his table. The teenage runaway had spiked purple hair and metal piercings dangling from every orifice, all of which glinted in the sun. He was short, perhaps five-foot-seven, with bulging calves and a set of cobalt-blue eyes that were revealed once he removed his sunglasses. Russ wasn’t sure if he

25

See You Tomorrow

should summon the owner to remove this delinquent or protect himself from a pending mugging. With one eye squinted, the runaway held out his hand to introduce himself with a firm handshake. “Mr. Brice?” Who the fuck is this guy? Russ said to himself, extending his arm out of habit, not desire. “Mr. Brice, I am Marco. It is a pleasure to meet you.” He left Marco’s hand suspended in the air for several seconds before it hit him: This was Marco, the Marco who called him about Everest. This meeting won’t last long, Russ thought as he took another sip of beer. The two men sat at the table and joined Russ. At first glance, Russ didn’t trust Marco to mow his lawn, let alone trust him to represent his business in one of the world’s most unforgiving environments. How would other clients get along with this freak, Russ asked himself. Marco introduced the person accompanying him as his lawyer. The lawyer wore a crumpled collared shirt, wrinkly pants, and had a satchel with papers that could have been a formal contract or a kindergarten art project, Russ would never know. “I don’t know why Marco brought a lawyer, maybe he thought it made him seem more serious and that I would take him more seriously, but I never saw that person again,” Russ said. “Marco didn’t need a lawyer, he needed to convince me to take him to Everest. Chamonix is full of people like Marco. Young, wild, dangerous, and many of them end up dead. But once I got past the initial shock, the studs and the green or purple hair or whatever color it was that day, and got to talking with Marco, there was something remarkable about this young bloke. He looked quite radical, but he was actually quite stable inside.” Russ couldn’t have known it at the time, but this kid with piercings and spiked purple hair became the closest thing he ever had to a son. Barkhor Street in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, is an ancient circular passage surrounding the Jokhang Temple, which has attracted religious pilgrims for over one thousand years. Barkhor means “divine pathway” in Tibetan, and the street is paved with hand-cut stones and lined with shops selling everything from Buddha statues to aromatic plants. The street is the most 26

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famous market in Tibet and, at a leisurely place, takes thirty minutes to walk in its entirety. The temple itself was built in the seventh century, and the three-story buildings surrounding the street display a tapestry of colors that include some of the best-preserved Tibetan-style architecture in the now Chinese-occupied territory. Prayer wheels and a large incense burner are some of the street’s obstacles, and since the street is crowded with travelers and pilgrims (some of whom crawl on their knees, as is custom), it requires some care to avoid bumping into somebody along the way. All the while, toward the south, brown hills powdered by fresh snow atop their summits serve as a backdrop to this holy city considered the center of Tibetan Buddhism. In the early 2000s, climbing expeditions to the north side of Mount Everest started in Lhasa after a short flight across the Himalaya from Kathmandu, the capital of neighboring Nepal. The 2001 Everest Expedition team under Russ Brice was no different. At twelve thousand feet above sea level, Lhasa is one of the highest cities in the world and where the wind-scoured plains of the Tibetan plateau greet the foothills of the Himalaya. The thin air in Lhasa contains about two-thirds of the oxygen at sea level, so for Russ, the city is a logical starting point to begin acclimatizing. Upon landing at the airport, clients had difficulty breathing and were grateful for the two days of rest before starting the overland journey to base camp at seventeen thousand feet. Although a means to an end since the 1920s for the cadre of international climbers focused on reaching Earth’s highest point, Lhasa remains a popular waypoint to adjust to higher altitude and soak up Tibetan culture. It’s also a final opportunity to relax before the more serious matter ahead. The 2001 Everest Expedition team arrived from Kathmandu that afternoon, and by that evening had visited the Jokhang Temple and Barkhor Street. Nearly two years after his meeting in Chamonix with Russ, following a series of previous expeditions that convinced Russ he could snowboard Everest, Marco had found his way onto the team. Marco was twenty-one years old at the start of the 2001 expedition, the youngest member of the team and young enough to be every other team members’ son. Some were intrigued by his youth and his plans to snowboard Everest, but every member of the team was an accomplished climber and was 27

See You Tomorrow

focused on their own objectives. The 2001 team’s collective curriculum vitae did not resemble the composition of present-day Everest climbing expeditions that often feature inexperienced mountaineers with robust bank accounts more than robust climbing experience. All of them were serious mountaineers, and in total, there were thirteen members of the expedition, not including Sherpa staff. The team was led by Russ, who was guiding his eleventh Everest expedition and his thirty-fifth Himalayan expedition. The three guides underneath Russ included two US-based climbers in Andy Lapkass, who had climbed Everest twice before and was returning for a second season guiding with Russ, and Chris Warner, a guide of seventy international expeditions and who had been on Everest before and climbed other Himalayan peaks such as Cho Oyu and Ama Dablam. The third guide was Asmuss Norreslet of Denmark, who summited Everest the previous year and notched several first ascents in Pakistan’s Karakoram range. In addition to Marco, Russ, and the three guides, the team members included Britain’s Roy Hughes, a retired hotel owner who had climbed with Russ on Cho Oyu in 1998; Owen West, a New York City resident and former Marine who traded natural gas on Wall Street and was featured in a Playboy magazine article earlier that year; Ellen Miller, an endurance athlete from Colorado who was about to become the first US woman to climb Everest from both the north and south sides; Guatemala’s Jaime Vinals, who was on his third Everest expedition and had climbed to the highest point on six continents; Switzerland’s Evelyn Binsack, a guide who had climbed the vaunted north face of the Eiger three times, including once in winter, and was on her second Himalayan expedition; Robert Bosch, also of Switzerland, another mountain guide who had been on Everest twice before and summited several Himalayan peaks; Japan’s Naoki Ishikawa, who had spent the previous year traveling between the North and South Poles via several modes of transportation, and had also climbed to the highest points on six continents; Britain’s Jess Stock, a professional adventure photographer who had been on Himalaya expeditions to Cho Oyu and elsewhere; and, finally, Scotland’s Keiron Mackenzie, who was on Russ’s 2000 Everest expedition and himself guided treks and expeditions in the Himalaya. 28

Pimp Poulet

“There were no weak links in that team,” said guide Chris Warner. “It wasn’t like the non-climbers checking something off their bucket list: Disneyland, the Eiffel Tower, and the summit of Everest. Everybody was a frickin’ hard-core climber. In terms of big commercial teams, that was probably the best team I’d ever been with on a peak like that.” Since initial pleasantries were accomplished over dinner the night before in Kathmandu, where everyone had arrived from their respective countries, time in Lhasa was spent getting to know each other on a more meaningful level. Team members talked about their home countries and dined on momo, a traditional dish that resembles a spicy dumpling, and then moseyed along Barkhor Street that evening to take in the sights and sounds. It wasn’t long before guide Chris Warner noticed Marco was missing. A few minutes later, high-pitched screams and laughter filled the increasingly chilly Tibetan air. As Everest team members looked behind them, a dense crowd of people parted, and the concert of laughter grew louder. Then they saw quite a spectacle in a city of spectacles: a trail of Tibetan children chasing Marco, who was riding his skateboard and swerving around people on the street. He was playfully teasing the children, slowing down but not letting them catch him. As he maneuvered the narrow streets and alleys of Lhasa, his blond locks flowed behind him in the darkening sky. His wide, gap-toothed smile was unmatched by the collective smile of local children. Over the course of the next two days, before the team left for base camp, Marco’s mob of child fans grew. While other team members were slowly adapting to the high altitude, Marco filled his days skateboarding around Lhasa. “To many people this was supposed to be a serious climbing expedition, but to Marco, this just seemed like fun,” said Owen West, who was in his early thirties at the time. Marco brought out Russ’s less serious side, which isn’t easy. If Marco was another client, Russ would have likely had a private, stern chat about his behavior. With Marco, there was no use. Off the mountain, Russ often felt like a father trying to corral an unruly toddler. “At first with him I would say, ‘Ah, Marco, what are you doing mate?’” Russ said. “But after a while, I just realized that’s who this guy was, and it 29

See You Tomorrow

wasn’t going to matter what I said. He’s not putting on a show, that’s genuinely who he was, and that is why the local people took a liking to him.” Other team members remembered that Russ had a stronger relationship with Marco than his other clients, which was refreshing for them to see because of Russ’s alligator exterior. He was a hardened Kiwi climber who had a difficult upbringing as a child, and he was direct and honest. He came off to others as uncaring and unemotional, but that’s not how he felt about his clients. “Russ was the best,” West said. “He had the perfect mix of leadership, tough love, and compassion. Marco got away with things probably because he was young or whatever. But Marco was like Russ’s pupil, the star student who was going to ascend quickly and have a trajectory faster than Russ had seen before. The rest of us just went along with it.” While Marco and Russ were separated by twenty-five years and didn’t share the same family structure, they shared life experiences in other ways. Like Marco, tragedy had struck Russ early in life. His mother died of pneumonia when he was just eighteen months old (the same age Marco was when his older brother Pierre died in an avalanche). Estranged from his father and sister, Russ was raised on a farm by grandparents outside Christchurch, New Zealand. Although Marco’s youth was a comfortable one with a stable family structure, their paths started to mirror one another’s as they grew older and ventured outside the house. Russ was bored in school, like Marco, and gravitated toward outdoor sports. When he wasn’t in the mountains, he worked construction. After high school, he obtained his electrician’s license and enrolled in classes to apprentice as a general contractor. Russ’s story sounded all too familiar to Marco, who took classes to become a carpenter and a stonemason after high school. Like Marco, Russ preferred working with his hands and being outside, so following their initial meeting on the Rue Paccard in Chamonix, Russ and Marco discussed their academic careers and found them similar. They spent time theorizing what they would be doing had a life of adventure and climbing mountains not gotten in the way, usually over beers at pubs in Kathmandu or Chamonix. 30

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In the 1970s, when he was in his twenties, Russ saved enough money to take a year off and travel the world. Marco, too, saved his own money and often funded his own adventures. They both felt there was something more rewarding in that process. Russ traveled in South America, climbing peaks like Peru’s Yerepuja and Siula Grande, and toured the American West to climb the granite walls of Yosemite. On the same year-round trip, he visited Nepal and met New Zealand hero Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was the first to summit Everest in 1953. Hillary isn’t remembered just as a famous climber; he had a desire to improve the lives of Sherpa. Using his manual labor skills, Russ worked with Hillary to build hospitals and sewer systems in villages in the Khumbu, the mountainous region of Nepal and a hub of Sherpa culture. Russ’s money ran out on exactly his 365th day away from home, but the people and scenery of the Khumbu left an indelible mark on the young soul. Having become the first Kiwi to climb all twenty-seven of the country’s three-thousand-meter peaks—in a single season—Russ was already known as a talented climber. But Russ felt a yearning to parlay his climbing exploits into helping others. He wasn’t quite sure how to do that yet but was convinced mountains would be involved. By 1981, at age twenty-nine, Russ made his first trip to Everest and joined a two-man expedition that unsuccessfully tried to summit the West Ridge without oxygen. During the 1980s, he climbed Himalayan peaks such as Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world; Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest peak in the world; and Shishapangma, the fourteenth-highest peak in the world. He also constructed a team that paraglided from the summit of Cho Oyu. He made another oxygen-less attempt on Everest in 1990. By 1991, he started to move beyond his individual climbing pursuits and found satisfaction in the logistical nature of organizing expeditions. That year he led a hot air balloon expedition over Everest’s summit (it crashed on the Tibetan plateau), but that was about the time he found his true calling in the mountains. “I found out early on that I had the physiology to do things at high altitude,” Russ said. “So you can be like a Reinhold Messner and use that physiology to climb all the peaks without oxygen and all sorts of other 31

See You Tomorrow

things, or you can use that to help others achieve their dreams of climbing and doing these other things on peaks. I chose the latter.” From Lhasa, where the team spent two nights, the journey to Everest base camp took several days. After leaving Lhasa, the team stayed the next two nights in Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet with more than eight hundred thousand citizens residing at 12,500 feet. The trip took on a more rugged feel by Tingri, where the team spent another two nights. Lodging accommodations were spartan, to be kind. One-eyed dogs and trash and feces lined the dirt and rock-strewn main street, often staying frozen in the ground until the mid-morning thaw. Tingri was a cold, windy, and inhospitable village at over fourteen thousand feet, and had Third World realities: crumbling buildings, meandering chickens, and children with unwashed, snot-encrusted faces. It was an important stop because Russ spoke with Tibetan yak men and Sherpas and acquired the last of his expedition’s supplies. Other than thinking about not wanting to be in Tingri, there wasn’t much for team members to do in Tingri, but Marco entertained himself. His child-like imagination, even in the vicinity of Everest, took over. As in Lhasa, Marco filled the days by putting children on his skateboard and taking them on rides around town. He treated children the same whether in more polished Lhasa or dilapidated Tingri. “Marco connected with the people a lot better than we did, but we all couldn’t skateboard around and put children on a skateboard,” said team member Owen West. Marco approached homes uninvited and visited with locals who couldn’t speak French or English. His gap-toothed smile was an effective translator. Maybe it was his gesticulations or his belly laughs, but whatever method Marco used to communicate, it worked. His general happiness and never-ending smile, which had been a trademark of Marco since he was a toddler, resonated with others. While many of his team members were serious, focused middle-aged adults, Marco acted like a playground virgin in Tingri, forgetting he was there to become the first person to snowboard the world’s highest mountain.

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Pimp Poulet

“It’s unusual,” said 2001 team member Ellen Miller of Vail, Colorado. “I have very close Sherpa friends and am friends with their wives, and I go into their homes but not off just one expedition like that. But Marco did that with the Sherpas, and I think they were amused by him, intrigued with him, kind of like what’s with this kid? He has these piercing blue eyes and this shaggy blond hair and this big toothy grin. The word authenticity is thrown around a lot these days, but Marco had it. He was one of a kind. Marco was authentic.” As Russ was speaking with a Sherpa about supplies and dividing weight evenly among the yaks, he noticed a plume of dirt sprout from the other side of Tingri. Within seconds, he saw a horse galloping down the main street. Then Russ saw that the horse was towing Marco on his skateboard. Marco was bouncing up and down and was out of control, but he didn’t seem too concerned that he could be ejected at any moment. Holding a rope that was attached to the horse with both hands as he passed by, Marco managed to free one of his hands and wave at Russ. Marco, you’re trying to snowboard Mount Everest and you’re trying to kill yourself in the meantime, Russ said to himself, then chuckled. Marco wore a down vest zippered tight to his neck. He had been wearing the vest since Lhasa where he bought it in a bazaar. After haggling with a street vendor, he settled on a price of two dollars. Marco was elated. He knew a down vest in Chamonix would cost several hundred dollars. When guide Chris Warner informed Marco that the vest was worthless and filled with chicken feathers, Marco was insulted and refused to believe it. Over the next six weeks of the expedition, out of defiance, Marco wore his chicken feather vest. But since the vest wasn’t sewn together well, feathers regularly flew onto people’s body parts and belongings. If it was anybody else, those annoying chicken feathers would have resulted in a heated exchange, if not a fistfight. But since it was Marco, people laughed it off and nicknamed him “Pimp Poulet” (Chicken Pimp in English). “He was a total goofball kid, and everyone thought it was absolutely hilarious when the feathers kept flying out of the vest,” Warner said. “But he could laugh at himself too, which is why people liked him. Here is this larger-than-life character, the biggest badass on a team full of badasses, 33

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and he had this impish grin on him all the time like a character from Mad magazine.” Satisfied with his morning ride in Tingri, Marco released the rope attached to the horse and packed up his skateboard and other belongings. It was time to go. The town’s children were disappointed, but the caravan was leaving for base camp. Until then, other members had good reason to label Marco as odd. Rumors had swirled since the team convened in Kathmandu about his wanting to be the first person to snowboard Everest, but the twentyone-year-old had yet to convince the team that his eccentrics equated to someone capable of even climbing Everest, let alone snowboarding it. An hour out of Tingri, as the Toyota Landcruiser accelerated around a curve on a rubble dirt strip, Everest filled the vehicle’s windshield. Faces were pressed against the windows. A plume of clouds slid across the peak’s pointed summit pyramid, an indication of high winds. As playful as he was earlier, Marco was quieter as they neared base camp. Snowboarding Everest was no longer an abstract concept. The obsession that irritated his father was no longer a collection of thumbtacks and scribbled notes on a map back home in his room full of Jean-Marc Boivin posters. Marco finally got an intimate, close-up view of the Norton/Great Couloir to the left and the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs to the right. As the vehicle approached base camp, the winds looked fierce. Everything was much larger in scale than he imagined. Marco tightened his lips and gulped, then looked around at the others and forced a smile. For the first time, he seemed vulnerable and every bit twenty-one years of age. Maybe this kid from Chamonix is human after all, the others thought.

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Chapter Three

Shooting Star

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. —Mark Twain From the French village of Les Praz, 13,524-foot Aiguille Verte rises sharply from the valley floor over two vertical miles of classic alpine terrain. Pine forests give way to cascading waterfalls that transition to a chaotic, severely tilting labyrinth of glacial crevasses, rock gullies, steep snowfields, and terminal cliff bands. High above meadows and pine forests, two serrated ridges converge at a rounded glacial summit that was first touched by Edward Whymper in 1865. Aiguille Verte or “Green Needle” can be seen from most anywhere in the Chamonix valley and, on more than one occasion, has been called one of the most beautiful peaks in the Alps. Aiguille Verte’s beauty, however, derives from neither its pointed summit nor its dizzying height, but the collective aesthetic of its glaciers, ridges, cliffs, and chutes. Typically, aficionados evaluate great mountains by first admiring their summits, then move their eyes downward to appreciate their construction. When viewed from a wooden bench near a church in Les Praz, Aiguille Verte is better evaluated with a bottom-to-top approach and for one reason: its Nant Blanc face. Several descent routes on Aiguille Verte are steeped in extreme skiing history, but none of the routes compare in composition and posture to the Nant Blanc, a mythical, complex ski and snowboard mountaineering challenge that has seen only a handful of descents in history. On June 12, 35

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1989, Jean-Marc Boivin notched the first descent of the Nant Blanc on skis. Then on June 17, 1999—almost exactly ten years later and four years after learning how to snowboard—Marco made the second. The third descent wasn’t until ten years later, in 2009, and the skiers that year—and the two subsequent descents—used a slightly easier route than Boivin and Marco. To be fair, the route is more condition-dependent than any other, and climate change has changed the Nant Blanc’s complexion. The conditions Marco encountered have rarely been replicated in the twenty-first century. Rising temperatures and sporadic snow patterns have resulted in different melting snow and ice patterns that have made previously navigable sections unnavigable. These patterns have increased the risk of falling rocks and seracs (chunks of glacial ice that break off or topple over) and created additional treacherous sections. Boivin once said the Nant Blanc was the hardest line he skied, which spurred Marco’s motivation to repeat the route and pay homage to his hero, but Marco’s selected date wasn’t a coincidence. “Marco did it exactly ten years after Jean-Marc Boivin did it,” said journalist Laurent Molitor. “Marco always thought about dates, and most of the time he did something big it was on an important date for him. Maybe it was for Jean-Marc Boivin or maybe he fucked a special girl on that date. Everything was an anniversary to him. Sometimes he told us what the date meant, sometimes he did not. It was fun to see a twentyyear-old be clever like that. An important date is something you think about when you are old, but to be that young and to attach importance to dates like he did, that was peculiar for me. He put more thought than we knew into what he was doing.” Leading up to his descent, Marco spent hours studying the face through binoculars from Les Praz. He understood its moods, how temperature fluctuations influenced its rock- and icefall patterns, how certain sun angles changed its snow conditions. Like when he was twelve years old and called scientists to discuss fish, he knocked on climbers’ doors seeking information on the Nant Blanc route, quizzing them on minute details. He accumulated information quickly, but also at a considerable depth that extended beyond typical trip reports. He educated himself on a mountain or a route’s history by reading about its early explorers. He 36

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cherished such knowledge and armed himself with it. In his estimation, physical readiness, like balance and snowboard technique, was only one aspect of big descents. He believed intellectual and psychological aspects also needed to be addressed. The more information, the greater chance at success, and success was Marco’s objective. Failure and death were not discussed at length. They were always possibilities, but Marco viewed them as abstract concepts, and to engage in a reoccurring conversation about unhealthy inhibitors polluted the beauty of the mountain poetry he wrote with his snowboard. By the time he was snowboarding serious routes like the Nant Blanc and those on Mount Everest’s north face, he was acutely aware of risks and didn’t need to be fixated on them. In the French-language book Marco Siffredi: Dernier Everest, his sister Shooty told the author: “He knew the rules, the risk of dying young. I never knew if he was teasing me or if he was talking seriously.” Marco would occasionally comment on what would happen to him in the event of an accident but never applied it to a specific route. On the terrain he was frequenting, it was unlikely anybody would endanger themselves to rescue him for what would likely be a body recovery. Even if others were around or joined him on ascents, Marco was alone on descents, and he knew it. The committing nature of what he did was part of the allure, despite the pressure on him to avoid mistakes. But mistakes are made on every expedition, including those on Marco’s 2002 Hornbein Couloir attempt on Mount Everest. But perfection is an unfair standard for anyone to meet, especially when one’s life is at stake. On serious routes—including Aiguille Verte’s Nant Blanc and Everest’s Hornbein—Marco always exhibited good mountain sense. Risk is unavoidable, although risk invigorated Marco more than it spooked him. Boivin once said, translated loosely in English: “To live, you have to risk. We are already nothing, we do not control anything, so if we let time run out, what were we waiting for? The mountain is good. It shows you that you’re just a piece of shit . . . it feels good to know from time to time that you are nothing. It’s a good reminder.” Boivin’s “To live, you have to risk” credo appeared on Marco’s notebooks and his bedroom walls. Marco’s credo, “The more you think, the less you move forward,” 37

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which he penned before leaving for Everest in 2002 in his father’s workshop, is laced with Boivin’s over-arching philosophy. At the tender age of twenty, Marco knew his existence was fleeting and precious. He knew his clock was ticking, and that his time would run out. His wasn’t a death wish as much as a mindset. With the steep faces he danced on, Marco rarely had the luxury of spending large chunks of time on these routes before he became entangled with their perilous qualities and inherent risks. To him, preparedness led to safe decisions and equated to less time spent on these faces, which in turn increased his odds of survival and success. “It’s psychological, you can’t just go,” Marco told his friend and filmmaker Bertrand Delapierre about the Nant Blanc in Delapierre’s film Etoile Filante. “You can’t say ‘I’m here, I’ll do it.’ I can’t anyway. It’s a whole preparation, the day. . . . That’s how it is for me.” On June 17, 1999, after three years of research and documentation, Marco was ready to take the same test that his hero had passed a decade before. Marco may have seemed rattled upon seeing Everest’s north face in 2001—and decisions that led to his disappearance in 2002 require further examination—but he found himself at Everest base camp because of what happened on the Nant Blanc. He had the confidence to approach Russell Brice about snowboarding Everest because of the Nant Blanc. He had the confidence to attempt the Hornbein Couloir because of the Nant Blanc. “Ever since I started snowboarding, I watched, [the Nant Blanc] has made me dream,” Marco told Delapierre. “I think it is one of the most technical runs you can do on board or skis. It’s long and it unites all the technical difficulties in extreme boarding and skiing. There’s everything, slopes and ice, narrow couloirs and rocks, all the difficulties. In a long run, it’s exposed from top to bottom, it’s really a great run.” There are defining moments in everybody’s life, moments that strengthen one’s resolve or weaken it, moments that propel one’s life into relevancy or torpedo it into obscurity. In those moments, will every person be brave enough, courageous enough, and have a firm belief deep within themselves that they can do something extraordinary? For Marco, that was the Nant Blanc. Had he died that day, he would just be another twenty-something in the Chamonix cemetery. 38

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“You come to a place like Chamonix and everybody is gnarly, and it takes a while before anybody stands out,” said snowboarder and writer Trey Cook, who moved to Chamonix in the late 1990s and wrote about Marco. “I had heard a little bit about Marco when I first got here, but he wasn’t that well known outside his inner circle. That’s not surprising because in Chamonix it’s hard to become well known. His inner circle knew he was special, but nobody else really knew. After Nant Blanc, everybody knew. Even his inner circle was like ‘Okay, this guy is different.’ At that point there was no doubt about it, Marco was legit, seriously legit, and he had no equal. You just look at that face from below and think ‘He can’t be human, there is just no way he can do something like that and be human.’” Marco engaged in an extreme version of what is called backcountry snowboarding/skiing, which is climbing mountains under one’s power and descending terrain outside a controlled ski resort. These athletes are known as free-skiers or freeriders. Skiing itself dates back thousands of years. Author Lou Dawson in Wild Snow wrote that wooden planks appeared in cave paintings over seven thousand years ago and that a Greek historian mentioned skis in a 500 BC essay. The modern version of skiing, however, can be attributed to Norway. Dawson revealed that military skiers in AD 1206 were considered national heroes after saving the Norwegian monarchy by transporting a king over mountains during the country’s civil war. And then in 1216, skiers helped Norway oust the Swedish army out of the country. “Norway is the world’s spiritual leader of skiing,” Dawson wrote, emphasizing its influence both militarily and recreationally. Snowboarding wasn’t invented until later in the twentieth century, but backcountry skiing has roots back to AD 1555 when Scandinavians created “climbing skins,” which are narrow hair-based contraptions that attach to the bottom of skis. When ascending, the skins grip the snow and don’t allow skis to slide, allowing skiers to efficiently climb steep and snow-covered mountains. Without skins, the only other option for backcountry skiers and snowboarders is to wear boots and carry one’s

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downhill equipment on their backs, which still happens when the terrain is too steep, or the conditions are too icy, for skins to be effective. The best-known example of backcountry skiing as a professional and recreational activity was in 1856, when Norwegian Snowshoe Thompson began delivering mail for the US Postal Service. For twenty years, during the winter and spring, Thompson transported mail over one hundred miles from Placerville, California, through the avalanche-prone Sierra Nevada to Genoa, Nevada. Skiing not just for recreation but for deeper meaning came in 1888, when Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen completed a crossing of three hundred miles across Greenland. Nansen’s book about the trip included a comment, published in Wild Snow, that states skiing is “something that develops not only the body but also the soul.” For this reason, Dawson called Nansen the “messiah” of backcountry skiing, which makes him the earliest luminary for Marco Siffredi. Nansen’s ski traverse in Greenland coincided with the Golden Age of mountaineering that took place in the Swiss and French Alps during the mid-1860s, punctuated by Whymper’s Matterhorn ascent in 1865 (the same year he climbed the Aiguille Verte via a prominent snow-filled chute now known as the “Whymper Couloir”). Climbing previously unclimbed mountains required the use of specific mountaineering equipment like crampons (metal spikes that attach to boots and sink into the ice) and an ice axe, an invaluable tool with three key features: the pick, which has jagged teeth and helps arrest a fall; the adze, a flattened area opposite of the pick used to chop steps; and the spike, the point at the bottom of the axe that inserts into snow/ice and provides increased balance during ascending. Since the mid-1860s, a blending of climbing and skiing mountains primarily occurred in Europe and North America. Dawson called this form of mountain play “glisse alpinism,” and it grew to include snowboarding. Alpinism is the practice of climbing mountains, and “glisser” is the French verb that means to slide, and in this context, it means to slide down a mountain using a steel-edge tool like skis or a snowboard. Marco was a glisse alpinist at its finest, and the term works for Marco because it’s tinged with connotative elements that guided him during his life.

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“Mountains embody the harsh essence of nature,” Dawson wrote in Wild Snow. “When a ski or snowboard descent caps a fine climb, the alpinist becomes a joyful, even sublime, part of that wild landscape. No human game is more elegant and joyful than glisse alpinism.” Glisse alpinism moved beyond its denotative meaning to a more extreme form of skiing once it grew to incorporate Boivin, but Boivin was inspired by his own luminaries like Sylvain Saudan, Anselme Baud, and Patrick Vallencant. In 1897, Wilhelm Paulke made the first alpine traverse of Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, a wonderland of thirteen-thousand-foot peaks that is smeared with thick glaciers and has danger lurking around each corner. Although Paulke’s traverse was the first of its kind, the next progression occurred when routes that were previously considered difficult climbing routes now became ski descents. Skiing routes that measured between 45 and 60 degrees in steepness seemed preposterous, if not suicidal, but Saudan was a renaissance man and tackled them with gusto. Known as the “skier of the impossible,” the Swiss skier recorded the first descent of the Spencer Couloir in Chamonix in 1967. His route began at an elevation of 11,700 feet, and he skied terrain that topped out at 51 degrees and averaged 45 degrees in steepness over the thirty-seven-hundred-foot descent to the glacier below. On a 50-degree slope, an erect skier can extend one’s arm and touch the slope, and on a 60-degree slope, a skier can bend their arm and feel their elbow touch the slope. A fall on a slope greater than 50 degrees would be nearly impossible to arrest depending on snow conditions, and no different than sliding down an elevator shaft. The consequences of such a fall depend on what the skier slams into after the fall, perhaps an important note in the story of Marco. In Chamonix, that could be a rock ten feet below the point of the fall or it could be a bottomless crevasse on the glacier two thousand feet below. To understand the strength and balance required to stay upright on increasingly vertical terrain, Marco built wooden ramps of varying steepness in his backyard. To learn his physical limitations, he practiced balancing on his snowboard on ramps measuring 50, 60, and 70 degrees of steepness. If Marco was going to reach Boivin’s level, learning to balance on steep terrain was non-negotiable. In 1980, Boivin skied the east face 41

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of the Matterhorn and linked turns on slopes steeper than 60 degrees. One person saw Boivin’s Matterhorn descent on film and, like Marco, came away both inspired and frightened. “My hands broke a sweat as I watched,” one attendee of the Telluride Film Festival in 1980 said upon watching Boivin’s descent, as published in Wild Snow. “He’d make a turn, then slide for 40 feet with his skis shaking and uphill hand dragging on the snow, finally gaining enough control to make another ‘turn.’ It was an awesome display and made us realize just what could be done using skis as a tool of alpinism.” For Marco, if he couldn’t maintain his balance a few feet above a smooth wooden surface—and in July surrounded by green grass and flowers in his mother’s garden—how would he stay upright on a threethousand-foot face with a terminal cliff awaiting him? While training on these ramps, Marco’s thick blond (or sometimes green) locks of hair swirled in the afternoon air, his bulging calves taut with stress, and his mind glued to the objective. Marco was nonchalant about many things as a teenager, but not his training regimen. To ensure his equipment was reliable on hard-packed snow or ice, he grinded his snowboard’s metal edges to such sharpness that he could use them to cut slices of cheese. When waxing his snowboard, he left it so smooth that sticks of cold butter could slide off. He treated his snowboard equipment better than most people’s family pet, tightening every screw on his bindings each morning and caressing his board before use. These were his tools, and he was not willing to neglect them. “Marco took his snowboarding very seriously,” said neighbor and close friend Hervé Cocco. “People may talk about his attitude or crazy hair, but that was just for show, for play. His equipment was always in perfect shape. When he was tuning his equipment, you did not disturb him.” Shortly after World War I, Chamonix’s title as “birthplace of mountaineering” expanded to include the moniker the “birthplace of extreme skiing.” In 1939, about three decades before Saudan’s first descent of a slope greater than 45 degrees outside a resort, two Chamonix locals climbed and skied a four-thousand-foot, 40-degree glacier that lay just beyond the hamlet of Argentiere. In the thirty years bridging those feats, 42

Shooting Star

ski manufacturers created better metal edges, more rigid plastic boots, and stronger bindings to stabilize the lower leg and ankle regions, which increase a skier’s steadiness on steep slopes. These technological advancements allowed Saudan to pull off additional first descents on the Mont Blanc massif: the Whymper Couloir on Aiguille Verte and the Gervasutti Couloir on Mont Blanc du Tacul. Marco descended those couloirs decades later, both of which have sustained 55-degree pitches for thirty-five hundred feet. Nowhere in either couloir could Saudan be remiss of the massive exposure or ominous bergschrund guarding each exit that was ready to swallow him. (Bergschrunds are large crevasses that mark the head of a glacier as it starts to pull away from the rock or stagnant ice of a mountain.) Saudan’s other first descents include the northwest face of the Eiger in Switzerland (dropped off by a plane on the summit); Oregon’s Mount Hood (dropped off by a helicopter on the summit); and North America’s tallest peak, 20,320-foot Denali, which he climbed in classic style and then skied its southwest face. Saudan’s psychological approach mirrored Marco’s on the Nant Blanc. “When you make a descent like that, you have to believe in your mind that you have already done it,” Saudan told journalist Graham Bell of the Telegraph in a 2016 article. “Then, on the day you do it, it is only physically. It’s too late when you are stood on the top to ask, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here?’” By 1973, Chamonix upstarts Anselme Baud and Patrick Vallencant had taken the baton from Saudan—without asking—and accelerated the arms race. Baud and Vallencant skied together yet a rivalry brewed—not necessarily between each other but between man and mountain. Baud, the son of a mountain guide, was muscular and had a more powerful style. Vallencant, meanwhile, had more grace and possessed classic good looks. He wore a pink headband, was credited with inventing the jump turn, and found himself on magazine covers. Baud and Vallencant ticked off 50-degree descents with regularity, but it all started with Saudan. “Skiing steeper than 50 degrees was like breaking the four-minute mile,” wrote Eric Pearlman in a 1996 article in Snow Country magazine. “It expanded long-held beliefs about the limits of human ability. The

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French newspapers and magazines blared the story, and the local Chamonix skiers got jealous. Then they got resolute, and the race was on.” Marco was influenced by Boivin, but Boivin was inspired by Vallencant. (The two skied and climbed together in 1985 when they filmed their descent of 22,205-foot Huascaran in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca; Marco visited the same mountain range in the late 1990s.) Initially, the term extreme skiing meant negotiating slopes steeper than 50 degrees, and for the most part it still does. But Baud and Vallencant increased the steepness threshold and modified the definition to include numerous factors, specifically the demanding nature of a route, not just its steepness. A sustained 60-degree slope for three thousand feet is different, for example, than a three-thousand-foot slope that maxes out at 70 degrees but averages 40 degrees. Additionally, skiing a slope with fresh snow is easier than skiing the same slope in firm snow. A lack of clarity for the inherently hazy definition annoyed Vallencant, so he simplified things and defined extreme skiing as: “Si tu tombes, tu meurs,” which means, “If you fall, you die.” The French haven’t softened or changed the definition for over a half-century. If Boivin became France’s first mega-ski star, then Vallencant’s boldness and his movie-star looks made him the first media ski darling. European skiers embraced the media and did not shy away from notoriety. The French were somewhat perturbed when Saudan, a Swiss skier, was celebrated in numerous outlets for what he accomplished in France’s mountains. When it came to Baud, Saudan, and Vallencant, “the European extremists led the development of ski alpinism and brought a spiritual and deep-rooted thought process to the activity,” Dawson wrote in Wild Snow. For as much as he was remembered for his flamboyance and boldness, Vallencant and his ski ethic echoed Nansen and his connection to nature when skiing across Greenland in the 1880s. Vallencant added a spiritual element to steep skiing that shaped Boivin’s thoughts, which then shaped Marco’s. “When I concentrate so, the world disappears. . . . To ski a very steep slope is completely beautiful; it is pure, hard, vertical, luminous in a dimension that, by its nature, is foreign to us, yet I become part of this cosmic dimension,” Vallencant was quoted in Wild Snow. 44

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More important to the French than notoriety was that Baud and Vallencant were the first French extreme skiing stars. After more than one hundred years of foreigners being credited with accomplishments in the Mont Blanc massif, Vallencant and Baud ignited a sense of territorial pride. Despite physical and stylistic differences, the two Frenchmen recorded numerous first and second descents in Chamonix (Vallencant notched first descents in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca). Both are responsible for providing a blueprint that snowboarders Bruno Gouvy, Dede Rhem, Jerome Ruby, and later Marco Siffredi followed once snowboarding was invented. Like Boivin, Vallencant didn’t die while skiing. He died because of an innocent climbing accident in 1989, just three months before Boivin’s first descent of the Nant Blanc. But by 1995, when Marco picked up a snowboard for the first time, backcountry objectives had changed a bit. In the 1980s, skiing steep lines became an obsession for those who lived and visited Chamonix, and being the first to ski a steep line on a peak in the Mont Blanc massif became a coveted prize. Soon, not many first-descent lines were left. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, culminating with Boivin’s first ski descent of the Nant Blanc and Marco’s second descent in 1999, the prospect of first descents in the Chamonix valley diminished. The best mountain apprenticeship anybody could desire is a childhood in Chamonix, but the next progression in extreme backcountry snowboarding and skiing meant bottling up the spirit and abilities of Saudan, Baud, Vallencant, and Boivin, then applying it to the Himalaya, the highest mountain range in the world. This evolution of extreme skiers and snowboarders, from Saudan to Vallencant to Boivin, and then from Gouvy to Rhem and Ruby, is the similar lineage Americans witnessed with, say, professional basketball players. First there was Julius Erving, then Magic Johnson, then Michael Jordan, then Kobe Bryant, and then LeBron James, and there will be another. Each person in the evolutionary chain cedes to another at some point, and not necessarily with the permission of their predecessor. That was no different for Marco. Beyond a rivalry that developed between he and his snowboarding rivals, these other Chamonix pioneers had been skiers or snowboarders 45

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since they were toddlers. Marco wasn’t the first snowboarder in the lineage of extremists. But finding himself on the Nant Blanc at twenty years old just a few years after learning to snowboard, Marco was an unlikely member of this club. Marco was introduced to backcountry snowboarding as a fifteen-yearold in the winter of 1994-95 by Philippe Forte, a competent climber and school classmate of Marco’s who picked up the relatively new sport when it was gaining popularity among the valley’s youth. Snowboarding’s roots date to the early twentieth century, but the modern version of the sport began in the mid-1960s. On Christmas Day in 1965, Sherman Poppen developed what became known as the “Snurfer,” a contraption that combined elements of snow and surfing to slide down hills near his home in Michigan. Poppen bound his daughters’ two pairs of skis together and created what appeared to be a surfboard. He patented the product and sold it to a company that laminated the wood board design. The Snurfer became the first commercially built and marketed board that slid on snow with the intention of going downhill. More than a million Snurfers had sold by 1970, and a snow surfing competition was held that year in Muskegon, Michigan. This Snurfer led to snowboarding, which induced new designs and technology applied to the original Snurfer board. By 1998 snowboarding was an official sport at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, which legitimized the sport, but it was popularized by the rebellious teenagers of the 1990s. Snowboarding combined skateboarding and surfing, two anti-establishment sports that irritated adults. Since teenagers’ parents skied, skiing was considered uncool. According to the National Sporting Goods Association, the number of American snowboarders increased from 1.5 million to 6.6 million from 1990 to 2004. During that same fourteen-year span, the number of skiers decreased from 11.4 million to 5.9 million. Europe trailed the United States in the sport’s rapidly growing popularity, but snowboarding had reached Chamonix by the mid-1990s when Marco’s childhood fascination with fish had subsided and he gravitated toward hockey and skateboarding.

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On the hockey rink, Marco was small, and the physical nature of the sport didn’t suit him. He didn’t like team training but would practice for hours by himself shooting pucks against walls and doors (his father was constantly repairing holes or doors in their home). Marco was part of a skiing family and continued with the sport but with less and less enthusiasm. He preferred the non-winter months because he could fish and skateboard. He hit lulls in the winter because, no matter how competent he was, skiing didn’t energize him. Once he was introduced to the sport of snowboarding, however, something clicked. His girlfriend, Stephanie, said Marco called skiing “a sport of dinosaurs,” as quoted in the book Marco Siffredi: Dernier Everest. Marco learned to snowboard at the Brevent ski area outside Chamonix and opposite of the Mont Blanc massif. As is the case with most people who learn to snowboard, he fell often. People laughed at his struggle and he laughed at himself, too, but he enjoyed the sensation when he could stay upright. He found snowboarding more fun than training and playing hockey games during the week. He also skateboarded in the non-winter months, racing against cars on asphalt roads of Chamonix, careening aggressively around hairpin turns to ensure he never lost a race. “He started snowboarding because it was something new and it was cooler than skiing,” said his childhood friend and neighbor Hervé Cocco. “But anytime he did something he wanted, he would try to achieve perfection. Just like his father. If Marco touched something, it must be perfect. And by the time he was sixteen, he liked the movement of the snowboard and was naturally talented. Like really talented.” Although skiing made technological advancements that allowed skiers to ski steeper and more technical terrain, skis themselves were skinny and weren’t conducive to speed and slicing through deep snow, known as powder, especially on steep slopes. In the 1990s, a snowboard’s width was greater than three skis combined, and the wider surface area allowed for better balance and floating capability in powder. The earliest images of Boivin, Vallencant, and Baud are on 50-degree steep slopes, but they appeared to be sliding, skidding, and making jump turns down firm snow, even ice. Their movements were rugged, and it often seemed as if they were struggling, a testament to their mettle and superior balance. But 47

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even though what they did was stylistic for their era, it was no comparison to the elegance Marco exhibited on a mountain. That changed with the advent of fat skis in the early 2000s, when skiing regained some of its popularity at snowboarding’s expense. Experts wonder if that is the result of skis being able to do what snowboards can or because twenty-first-century teenagers’ parents snowboard and now the sport is less cool. Either way, Marco’s elegance on a snowboard was unparalleled and unquestioned. His style was defined by arcing graceful turns, the speed at which he carved them, and the way he positioned his hands in the air, as if surfing a big wave. Compared to skiing, Marco found snowboarding more fluid and free flowing. “Marco floated, and he would fly on a snowboard,” said his father Philippe. “It was like he wasn’t on snow but like a spirit above the snow; the style of Marco was marvelous. The surf, the snowboard, it was made for Marco. Marco danced when he snowboarded. Fast and graceful, it was a dance.” He was lightweight and a stick of dynamite out there, and picked up the sport quickly. His small, but strong, frame gave him a low center of gravity and provided him stability at high speeds on variable terrain. He was riding advanced slopes his first year and was snowboarding difficult faces in Chamonix. By 1997, two years after learning how to snowboard, Marco had repeated nearly twenty routes that were pioneered by his predecessors and had notched two first snowboard descents of his own. His talent level was soon beyond the challenges of local resorts. Marco credited his ascendency to Philippe Forte, who accelerated Marco’s snowboarding ability as fast as their friendship. Although Marco’s father was a climbing guide, it was Forte who taught him how to use an ice axe while snowboarding steep faces (to arrest a potential fall), how to set up rappel with a rope (to descend cliff sections that were impossible to descend on a snowboard), and how to assess avalanche conditions outside the resort. “It’s him who made me discover,” Marco told journalists Laurent Davier and Laurent Molitor in the book Dernier Everest. Marco and Forte were best friends, but theirs was an unlikely kinship. Forte was tall, gregarious, and extroverted. Marco was short, introverted away from his family and friends, but charming. If not for snowboarding, 48

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the two likely would have never bonded. Once they did, Marco developed the confidence to break out of his shell publicly. Before he became friends with Forte, Marco was shy around strangers, reserved, and liked to be in control. The latter part never really changed. Bertrand Delapierre, who befriended Forte and Marco as the trio became among the most daring snowboarders in the valley, said Marco never fell in terrain outside the ski resort. Never. When he was with Delapierre and Forte at the resort and monkeying around, sure, Marco would fall attempting tricks and jumps. But outside the resort, a switch was flipped. Marco was careful and methodical with his movements. Some wondered if his commitment to safety was because he didn’t want to leave his parents without a son. “He didn’t speak much about his brother Pierre, and never about the accident that killed him, but you could tell he thought about him while we were in the mountains,” Delapierre said. “Marco was a focused snowboarder. He didn’t know what was possible and what the barriers were, so he pushed the fences down to see what was possible.” In 1997, Marco wore crampons for the first time to climb mountains. Whether it was the Gervasutti Couloir with Delapierre on Mont Blanc du Tacul or Aiguille Chardonnet with Forte, the sustained 55-degree pitches mattered little to Marco. Once he had crampon skills to go along with the others Forte had taught him, there wasn’t a mountain he couldn’t climb. Strangely, he never climbed mountains for pleasure. He only climbed mountains to snowboard down them. He tolerated the laborious nature of climbing—the uncomfortable predawn starts and long hours outside in inhospitable terrain—for an opportunity to snowboard. That was his singular focus. He never slept in a hut or a tent unless it came with the prospect of snowboarding. He enjoyed being out in nature but only if his snowboard was with him. That wasn’t a surprise to his parents, who vividly remember dragging an upset Marco on hiking trails when he was younger. Like most parents of teenagers, they weren’t quite sure what he was up to outside the house. But with his obsession with Boivin and his newfound interest in snowboarding, they suspected it involved perilous risks. His mother worried when Marco left the house and had his snowboard with him, which res49

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urrected memories of the day Pierre left with his skis and never returned. His father was more accepting of his behavior. Dangerous or not, snowboarding retained their son’s interest. Even if they didn’t approve, it was impossible, and foolish, to control him. Once Marco fell in love with snowboarding in the mountains, “his parents couldn’t stop him, so it was better to work with him,” Delapierre said. “Sometimes when you stop people like Marco, perhaps it’s not such a good idea because he will do it anyway.” Snowboarding became Marco’s true calling, a purpose that guided him. By the summer of 1997, when he was eighteen years old, he had amassed an impressive list of accomplishments with Forte and Delapierre. Marco also became more visible. He started dyeing his hair, piercing body parts, and listening to American punk rock and rock and roll music. Whether snowboarding or skateboarding, he gained a confidence about him that perturbed members of the establishment. Chamonix’s skiers and climbers, and its other famous snowboarders in Dede Rhem and Jerome Ruby, were mostly straight-edge, agreeable characters. With colored hair, earrings, and AC/DC blaring from his portable stereo, Marco’s image fit a negative teenage stereotype, but his true character rarely matched the image. Marco never was egotistical about his snowboarding (his riding did the talking for him), but he was more than willing to talk back to sanctimonious climbers and guides who labeled him a snowboard kook with a death wish. Townspeople were aware what Marco, Delapierre, and Forte were up to and labeled them wild, crazy, and stupid teenagers, destined to be buried before long in the Chamonix cemetery. Marco remained committed to challenging himself and respecting those who respected him. “If you have blue hair you are a bad guy to old people,” said Hervé Cocco. “When you have that kind of hair, everyone knew Marco because he brings attention, but it was just for fun. He was the same Marco to us, quiet and would come to barbecues at my house. He had a rock star life, going to parties and having fun, and young people loved him. He was the vision, the beacon, because there are lots of people who come and do amazing things, but they are not born in Chamonix. Marco was born in Chamonix. For the blood and people that meant a lot, so people are very 50

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respectful of Marco here even if everyone didn’t like him. The level he reached made people think it’s possible for anybody. If the small guy with blue hair can do it, we all can do it. He was an inspiration.” More important than elevating his snowboard level, he enjoyed spending time with his friends in the mountains, especially Philippe Forte. They were inseparable. It’s impossible to predict what any teenage friendship would become in adulthood, but the power of kinship at that age is special. A teenager’s raw emotions are more authentic. Adults wish they could bottle that emotion in middle age when friendships are superficial and borne out of one’s circumstance. The carefree nature of Marco and Forte’s actions, the rebelliousness of their choices, their bond that was strengthened in nature, theirs was adolescence at its finest, but with a purpose: see how far they could take snowboarding as a tool in the mountains. Even when teenage hormones were exploding and girls became topics of conversations, the mountains won. “Marco was a panty dropper,” his sister Shooty said in 2018. “But between the ass of some chick or a fresh slope, he preferred the mountain.” In January of 1999, Philippe Forte was killed in an avalanche at the Grand Montets ski area near Chamonix. The day Forte died, it had snowed several feet and was coming down in the late afternoon when disaster struck. Forte was with his girlfriend and wanted one last ride with his less skilled partner. He started down intermediate terrain and stopped to look back for his girlfriend; she didn’t follow him. Forte got stuck in a flat spot and was unable to move. He heard cable cars passing over him in the low-hanging clouds but couldn’t see them. He cried out for help but to no avail. A few seconds later, a snow-loaded slope broke off above him, raced toward Forte, and buried him. He died instantly. Marco was devastated but developed an even greater respect for the indiscriminate power of nature. Although Forte’s death deeply affected Marco, he grew more contemplative with his snowboarding. “Engagement in extreme surfing begins where the fall is prohibited,” Marco said in the book Dernier Everest. “It is a dirty game that attracts me. . . . The mountain teaches me humility. It is a school of life.” 51

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With Delapierre unable to snowboard because of an ankle operation, Marco mourned Forte’s death by spending time in the mountains, often alone. His friends and family wonder if he recorded descents nobody knew about, in memory of Forte and buoyed by an urge to follow through on plans they shared. Marco’s desire to be alone in the mountains was a personal choice to enact the healing process, but some of it was because he didn’t have a choice. Delapierre was a talented and ambitious snowboarder who made a concerted effort to accompany Marco as often as possible. But, in addition to his injury, Delapierre was studying to become an engineer. Academic demands occupied more of his spare time. A talent gap started to grow between them. Marco snowboarded alone at times, but he wasn’t reckless. He would tell friends of his plans, but never told his parents because he didn’t want to worry them. If he didn’t return, Marco asked if his friends would assume the difficult task of breaking such sad news to his parents. “He preferred to always snowboard with a friend, but the trouble became it was difficult for him to find someone able to follow him on something so steep,” said journalist Antoine Chandellier. On June 17, 1999, the day of his Nant Blanc descent, Marco awoke around 2:00 a.m. and smoked a cigarette in the dark. Marco sometimes smoked tobacco, other times marijuana. For those that climbed with Marco, they never remember smoking affecting him. Whether it was a cultural thing (50 percent of French males smoked cigarettes in 1999) or a Marco thing (he was stubborn), he smoked during climbs. The previous afternoon, he took a cable car from Argentiere to the Grand Montets station, which is perched on the edge of a glacier at an elevation of 10,742 feet. Marco spent the night outside the station, not far from where an avalanche had killed Philippe Forte five months before. With his best friend and hero Jean-Marc Boivin on his mind, Marco gathered his belongings and started climbing Aiguille Verte with Loic Lesage, an aspiring guide. The two had never climbed together before. Their headlamps guided them through the maze of crevasses and onto the face before the landscape tilted severely. They began kicking steps into a slope that steepened 52

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to 50 degrees—and stayed that way for several thousand feet. It took roughly seven hours for them to reach the summit. Marco didn’t sleep much the night before as the anticipation of such a historic descent consumed him. Similar thoughts raced through his mind during the ascent: Would he succeed? Was he good enough? Would he survive a mistake? Was he prepared? There was only so much he could assess from the valley floor, from speaking with others, and from weather reports. Within seven hours of leaving the Grand Montets station, Marco and Lesage were on the summit. All his questions would be answered soon. On Mount Everest Marco never descended the route he climbed, but that wasn’t the case on the Nant Blanc. This is standard operating procedure in the backcountry, as it allowed Marco to assess route conditions on the ascent before committing to the descent. Once he dropped onto the face from the relative safety of the summit, it was total commitment. Lesage descended the Whymper Couloir, on the opposite side, leaving Marco by himself. That’s a heavy burden for a twenty-year-old, or any person, to not only handle or survive such a descent but do it with grace and style. There were whispers that he was attempting the Nant Blanc, and since the route is visible from most anywhere in Chamonix, Marco knew the valley was watching. Before the Nant Blanc, Marco’s reputation was created through gossip and rumors, mostly because there was no way to confirm things he did. There were some amateur photos by Forte, some video by fledgling cinematographer Delapierre, and some photos by René Robert, whose work appeared in winter sports magazines and films, but little circulated. Nobody documented Marco’s feats for public consumption, and if they did, the footage captured wasn’t intended to glorify Marco. Much of what Marco did remained private, but he needed to document the Nant Blanc. Even today Nant Blanc has only five documented descents in its history; in 1999 it was so mythical and required so much bravery that Marco would need visual evidence. Marco told photographer René Robert to take the morning cable car to the Grand Montets station, then climb to a nearby ridgeline that provided an interrupted view of the Nant Blanc face. The two agreed on the exact location to capture his descent. Marco told him to be there no later 53

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than 10:00 a.m. or he’d miss a chance to document what became some of Robert’s most thrilling images. Sure enough, at 10:00 a.m., Marco was at the summit of Aiguille Verte and said goodbye to Lesage. He waited about an hour on the summit to allow the snow to soften, then started down a ridgeline before dropping onto the vertiginous face. There was no turning back now. For the next two and a half hours, Marco made a series of delicate turns. Some sections were so steep that an upright Marco could reach out and place his palm on the snow. Each turn was perfection, switching from heel side to toe side with precision balance. Down he went, zigzagging on either side of his footsteps from that morning. His snowboard’s edges sawed into the snow and had to be reliable. The only thing separating him from certain death was his balance, his fortitude, and a two-millimeter metal edge inserted into a long slab of wood held together by polyethylene. One of Robert’s images smelled of death and showcased not just the immensity of the Nant Blanc but how vulnerable Marco was out there. Zoomed in, one image made it difficult to discern Marco’s body from rocks that peppered the face. The snow wasn’t powder, and the yawning glacier below was ready to swallow Marco at the slightest mistake. About two-thirds down was a nearly 150-foot vertical icefall that required Marco to set up a rappel. He uncoiled his rope, attached it to a carabiner that was connected to the anchor point, then tossed each side of the rope down the icefall. He watched the rope snake away before it snapped tight on the anchor. He clipped into the rope and rappelled, his snowboard still attached and scraping the icefall for several minutes. Once at the bottom of the icefall, he recoiled his rope, tightened the zippers on his backpack, and continued. When he could reach out behind him and only grab air instead of snow and ice, he had done it. At twenty years old, Marco had made the second descent of the Nant Blanc, completing it quicker than Boivin and in a similar style. The student had joined the master. “Le Nant, you feel nothing while doing it, you want to get down alive and you’re concentrating, you think about each turn,” Marco told his 54

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friend Bertrand Delapierre for his film Etoile Filante. “Each turn taken is one less to take, you take one and you’re happy, I think you’re happiest when you cross the finish line. It’s definitely a great memory, a great day. . . . Boivin did it when he was thirty-nine and he died at forty. I’m twenty, so I have twenty years (left).” Sitting next to his father in their home later that week, Marco had confidence oozing from his pores. He had done the Nant Blanc solo, with style, with gusto. Philippe didn’t need to ask. Marco had already planned his next objective. It might as well have been written in the stars, like the protagonist’s fate in The Little Prince, his favorite children’s book. “Papa, I will go to Everest,” Marco told his father. It was not a question or a discussion. “I will go to Everest.”

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Chapter Four

Base Camp

When the going gets tough and things go wrong the same qualities are needed to win through as they were in the past—qualities of courage, resourcefulness, the ability to put up with discomfort and hardship, and the enthusiasm to hold tight to an ideal and to see it through with doggedness and determination. . . . Today, it is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, and not for what he may find. —Sir Edmund Hillary in High Adventure Since Russell Brice has been guiding on Mount Everest’s north side, he has always established his team’s base camp site near a barren brown hill of rock called “the mound.” Erected near the toe of the Rongbuk Glacier, which flows in icy, unspoiled chaos from the bottom of the north face of Everest, his camp is about a mile past Rongbuk Monastery, the highest temple in the world at an elevation of 16,500 feet. When Marco and the 2001 team arrived from Tingri, yellow tents were splayed out at seventeen thousand feet on a desolate, windswept palette of terra firma. They shared the general area with several hundred other climbers with the same objective. The Himex base camp was situated near a group of rather unsettling memorials called “chortens” that commemorate climbers who have died on the north side. One memorial not in the vicinity of base camp is that of Britain’s George Mallory, whose chorten is about a mile farther up-val57

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ley (Mallory disappeared on the Northeast Ridge in 1924 while trying to become the first to summit Everest with partner Andrew Irvine). From 1994 to 2008 Himex conducted expeditions on the north side, including both of Marco’s. His 2002 expedition was a customized version that Russ put together specifically for Marco’s Hornbein Couloir attempt. Marco, though, was a full-fledged member of the 2001 Everest Himex team, which came with a $36,000 price tag, a princely sum for the twenty-oneyear-old snowboarder who worked part-time jobs in Chamonix. Russ isn’t a big man, about five-foot-nine with silvery hair and weathered skin, but has a big personality and big experience. His company has placed more people on Everest than any other, and Russ himself has spent more time in the region than any westerner. The Sherpas, including his lead climbing Sherpa Phurba Tashi who accompanied Marco on both of his Everest climbs, call him “Big Boss.” Everyone else referred to him as the mayor. Russ has led more than sixty expeditions to eight-thousand-meter peaks (26,240 feet above sea level), a delineating distinction among mountaineers as there are only fourteen such peaks in the world. Although Everest’s north side base camp is about three thousand feet higher than any point in the contiguous United States, jeeps can be driven there and, all things considered, the services are not as bleak as the brown earth and incessant wind. For his clients, Russ spares neither a necessity nor a luxury. “The accommodations during a Himex expedition, both on and off the mountain, were some of the best available,” Nick Heil wrote in Dark Summit, an account of the 2006 climbing season on the north side. “He (Russ) ran a top-notch kitchen, marshaled sophisticated weather data, employed the strongest Sherpas, and hosted raucous parties.” Just to the south of Marco, in all its shining glory, the north face of Mount Everest rose in a single twelve-thousand-foot push above base camp. When approaching the mountain from the south side in Nepal, it’s first seen along a trail near the town of Namche Bazzar. Above a scrub pine forest Everest is a shy, unassuming mountain, nothing more than a shark fin rising above the Nuptse-Lhotse wall, two satellite peaks that command more attention. If one isn’t looking close enough, Everest could be overlooked, a sad introduction for Earth’s highest point. But 58

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when viewed from Himex’s base camp on the north side in Tibet, Everest is the greatest of all mountains. “There are a handful of mountains that can claim to be the world’s most beautiful,” said journalist Alan Arnette. “Alpamayo in Peru is one, K2 is another, and the north face of Everest is obviously in that company. With steep faces and those couloirs, with two skylines on the left and right, it just wreaks of personality. If you’re a true mountaineer it screams at you: ‘Let’s go, let’s see how good you are.’” Everest is a pyramidal rock mountain defined by three ridges: the west, northeast, and the southeast. The Northeast Ridge is the north side’s most popular climbing route and the one used by Mallory in the 1920s. Marco’s plan was to climb the Northeast Ridge with his snowboard and descend the Norton Couloir (or Great Couloir), which angles toward Camp 1 atop the North Col, a low point on the ridgeline between Everest and its neighbor, 24,868-foot Changtse. From there, Marco would continue riding to advanced base camp and finish the world’s first complete snowboard descent of Everest (summit to camp). If Marco was nervous upon seeing the mountain as they approached base camp from Tingri, the feeling didn’t last long. He was caught staring at the mountain on more than one occasion and filled his days studying both the Norton Couloir and the Hornbein Couloir, the two main hallways below the summit. Marco often was caught talking to himself about the routes but was eager to speak with others who would listen. “Marco liked the fact that he could see the route the whole way up,” Russ said. “He definitely wasn’t here to summit the mountain like everyone else, he was doing that to get to where he could start his actual objective, which was to snowboard. He actually preferred to climb it even though that wasn’t his objective. He was bit old school in that way. Young kids today want to fly to the summit on a helicopter and wonder why they didn’t spot that piece of ice, but Marco was studying the route the entire time.” What he discovered, however, was firm and thin snow conditions in both couloirs. The Hornbein Couloir is little more than a narrow slit directly down the middle of Everest’s north face. It’s the line Jean-Marc Boivin coveted and remains to this day a holy grail of backcountry skiing 59

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and snowboarding. But in the spring of 2001, the line was naked, a single vertical ribbon cutting into the limestone wall, and there were numerous rocky sections connecting sporadic patches of snow. It wasn’t rideable, but Marco wasn’t too upset and quickly turned his attention to the Norton/ Great Couloir. “The Hornbein was a sheet of ice,” Russ said. “When you see green ice, you know it’s not possible. Marco was resigned to that, that he wouldn’t have the best conditions but that he was going to snowboard this anyway. There was no discussion or argument about which route to do, it was totally fucking obvious. The Hornbein wasn’t possible.” Russ wasn’t there on Marco’s 2002 trip to Everest. If he had been, he could have moderated any potential hubris that inflicted Marco. Marco’s friend Bertrand Delapierre maintained that Russ was “Marco’s Yoda” since the Frenchman trusted him and relied on him in numerous ways. Even if Russ hadn’t been there in 2001, Marco wouldn’t have been deluded by a Hornbein attempt. Spring was too dry on Everest. The best season to snowboard the Hornbein would be after the monsoon summer season that drops significant amounts of snow that would fill in the rocky sections and powder the permanent snow. Russ was there to keep Marco safe and ensure his decisions were sound, but even Marco understood the Hornbein wasn’t possible. “We have to sharpen the edges, looks dry up there,” he said on a video diary during his second day in base camp. “So we’ll forget the Hornbein Couloir. We’ll try another one, Messner Couloir [Italian Reinhold Messner was the first person to make an oxygen-less ascent of this couloir in 1978, and it is sometimes referred to as the Messner Couloir]. I didn’t really see the top, the top’s sketchy, the summit, two hundred meters of snow, after maybe one hundred meters of abseil [rappel]. Too bad, then we go down the couloir. I don’t know if I can board all the way down, doubt it, no big deal, we will take the north col at seven thousand meters, descend, cross, and get to the advanced base camp.” As much as Marco accepted conditions and understood that a complete descent without unstrapping from his snowboard was unlikely, he detested expedition life. Unlike in Chamonix, where Marco could be climbing a twelve-thousand-foot peak an hour after leaving his house, 60

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it took more than a month before he would summit Mount Everest. In the Himalaya, one slowly acclimatizes to the high altitude. The summit is twenty-two miles from base camp and looks even farther on some days. Marco was there to snowboard, and there was no snowboarding because there was no snow in the lower valleys. In his video diary, he said, “I hate starting out because you can’t board. On each expedition, I hate base camp. So the days go by quietly, the days are all the same. Snow makes everything better.” As much as Marco wanted to get going, he understood the grind of expedition-style climbing, and embraced aspects of the team building process that develops. Shortly after arriving in base camp, Sherpas organized loads of gear, cooking fuel, food, and everything else team members would need for their stay at advanced base camp and higher camps. Seventeen miles away and at an elevation of 21,300 feet, advanced base camp is the main headquarters for north side expeditions. But since it’s four thousand feet higher than base camp, there is often an interim camp between the two to aid with acclimatization. Team members made a series of trips between base camp and advanced base camp, employing a long-trusted theory of climbing high and sleeping low. This methodical, back-and-forth approach causes cardiovascular systems to produce more red blood cells, and allows bodies to adapt to higher altitudes and theoretically avoid altitude-related illnesses like acute mountain sickness (AMS), high-altitude pulmonary edema, and cerebral edema. (Altitude sickness accounts for about a fifth of all deaths on Everest.) “You can’t compare Marco to the average client,” Russ said. “Marco lived in Chamonix and did shit loads of stuff there. He knows what works and doesn’t work in the mountains. The infrastructure for the climb takes weeks to build, there’s no point in trying to go up early, and so Marco worked with everyone. If he doesn’t work with the team, things disintegrate in their own little way.” While Marco understood the need for acclimatization, the mundane nature of expedition life bothered him. Out of generosity and boredom, he helped Sherpas organize and pack loads for yak trains headed 61

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to advanced base camp. Marco didn’t have many faults, but one chink in his impenetrable armor was that of impatience, which hijacked his mountain sense during the 2002 Everest expedition but was tempered by Russ in 2001. He was fitter than the most fit person on the team and simply wanted to get on with things. Marco, though, knew that team dynamics were critical to everyone’s success, and he also generally liked his teammates, particularly Americans Owen West and Ellen Miller. Continuing with the acclimatization process, Marco and the team spent time between base camp and advanced base camp, hiking during the day and lounging around when they weren’t. Each climber had their own tent, which provided privacy in an otherwise public setting. Team members ate meals together, had team meetings together, and went to the bathroom in the same latrine area together. Marco often recorded videos of himself in his tent and lamented the monotonous, up-and-down schedule. He also mentioned the team members’ lack of physical prowess, but these private thoughts were never revealed. He wasn’t angry at anyone, but he was fit and climbed faster than everyone else. Russ knew it, Marco knew it, and the team knew it, but Marco was never combative and remained supportive. “There was nothing stark about Marco besides he was strong, he was fit, he was keen, and he was prepared,” Russ said. “What everybody else had to do to show me they were capable of climbing Everest, Marco had to show me as well. He followed the schedule and had no complaints to me. And that’s cool because he knew he needed to do that, to demonstrate to me and the Sherpas that we were all in this together. I think he was often frustrated, but he never showed that.” Mountaineering, at its root level, is an individual challenge between man and mountain. Marco climbed by himself, or with a partner, or perhaps two partners, and that’s how things can be accomplished in the Alps. In the Himalaya, because of the length of the expeditions, the logistics, and the work Sherpas must do to pave the way for clients, mountaineering changes from an exercise in selfishness to selflessness. Individual challenges are met through the insertion and adoption of team principles, including mutual respect. The other team members’ goal was to climb Everest, and Russ was preparing them for that. Marco’s goal 62

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wasn’t summiting Everest. Climbing was a means to an end, and Marco viewed it this way in Chamonix as well. “I never worried about Marco once he was on top,” said Chamonix photographer René Robert. “It was the way up that concerned me because he didn’t climb to reach the top. He climbed up to snowboard down and getting down was never a problem for him.” On Everest, the waiting game continued. Marco once said in his video diary, “We’re bored shitless at the base camp.” Marco visited with the Sherpas and yak herders in their areas of base camp, which were separate from the clients. It was a discouraged act, if not a culturally prohibited one, but Marco drank beer with them and took rides in yak carts. It was around this time that he had accepted that the vest he had purchased in the market was indeed stuffed with chicken feathers, which then led to a transaction with a yak herder. At base camp, he liked a yak man’s jacket and one of the yak men liked one of Marco’s earrings. It was a fair trade in both men’s minds, so Marco started wearing the jacket and his chicken feather vest around base camp. “He had a special way of bonding with people,” recalled Ellen Miller, a climber from Colorado who was attempting to become the first American women to climb Everest from both the north and south sides. “He would go over into the camp with these nomadic people who are very primitive in the sense that they’ve never received any type of formal education so they’re unsophisticated people, but lovely people. I remember thinking that Marco’s a really brave soul to immerse himself and go over there and bond with people who weren’t used to people bonding with them.” Among the Himex team members, Marco connected best with West and Miller, who both spoke some French. West limped into advanced base camp one day with his wife. Marco wasn’t struggling and cared for West and his wife, providing water and offering to carry their backpacks a short distance, anything to lessen the burden on the couple. “Everyone in the climbing community is strange and eclectic, so I wasn’t surprised that there was a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman with earrings on Everest,” West said. “I was surprised that he planned to snowboard the mountain . . . that never left me after our first night in 63

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Kathmandu. He was a naturally warm person, smiled all the time, but he was an athlete, almost competing but so nice that he didn’t want to seem pushy. In that body was an Olympic-level athlete with all the fast twitch muscle fibers. There was no question that he was the leader of the Sherpa as a peer. He was superior athletically to everyone in my judgment. So many of us were behind the Sherpa in terms of physical capacity, but Marco was superior and was willing to do all the work as well. He was just way better than all of us, but he never let you know it.” Upon arriving at advanced base camp at 21,300 feet, the other clients went to their tents to recover, rest, and adapt to their new sleeping altitude. This would be the team’s home for the next month, and they wouldn’t return to base camp until the expedition was over or unless there was an emergency like an injury or altitude sickness. Whether it was curiosity of age, his fitness, or his mental wiring, Marco buzzed around, tapping on tents and starting conversations with anyone who obliged. If he couldn’t find willing clients, he walked to Sherpas’ tents and fraternized with them. When he finally retreated to his tent, he’d sketch drawings with colored pencils, listen to rap music and Bob Marley, and read chapters from The Little Prince. Unsure if Marco understood the American rap music’s explicit lyrics, West asked Marco, “Do you know what they are saying right now?” When Marco admitted he didn’t, West filled him in, and Marco was offended and said, “Really, that is what they are saying? That is bad.” Marco ate popcorn one day and got a piece stuck in his teeth. Lodged between his molar and gums, it settled there and caused an infection. Marco lay in his tent whimpering. He had an abscess but wouldn’t let anybody inspect it, let alone touch it and alleviate the pressure. When Chris Warner, a lead guide, explained to Marco that someone needed to poke the infection with a scalpel and let the pus drain out, Marco refused and cried out like a kid who wouldn’t let a parent remove a splinter. Marco ignored the infection. On acclimatization hikes, Marco grimaced and dealt with the pain in his mouth and hoped it somehow would disappear on its own. “I was convinced he would cry if I took him to get a flu shot, which was hilarious considering how much of a badass he was,” Warner said. 64

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“He was such a mama’s boy, a big baby in many ways. But the pressure was so much that Marco couldn’t handle it anymore, so Andy (another guide) barely touched it with a little scalpel and pus exploded everywhere. It was over in a second, then he was back to happy Marco again.” A disciplinarian with a draconian approach, expedition leader Russ had a strict time limit that clients had to meet between advanced base camp to Camp 1 at the North Col, the low point at over twenty-three thousand feet between Everest and 24,868-foot Changtse. To reach the col, clients used ice axes and crampons for the first time. A 45-degree ice wall below the col was the most difficult section. It was equipped with ropes for clients to clip in and ascend the last several hundred feet before the tents. Russ’s policy was if clients could not reach North Col within five hours of leaving advanced base camp, they would never be strong enough to make the summit. Russ gave clients several opportunities, and clients were stressed until they made the time. On his first attempt, Marco reached Camp 1 on the North Col in less than two hours. He was the fastest climber and outpaced Russ’s threshold. Once there, he took off his backpack and leaned back against his snowboard that he placed in the snow. He glanced at the summit, which was about six thousand feet above him, and marveled at the Norton Couloir route. The whole north face of Everest unfolded before him. This would be the same vantage point Russ would return to, year after year, after Marco’s disappearance in 2002 to search for the snowboarder. “First time I saw the couloir, it’s cement, all cement [hard conditions],” Marco said in his video diary. “I don’t know if I can board all the way down, doubt it. If we can do it without abseiling [rappelling], it’ll make it all even bigger.” It would not be Marco’s only trip to Camp 1, so he collected additional mental notes, finished his snack, then strapped into his snowboard and descended to advanced base camp. As he glided past others, he held out his hand to high-five them. No other client had made the North Col yet, and most clients were struggling, hunched over or leaning on their ice axes. They were in no mood for high fives from a sprightly Marco, whose smile matched that of a toddler at a playground. When he didn’t receive a high five in return, 65

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Marco stopped and offered words of encouragement. Once others saw his beaming smile and the gap between his front two teeth, they melted and had no choice but to give him a faint slap of the palm and push on. “You wanted him on your team,” Warner said. “He was just so happy all the time. He was contagious because of his happiness. Marco was your classic mountain man, not arrogant but flamboyant, and just a ridiculously gifted athlete on a team of gifted athletes.” Like West, Ellen Miller was particularly drawn to Marco despite her age being nearly twice that of the twenty-one-year-old. In the team mess tent, Marco made sure Miller ate before the men and often served Miller. “Ladies first everyone,” Marco would say as he ushered her to the front of the line. Marco would visit Miller’s tent to talk about music and life in the mountains. Other times Miller visited Marco’s tent and had noticed he was tinkering with his equipment, studying maps of Everest, listening to objectionable music, drawing pictures, or reading The Little Prince. One day Marco drew a picture of the Little Prince and gave it to Miller, who remembered Marco often discussing the playful and innocent protagonist. After Marco gave Miller the picture, she looked down at it and thought, This might as well be a picture of Marco. At base camp and advanced base camp, Marco often called his parents and friends back home on the expedition’s satellite phone. Marco ran up the expedition’s phone bill with calls to Chamonix. Russ usually prohibited so many cost-inducing calls across the world, but even when Marco’s minutes totaled more than the rest of the team’s combined, Russ permitted it. Marco often called his girlfriend, Stephanie, who was with Marco the first day he went snowboarding at the Brevent ski area. The two had become serious in the years after, or as serious as teenagers can be when it comes to love. Marco was in his twenties by 2001 on Everest, and he was more committed to her than ever. When speaking with Stephanie, Marco would turn from the group, as if the back of his jacket provided ample privacy for an intimate chat between lovers five thousand miles apart. “Marco talked about his girlfriend all the time,” Miller remembers. “He was so in love with her.”

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After one phone call home to his parents at base camp in April of 2001, Marco hung up the phone and sprinted to Ellen’s tent, gleefully shouting “Joyeux Pacques” or “Happy Easter.” Miller was acclimatized by then and less irritated by his spontaneous bursts of energy. Marco hadn’t realized it was Easter before speaking with his parents, so he reminded the one person he thought would celebrate Easter with him. That afternoon, Miller and Marco shared chocolate and colored Easter eggs. “It was like a really big deal to him that it was Easter,” Miller said. “He was playful and child-like, but it wasn’t superficial. It wasn’t for show. Even today (eighteen years later), I will always remember him as a twenty-year-old that was gentle and kind. He was a big star athlete who had that glitz and glamour, but in a very simple way he was just a respectful young man. He didn’t clash with anyone. He was very driven and focused from an athlete’s perspective. He just didn’t have a conventional brain . . . he was either smiling and happy or serious and focused. He had a confidence about him that left us no doubt, he was going to snowboard Everest.” Mount Everest is named after Sir George Everest, the former British surveyor of India whose preference was mountains be called by their local names. The local name for the peak is Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World. (Some Nepalese call it Sagarmatha, which means Peak of Heaven.) Everest wasn’t known to westerners until 1852 when a mathematician for the Survey of India discovered a high point above the plains of India and labeled it Peak XV. Within four years, the Royal Geographic Society renamed the peak Everest and, using triangulation methods, declared its official height at 29,002 feet above sea level, making it the tallest mountain in the world. Its official height increased to 29,028 feet following a survey in 1953, when it was first climbed by New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. (The mountain’s official height was updated most recently in 2020 and currently measures 29,032 feet.) In some ways, those climbers were unlikely candidates to enter the record books as Everest’s first summiteers. Although Everest was considered the highest mountain in 1852, it remained inaccessible to westerners since the kingdoms of Nepal and Tibet were closed to foreigners. Nepal remained off-limits until 1949, but 67

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the British received permission from Tibet in 1920 to explore Everest’s north side. Until then, only local Himalayan people had been close to Everest. In 1921 a British reconnaissance team left the northern India town of Darjeeling and approached Everest via the Rongbuk Monastery, which was built two decades earlier in 1899. From the monastery, a young adventurer named George Leigh-Mallory explored the Rongbuk Glacier, which led directly to the base of Everest’s enormous ten-thousand-foot north face. If anybody deserved to summit Everest first, it was Mallory. Mallory sought ways to conquer the mountain in 1921 but didn’t consider the couloirs Marco snowboarded as plausible routes. To get another view, Mallory climbed Everest’s western flank and reached Lo Lha, a pass at nearly twenty thousand feet that marks the border between Tibet and Nepal. Mallory became the first westerner to see the highest valleys of Nepal. He noted a wide river of ice he called the Western Cwm, which was the apron Norgay and Hillary accessed more than thirty years later to ascend the Southeast Ridge route. He was forbidden to enter Nepal, but Mallory wasn’t convinced the Western Cwm led to a viable route and so he returned his focus to Tibet’s Northeast Ridge route. In his estimation, the skyline didn’t pose technical difficulties, but he still needed to access the North Col, where Marco got his first intimate view of the summit. Mallory did just that in 1921, splintering from the valley leading to the Central Rongbuk Glacier and venturing up the valley containing the East Rongbuk Glacier. At the glacier’s head was the North Col. All that separated Mallory and the twenty-three-thousand-foot pass was a five-hundred-foot ice cliff, one that Marco snowboarded after his first climb to the col. Once Mallory climbed to the North Col, he knew his assessment was correct: The Northeast Ridge was the way to the summit. Mallory traveled no farther that year but returned the following one and launched the first official assault to reach Earth’s highest point. By spring of 1922, Mallory was back at the Rongbuk Monastery and within weeks was at the North Col and ready to climb higher. His determination became an obsession, though it had little to do with entering the record books. Once the North Pole was reached in 1909 and the South Pole in 1911, Everest was deemed Earth’s third pole and the 68

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last great man versus nature challenge. Mallory was aware of this global fascination, but his relationship with the mountain seemed more deeprooted and personal. Author David Roberts wrote in his 1999 book, The Lost Explorer, that: “Everest was an opportunity not to be missed: it would be an extraordinary adventure; and it would be something for George to be known by, in his future work as an educator and writer. Thus, in a decision more pragmatic than spiritual, George Mallory walked open-eyed into the obsession that would make him famous, and that would cost him his life. Mallory had the kind of addiction to risk that skeptical observers considered simple recklessness.” Mallory and Marco shared numerous parallels in their lives, not the least of which was their sheer talent. Growing up in England, Mallory enjoyed the same general lack of discipline as Marco. Both were born into financially stable families, and both could be considered obstinate and stubborn. Mallory was once sent to his room by his parents as a punishment but later was found on the roof of a nearby church. In his mind, he had followed directions because he went to his room first and got his hat before leaving the house. Teachers cited his lazy work ethic toward assignments, and he was routinely disciplined at school. That didn’t really encapsulate Marco’s behavior in school, but like Marco, Mallory preferred being outside and in nature than confined in a classroom. Mallory was in his thirties when he first visited Everest, whereas Marco was barely removed from his teenage years upon joining the 2001 Himex expedition. In the early 1900s, Mallory established himself as a skilled mountaineer and recorded numerous first ascents in Chamonix. Although the valley’s principal peaks had been climbed by 1900, the next progression was for climbers to establish new routes on these great peaks. The one that connected Marco and Mallory is the Mallory-Porter route on the north face of the 12,600-foot Aiguille du Midi, a four-thousandfoot-long route that was first climbed in 1919 by Mallory and Harold Porter. Marco, who could see the route from his house, descended the route less than two years after learning to snowboard. First skied by Pierre Tardivel in 1994, the Mallory-Porter route is rated “fairly difficult” on 69

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the French climbing system but is an extreme backcountry descent. It is located directly underneath the cable car and is one of several extreme backcountry descents on the north face. With two mandatory rappels and several steep sections measuring 55 degrees, it’s no-fall-zone territory and requires route-finding ability to avoid terminal cliffs. One of the route’s redeeming qualities is that it’s accessible from the top of the Aiguille du Midi cable car station and offers front-row viewing for visitors. As a teenager, Marco walked out of the cable car, navigated hordes of tourists, strapped on his snowboard, and descended a narrow ridgeline separating the Mallory route and the Valle Blanche, the longest ski run in the world and one that is suitable for intermediate skiers. The only thing separating the two is a rope line and a path of footprints. But in Chamonix, nobody checks one’s credentials and tourists can walk onto the north face as easily as Marco did. While the Nant Blanc cemented Marco’s status as the best snowboarder in the valley, it was his routine descents of the Mallory that ignited those rumors. On winter days today, there could be a dozen people descending the Mallory, but it was hallowed ground in the mid-to-late 1990s and remains a test piece for skiers and snowboarders. In ski towns, being a local comes with perks. One such perk is knowing ski lift operators and cajoling them into being first on the lift, especially in powder conditions. In the late 1990s, Marco’s territory was the north face of the Aiguille du Midi. He was the most accomplished and stylistic skier or snowboarder seeking out the various lines, and he was also concerned with being the first to ride them in fresh snow. In a 2012 article in Powder magazine, Chamonix resident Nate Wallace said: “The first 10 to 20 bins used to be reserved for Chamonix Mountain Guides. So, if you didn’t know Marco Siffredi or the French guys, it didn’t matter if you got to the tram at 6:30 in the morning. You weren’t getting up until at least 20th bin. It was like (surfing) the North Shore of Oahu, it was completely regulated by the locals. Nowadays, you can sneak in before the guides.” Marco became synonymous with the route and, to him, snowboarding it was as routine as brushing one’s teeth. He’d make five laps of the Mallory in a single day, and his tracks would be visible days after a 70

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snowstorm. His bullish nature in getting first tracks and never waiting in line didn’t endear himself to guides who watched Marco flip them off as he walked into the first bin. Their clients were appalled at Marco’s behavior, but kept their mouths shut. Guides preferred a quiet, sanitary, and respectful ride, but Marco possessed a sailor’s lexicon and loudly expressed his excitement about snowboarding the Mallory-Porter. Marco’s teenage antics are in stark contrast to the respectful twentyone-year-old that West and Miller encountered on Everest in 2001, but in 1997, the gulf couldn’t have been wider between the blue-haired snowboarder with earrings and the proper guides trying to maintain the respect of their clients. For Marco, being the first to snowboard a mountain was a coveted achievement, no different than being the first to climb a mountain or establish a new route. Like Marco, Mallory’s apprenticeship in Chamonix gave him the confidence to attempt the ultimate first: Everest. Mallory was married with children and worked as a teacher when he returned to Everest in 1922. While Marco and Mallory’s ages differed, their penchant for risk and exploration did not. Remembering a time Mallory worked as a guide in the 1900s, David Roberts wrote in The Lost Explorer: “Some years later, after Mallory had led a very experienced Austrian mountaineer up a difficult route in Wales, the visitor marveled at Mallory’s ‘mastery of the hardest pitches,’ but inveighed, ‘That young man will not be alive for long.’” David Pye, a schoolmate of Mallory’s who published a memoir in 1927, once wrote about his childhood friend: “There is no doubt that all of his life he enjoyed taking risks, or perhaps it would be fairer to say doing things with a small margin of safety.” The high-stakes game of Himalayan climbing became evident to Mallory during the 1922 expedition. Two members of his team reached 27,300 feet on the Northeast Ridge before returning to the North Col because of exhaustion and deteriorating weather. The 1922 expedition was the first to experiment with oxygen when climbing, but the heavy and faulty apparatus was more of a hindrance than a benefit. Nevertheless, Mallory was prepared to make another summit attempt before an avalanche beneath the North Col killed seven Sherpa, which ended the expedition and was the deadliest climbing accident on Mount Everest until 1996 when eight climbers died on Nepal’s Southeast Ridge route. 71

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Mallory would return one more time to Tibet before disappearing on the north face. On a publicity tour in 1923, a New York Times reporter asked Mallory why he wanted to climb Everest, to which the climber famously responded, “Because it’s there.” In a later speech about the mountain and risking one’s life to climb, an excerpt of which appeared in The Lost Explorer, Mallory said, “To refuse adventure is to run the risk of drying up like a pea in its shell.” The tour coincided with Mallory’s teaching duties at Cambridge University. Saddened by the Sherpa deaths in 1922 but dogged in their pursuit of climbing Everest, the British returned in 1924. And, of course, the country’s most accomplished climber would be there. Being a father, a professor, and a husband to his wife Ruth mattered little to Mallory in comparison with his dreams to climb Everest. “The mountain had become his destiny,” Roberts wrote in The Lost Explorer. Roberts recounted a conversation between Mallory, before he left for Everest in 1924, and a Cambridge colleague that revealed a fatalistic premonition: “This is going to be more like war than mountaineering. I don’t expect to come back.” Before an expedition attempts to climb Everest, whether in 1924 with Mallory or in 2001 with Marco, a puja ceremony is held to appease the mountain gods. A puja normally takes place in base camp where Sherpas create a stone altar or cairn and decorate it with prayer flags. Monks often walk from surrounding monasteries to participate. The puja is mostly symbolic for western climbers but is a deeply spiritual ritual for Sherpas as Buddhists. A ceremony consists of several prayers to gods, asking them to provide everyone safe passage. Toward the end, Sherpas and climbers place something against the altar as an offering for the gods to bless. When the puja is over and the gods have been respected, it’s party time: Everyone cheers, rice and flour are tossed into the air, and shots of alcohol are sometimes consumed. At base camp in 2001, Marco participated in a puja ceremony. He wasn’t very religious, although his parents were, but he respected and was curious about religions. In 1997, the mother of his friend and neighbor, 72

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Hervé Cocco, gave Marco a necklace with a silver cross. Cocco’s mother was a devout Catholic and told Marco to keep it with him for luck on climbs. He brought the necklace with him on every climb after that. During one of his phone calls to Chamonix from Everest in 2001, he pleaded with Cocco to tell his mother that he had the cross with him. “It is more a joke for Marco, for play, as he doesn’t pray before he sleeps, but he respects all religions,” Cocco said. “But when you have the chance to have luck, why not take the luck?” During the puja ceremony when climbers offered an item to be blessed, West, Miller, and other team members placed their crampons and ice axes against the altar. Marco, though, hadn’t offered anything yet. Not thinking of himself as a climber and feeling somewhat uninvolved, he glanced over his shoulders and snapped his neck left and right. Then he walked over and picked up his snowboard, hauled it to the altar, and leaned his board against the stones. There was a pause in the ceremony. The Sherpas and the other climbers looked at one another, then locked eyes with Marco. He squinted a bit and smiled. The ceremony resumed, rice was tossed, and Marco was ready to become the first person to snowboard Everest. “It was one of the most poignant moments of my life, seeing Marco place his snowboard there to be blessed,” Miller said. “And that’s when it hit me . . . oh man, this is unusual. This is a little risky.” Toward the third week of May, on the way to Camp 1 atop the North Col at twenty-three thousand feet, West and Marco found themselves chatting. After weeks of climbing between the various camps, the team was acclimatized. The never-ending procession was ending, and everyone’s objectives were within their grasps. Expeditions seem to take forever but end quickly. A week from then, West and Marco would be driving back to Kathmandu and sitting at the airport waiting to return home. This reality wasn’t lost on West, who admitted he would miss the “rascally kid with a huge heart” from Chamonix. West, a thirty-one-yearold Wall Street trader, went to Everest hating rap music but grew to enjoy it because Marco listened to it. West never converted Marco to be a fan of his favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen. West wasn’t too insulted when 73

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Marco didn’t provide his reasoning for not liking the American rock star, but Marco eventually did reveal the source of his impatience throughout the trip. Marco was concerned because an Austrian snowboarder, Stefan Gatt, was on the north side that year and was also attempting to become the first person to snowboard from Everest’s summit. Just like Mallory felt it was his destiny to climb Everest, Marco felt snowboarding Everest was his. As Marco and the others made their push to higher camps, he didn’t know where Gatt was. But since Gatt’s team arrived at base camp earlier than the Himex team, Marco knew Gatt was higher on the mountain and in a better position. Learning that someone else had snowboarded Everest first was one thing. But witnessing that person steal his dream and carve turns from the summit as he was climbing the final parts of the route—that thought plagued him. Marco wasn’t ignorant of this arms race, but he felt inaction was the culprit, not ill-fated timing. In Chamonix, snowboarders Jerome Ruby and Dede Rhem wanted the Nant Blanc route before Marco had even learned to snowboard. Marco asked Rhem about the route and if they wanted to come along with him, but they declined his invite. “Everybody wanted that line, everybody, but people were a lot more cautious than they are now,” said Chamonix snowboarder and writer Trey Cook. “People didn’t race up and charge into things like they do now. Definitely Dede and Jerome wanted that line really bad, and Marco totally snaked them.” Marco didn’t want anybody to snake him on Everest. He wasn’t interested in collecting every first descent, but the ones he did want, he wanted. Marco’s ultimate goal was to snowboard the Hornbein Couloir and honor his hero, Jean-Marc Boivin, but being the first to snowboard any route on Everest was still important. Ever since meeting Russ in 1999 and drinking beers with him at a pub in Chamonix, Marco had been preparing for this moment. It was also in May of 2001 when the Himex team was ready to launch a summit bid, and Marco turned twenty-two years old on May 22, 2001. Dates had always been important to Marco, and he wanted to make Everest’s first snowboard descent on his birthday. 74

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“A famous skier one time called Marco to make a new first descent in the Alps,” said his close friend Bertrand Delapierre. “It was a nice mountain, quite long, and the skier had success, but Marco said it snowed in Chamonix the previous night and he wanted to go snowboarding with friends, not make a first descent. He did not want to collect every first descent. He has many goals, but not every goal. Somebody else’s goals were not his goals.” Gatt, however, didn’t care about Marco’s goals or his birthday; he had his own plans. On May 22, 2001, Marco reached high camp at 27,300 feet. A day late, the team’s schedule negated any chance of a historic climb and snowboard happening on Marco’s birthday. More unsettling, Gatt climbed to the summit that day and became the first person to snowboard from the summit of Everest. Marco collapsed when he heard the news. He stayed in his tent at high camp, writhing and moaning most of the afternoon. Crestfallen, Marco considered ending his expedition. “He was more than mildly disappointed, he was crushed, almost depressed,” West said. “I had never seen Marco not smile for so long. He thought his dream was over.”

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Making History

There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with those in mind I say, Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end. —Edward Whymper in The Ascent of the Matterhorn On the morning of May 23, 2001, Marco Siffredi stood frozen on his snowboard at over twenty-eight thousand feet above sea level on the north face of Mount Everest. The rollercoaster of emotions from the previous day, his twenty-second birthday, had been replaced with the seriousness of his current predicament: an eight-foot cliff guarding the upper entrance of the Norton Couloir. Also known as the Great Couloir, the Norton Couloir is named after Britain’s Edward Norton. During the 1924 British expedition made famous by George Mallory’s disappearance, Norton, the official leader of the expedition, climbed without supplemental oxygen to 28,126 feet. Norton’s height was a world altitude record for nearly three decades until 1953 when Hillary and Norgay first stood on the summit. Norton’s physiological capacity to reach such an altitude without oxygen inspired Reinhold Messner to make the first solo oxygen-less ascent of Everest in 1980 via a similar route (hence why

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Marco referred to the Norton Couloir as the Messner Couloir in his video diary from base camp). With Mallory and his partner Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappearing on the Northeast Ridge that year, Norton’s feat was overshadowed by the whereabouts of Mallory and whether he was the first to summit Everest twenty-nine years before Hillary and Norgay. If not for a maze of rock, ice, and snow that included the cliff Marco was staring at, Norton could have made a solo summit attempt himself. But by early afternoon he was in uncharted territory and, if he hoped to survive, couldn’t justify continuing. He turned around in 1924 just where Marco was frozen in 2001 at a cliff. Norton rejoined partner Theodore Somervell, who had turned around a few hundred feet earlier because of a dry throat and incapacitating cough. Norton and Somervell descended to their high camp, and a few days later Mallory and Irvine left high camp and were never seen again. Marco, who approached the cliff from above, was in peak physical condition and using oxygen at the upper entrance of the couloir. Below was a 50-degree snow slope of questionable condition. The cliff gave Marco a slight pause. In Chamonix, Marco would have jumped the cliff without hesitation, but on this day, he was where no skier or snowboarder had been. Not that it would have mattered much if he had a prior trip report. The cliff ’s height wasn’t a concern; it was the landing. Norton described the terrain in that area this way in Everest: The Ultimate Book of the Ultimate Mountain: “The whole face of the mountain was composed of slabs like the tiles on a roof, and all sloped at much the same angle as tiles. I had twice to retrace my steps and follow a different band of strata; the couloir itself was filled with powdery snow into which I sank to the knee or even to the waist, and which was not yet of a consistency to support me in the event of a slip. Beyond the couloir the going got steadily worse . . . it was not exactly difficult going, but it was a dangerous place for a single unroped climber, as one slip would have sent me in all probability to the bottom of the mountain.” To help Marco through this section, Russell Brice was stationed at Camp 1 on the North Col. He was following Marco with a telescope and 78

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communicated with him via two-way radio. Russ directed Marco from below, alerting him of his location in relation to any potential hazards along the way and guiding him down the mountain. Marco had memorized the route’s details, but the scope, size, and complexity of Everest’s north face were beyond anything he had experienced. Horizontally, from the start of the Northeast Ridge to the end of the West Ridge, the north face is about two miles from side to side, with an average vertical drop of eight thousand feet over that distance. From the North Col there was an unobstructed view of Marco’s current location, but he was invisible to the naked eye. Unless he was moving, Marco appeared no different than rocks. Russ’s route-finding services were necessary as much as they were appreciated. It was teamwork at its finest and how Marco made history in 2001, but first he had to figure out this small cliff in a sea of larger ones. “There’s this big drop onto the steep snow slope, which caused us an amount of awareness,” Russ said. “Marco said he almost fucked up there. I am telling him go right here, go left there, because he can’t see what is coming and now here is this rock. I am talking to him and trying to get him to this snow slope, but we didn’t know about that drop and Marco just came across it. If a mistake was made, he would be dead.” Marco launched the cliff and disappeared into a hollow where Russ could no longer see him. Had he been successful, Russ imagined he’d be immediately back in sight. When he didn’t reappear, Russ started to worry. If Marco had fallen, Russ would have seen his body bouncing on the cliffs and sliding uncontrollably. Since he didn’t, he imagined he was alive but in trouble. Russ wondered if Marco’s snowboard suffered from a mechanical error upon landing, and for good reason. Marco’s binding had broken shortly after leaving the summit; minus-30 temperatures likely compromised the plastic binding’s durability. Marco didn’t experience any complications up until the point of his binding breaking. Marco left high camp before 2:00 a.m. and was on the summit before sunrise at 6:00 a.m. He arrived before the Sherpas. It wasn’t a race or else the Sherpas would win, as rarely did anybody beat them to the top. Most climbers require eight hours to climb from high camp to the summit. Marco left

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with the Himex team that morning but pulled away immediately and demonstrated superior strength and stamina climbing through the dark. “He was flying that day,” said American guide Chris Warner, who filmed Marco from near a rock outcropping at 28,500 feet on the Northeast Ridge known as the Third Step. “Everyone thinks they are a badass, and then you watch someone like Marco doing laps around everyone on Everest. The level of respect for Marco, not just on summit day but throughout that trip, was immense. Everybody was in awe of him.” At the summit, Marco strapped into his snowboard and connected with Russ on the radio. Russ: “Marco, are you ready to go?” Marco: “I slowly take more oxygen, attach my snowboard and go.” Just past 6:00 a.m., with the sun rising and coloring the landscape golden, Marco descended. He wore a purple down suit and a black backpack. Inside the pack were items he would need to descend, including a full oxygen tank, anchors, and a rope. From the summit he made an initial heel-side turn, exposing the front of his body to an immense drop to the Central Rongbuk Glacier below in Tibet, then skidded onto his toe side and darted down a ridge. With a cornice on his right side and a jungle of rocks tilting toward the glacier on his left, he skirted rocks and climbers on wind-scoured snow with careful precision. There were ten-thousand-foot drops on either side of him. He clutched an ice axe with his uphill hand to arrest a potential fall. His herky-jerky progress on uneven snow soon gave way to a smoother set of turns on the wider summit pyramid. At the bottom of this slope he visited with fellow Himex climbers who had just moved past the Third Step, the route’s last technical hurdle before the final summit push. American Owen West had turned around earlier at a rock feature known as the First Step, but Colorado’s Ellen Miller was there. “I looked up and saw Marco coming down and it seemed that the snow conditions were such that he was pretty capable and confident, and he was arcing these beautiful turns when he came up to me, took off his oxygen mask, and said, ‘Bonjour Ellen . . . how’s it going?’” Miller recalled. “Here we are over 28,000 feet and it’s like he was on Vail moun-

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tain [a popular US ski area]. A lot of young men would have had a huge expanded ego doing what he was doing, and he did not. He stopped and asked how we were doing like he really cared. I’m huffing and puffing, and he wants to have a conversation. He was such a special character.” The winds whipped the upper summit pyramid and sprayed plumes of snow into the blue sky, plummeting the wind chill toward minus 50. Before stopping to chat with Miller, one of Marco’s snowboard bindings broke. Unable to properly secure his feet to the board, he gradually came to a stop near his teammates. Marco didn’t mention the broken binding to Miller but began exchanging pleasantries in arctic temperatures. Here was Marco, his descent in question and hypothermia and frostbite looming as real concerns, yet he was more concerned with her than with the most important achievement of his life. Marco wanted to snowboard Everest, yes, but he wanted everyone to achieve their dreams. He was always drawn to those people who dreamed big like him. (Miller summited that day and later became the first American woman to climb Everest from both the Southeast Ridge and Northeast Ridge routes.) A few years later, when she visited Marco’s mother in Chamonix, Miller described that indelible moment to Michele, who cried. On that morning in 2001, with a busted binding at 28,500 feet, his descent should have ended. Sherpas, though, fixed Marco’s binding with bailing wire and his life hinged to that bailing wire holding for the seven-thousand-foot descent to advanced base camp. Trusting of their workmanship, Marco waved goodbye to Miller, reattached his oxygen mask, and started the exposed angled traverse toward the entrance above the Norton Couloir. Traversing on a snowboard is a specific technique that requires balance and continuous micro-adjustments to hold one’s line in the snow at a controlled, consistent speed. Traverses are required to get from one point to another when there isn’t another safer way because danger lurks above and below. Any drop in elevation from stopping or slowing during the traverse could lead to trouble. Marco’s leg muscles couldn’t disobey him on the traverse, or he’d slide into chaotic zones of ice/snow and limestone ramps without safe exit points. Marco had mastered the traverse technique and so, despite labored breathing and his pack threatening his balance, he maintained his line and speed. He found the only clear pas81

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sage through this minefield of cliffs, snow, and ice. He was just through it when he encountered the eight-foot cliff, which looked like nothing more than a large boulder through a camera lens. Russ described the traverse to Marco over the radio: “It is very thin there Marco. Go straight across there Marco. Straight across to get to that snow slope right on the edge. Just a piece of rock in front of you and then it’s clear after that.” Marco launched the cliff or “piece of rock,” and, upon landing, his knees jammed into his stomach and knocked the wind out of him. He sat down and collected himself a bit. With Marco hidden from view, Russ thought about a rescue. With Himex’s Sherpas nearby on the Northeast Ridge route, a rescue was possible, but he wouldn’t endanger Sherpas without first knowing Marco’s status. “It was probably better I couldn’t see his landing; otherwise I would have been starting a rescue, which would’ve been rather easy to do at that part of the mountain,” Russ said. “Our people were still there, and he was still high enough where we could reach him. I thought what he was doing was quite radical. His equipment failed and he decided he was going to do it with a piece of wire, and if that breaks, he is dead. But anyway, off he went to snowboard.” With a rescue unnecessary, Marco reentered Russ’s view and Russ steered him into the main couloir that measured between 45 and 50 degrees in steepness. Slow and steady but very much in control, Marco exhibited solid, stable turns over the next five hundred feet until he reached a sixty-foot rock band. This section posed the most significant technical challenge of the route, known as the “crux” in climbing parlance. Russ said on the radio: “Marco, you think you maybe abseil [rappel] there or you try to go to your left?” Russ wanted to be encouraging but knew there was no chance Marco could descend this section without unstrapping and/or setting up a rappel. This is precisely what Marco didn’t want to do. After collapsing in his tent at high camp the day before, dejected over Austria’s Stefan Gatt becoming the first to snowboard Everest, details of that descent trickled into Marco’s camp. 82

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Gatt’s descent initially spoiled Marco’s birthday, but he discovered Gatt had to unstrap and downclimb several sections of the Northeast Ridge route. This had discounted Gatt’s descent as it wasn’t considered a complete descent, an important distinction among purists. When Marco learned that Gatt didn’t keep his board on the entire time and downclimbed, he exploded from his sleeping bag. Instantly his gap-toothed smile smeared across his face again, and Marco’s twenty-second birthday ended up being a good one. Now Marco faced his route’s technical crux. If he wanted to be the first person to make a complete snowboard descent of Everest, Marco couldn’t rappel here or else he’d risk subjecting himself to the same scrutiny Gatt did. After weeks of preparation, months of saving, and years of dreaming, he was in position to make a complete and pure descent. But, in Russ’s estimation, if Marco wanted to hug his mother again, he would have to rappel. The rock band had small ledges with slivers of snow that loosely connected. At sea level and on flat ground, he could link these sections in a challenging game of hopscotch. But at 27,225 feet above sea level and attached to a snowboard, such mountain ballet wasn’t possible. Complicating matters further, the terrain was steep. Marco couldn’t see a way through this section because his horizontal view, or “roll over,” was blind. Although Russ could see what was below, Marco extended his neck over the precipice and only saw air. From photographs and maps, as well as examining this section with Russ from the North Col, Marco knew there was a wide-open snowfield below him. Reaching that snowfield meant success, but if he had to rappel or unstrap to reach it, Marco knew the purity of his descent would be compromised. Style and ethic mattered, just as they did on the Nant Blanc. Russ and Marco discussed this zone at length throughout the expedition. Marco agreed to bring rappel gear, but Marco told Russ that he would make a final decision once he was there. Russ trusted Marco’s judgment. “Marco’s dream was to snowboard Everest and I reckoned it could be done, but it’s a big responsibility,” Russ said. “Marco was well aware that conditions might not allow that. We had discussed all of this before he even left Chamonix. He was aware of all the things that could go wrong. It’s not like he could just pop onto the summit of Everest day and start 83

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snowboarding. But above 8,000 meters (26,250 feet), you can’t have anything go wrong. Now you got a bloke that is snowboarding up there, and he is really out of my control. If a simple thing goes wrong up there, a person dies, or several people could die. This wasn’t a simple thing he was doing, and Marco knew it.” Upon seeing this crux section through binoculars earlier from base camp, Marco said he would prefer to not rappel. But in his video diary, he also exhibited some maturity and expressed a willingness to wait until fall when there would be more snow, which would decrease the odds of having to rappel. “If we can do it without abseiling, it’ll make it all even bigger,” said Marco, who then followed with: “We’ll have to rappel, whatever else happens, we’ll have to rappel in. We’ll wait for the fall, if it doesn’t happen, it’s OK. We’re not crazy.” At the crux and determined to explore a bit more, Marco skidded along an apron of snow that split the sixty-foot rock band in half. He teetered on a thin boundary between confidence and hubris. He stopped at the end of the apron, inches from a death cliff. If Marco didn’t rappel soon, he’d be forced to leap onto slivers of snow on surrounding rock ledges where it would be nearly impossible to set up a rappel. That’s all assuming he didn’t tumble over the edge. He had reached a point of no return. It was decision time. As expected, Marco sat down and fiddled about. “He was well prepared to abseil,” Russ said. “No other way around it. It’s not vertical, but he’s got to get down it. It was clear to us he was going to put a picket in and abseil.” Marco stood up without a rope and aimed his board to the left, then hopped onto a rock ledge that was free of snow. He balanced himself on the rock ledge, then shifted onto an unstable depression of snow that crumbled beneath him. The snow patch was perhaps six feet wide. He inched closer toward another set of cliffs. Standing on his snowboard again, he shimmied to the left and leaned awkwardly onto a downwardslanting limestone ramp. His momentum caused by the steepness propelled him down the ramp in sort of a controlled fall. Unable to stop and think, he had been catapulted too far forward. He would have to deal 84

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with this situation on the fly, and the ramp ended with a cliff he hadn’t realized was there before getting onto it. He would have to blindly jump into what he hoped was a snow-filled chute or risk losing his balance and tumbling thousands of feet to the glacier below. These maneuvers were requiring split-second decision making at twenty-seven thousand feet. His brain functions were deteriorating each minute, oxygen or no oxygen. He relied on his intuition more than anything at this point and had to trust that a flash of white was snow and that flash of brown was rock. The intensity of these mental gymnastics exceeded the physical ones. As with the eight-foot cliff near the entrance of the couloir above that knocked the wind out of him, Marco had no idea what the snow conditions would be below him. The ramp ended. He jumped. If that flash of white was ice instead of snow, he wouldn’t know until he slammed into the ice and bounced off the mountain. Marco landed. The snow was firm, but he stayed upright. His snowboard’s edges sawed into the snow, and he balanced himself. But the chute’s steepness accelerated his speed as he pinballed left and right between the limestone walls on either side of him. In yet another controlled fall, Marco skidded onto his heels and exited the chute. Once onto the wide-open slope below, he regained complete control. He decelerated, then stopped. Holy Shit! Russ thought, but he calmly told Marco over the radio: “Well done, well done man. Now much more easy for you. Much more easy after this.” Marco hadn’t exhibited any elegant turns in this area, but they were the turns of brawn, the turns of someone who would return to Chamonix as the best snowboarder in the world. He wasn’t well known outside his French valley, and much of that was by Marco’s design, but news of what he had just done would travel fast. He would be inconspicuous no more. There was nothing but a steep, uninterrupted hallway of snow before him. No more cliffs, and no more surprises. He could see the North Col, and he could smell success. Marco had overcome the crux. And he never unstrapped. Russ’s thoughts on what he witnessed that morning required years to comprehend. 85

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“He told me it was easier to jump down than abseil [rappel],” said Russ, shaking his head in disbelief. “To watch a guy do that in Chamonix would be pretty amazing, but to watch a guy do that on Everest . . . my eyes are bloody saucers. He improvised during the moment, and what type of snow is he going to land on? He had no idea. This was the confidence level of this guy, that he could summit and come down on a broken binding, then go off cliffs onto snow slopes that none of us knew anything about. I am concentrating on Marco the entire time and giving him direction, trying to tell him if there is better snow here or there, but he doesn’t realize how much I am just shitting myself when he was up there. My eyes are popping out the entire time, it was just remarkable.” The highest mountain range in the world is the Himalaya, which stretches fifteen hundred miles from its northwest recesses where Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan intersect to the border of Bhutan and India in the southeast. The range is broken into three layers: The southern layer is the foothills; the middle layer is the Lesser Himalaya with peaks averaging fifteen thousand feet; the northern layer is the Greater Himalaya, a nearly impenetrable wall of twenty-three-thousand- to twenty-nine-thousand-foot peaks that collides with the Tibetan plateau. Roughly one hundred miles separate the three layers, and just fifty million years old, the Himalaya is, geologically speaking, a young and active range. As the Indian tectonic plate slides further under the Eurasia plate, the range’s peaks continue to grow about a quarter-inch a year. In terms of height, the Himalaya has no equal. Of the 137 peaks in the world higher than 22,900 feet above sea level, all of them are in the Himalaya or a subset of the range. The highest peak outside Asia, 22,841-foot Aconcagua in Argentina, would be a small mountain in the Greater Himalaya. On the eastern edge of the range is the landlocked country of Nepal, which is about the size of New York. Of the fourteen peaks above eight thousand meters (26,240 feet), eight of them are in Nepal. Shishapangma, the lowest of the eight-thousand-meter peaks, is located completely within Tibet, while the other thirteen form a natural political border between the Asian countries that straddle the world’s highest peaks. 86

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When the Golden Age of climbing in the Alps ended in the nineteenth century, it took time before climbers turned their attention toward the Himalaya. There were several factors that delayed an immediate assault. For starters, there were few reliable maps and charts to utilize. Beyond that, many Himalaya countries restricted access to foreigners. Human determination and ingenuity would overcome those barriers, but there were serious doubts if humans could function at such high altitudes. So, following Edward Whymper’s impressive climbing season in 1864-65, subsequent decades focused on first ascents of major peaks in the Alps. The next progression was focused on establishing new routes on those major peaks, and this continued into the early twentieth century. This was the era of George Mallory, but once climbers like Mallory realized that there were no more notable first ascents possible in the Alps, nor any notable new routes on them, a similar climbing cycle began in the Greater Himalaya. It started with early British expeditions to the north face of Everest in the early 1920s, and by the middle of the century, the first Himalaya domino fell. Not surprisingly, Chamonix had its fingerprints on the first eight-thousand-meter peak to be climbed, the first to be skied, and the first to be snowboarded. In 1950, Frenchmen Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal recorded the first ascent of an eight-thousand-meter peak with their climb of Nepal’s 26,545-foot Annapurna, the tenth-highest peak in the world and the only eight-thousand-meter peak to be climbed on its initial attempt. A former mayor of Chamonix, Herzog was buried in the town cemetery in 2012. On his Annapurna climb: “I hardly knew if I were in heaven or on earth and my mind kept turning to all those men who had died on high mountains, and to friends in France,” Herzog wrote in The Himalayan Journal, Volume XVI, published in 1951. “Our moments up there were quite indescribable, with the realization before us that we were actually standing on the highest peak in the world to be conquered by man. The green valley of Chamonix where I had spent my youth, at the foot of the lovely Mont Blanc massif, seemed far away. In those days the 4,800 meters had impressed me greatly and I revered those who had climbed them as heroes—and now, 8,000 metres! It seemed incredible and yet there I was!” 87

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Herzog’s elation was genuine, but he paid dearly for his Annapurna climb: He lost all of his toes and fingers to frostbite on that trip. His partner, Lachenal, died in a skiing accident five years later in 1955. Annapurna was the first to be climbed, but Everest was climbed in 1953 and by 1965 every eight-thousand-meter peak had been climbed, the last being Shishapangma in Tibet. There seems to be an evolution with backcountry skiing and snowboarding that before a route can be skied or snowboarded, it must be climbed. The Greater Himalaya had been climbed by the mid-1960s, which was about the time Sylvain Saudan and then Anselme Baud and Patrick Vallencant recorded first ski descents in the Alps. Since snowboarding didn’t emerge until the late-1980s, snowboarders generally followed skiers in the record books for first descents. In the Alps, first descents were categorized by first ski descent, first snowboard descent, or first overall descent (skier or snowboarder). Marco didn’t start snowboarding until decades after the arms race for first snowboard or ski descents began in the Himalaya. But by the time he disappeared on Everest in 2002, Marco had recorded six first descents in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya; he notched six first snowboard descents on routes in the same ranges. The majority of his first descents were around Chamonix, but like the climbers, skiers, and snowboarders before him, he soon turned his attention toward the possibilities of first descents in the Greater Himalaya. Without delving too much into existentialism, that’s been the global trajectory and focus of man’s relationship with mountains: to do what has not been done, and once that’s done, look somewhere else and do it there. In 1982, Saudan made the first “complete” descent of an eight-thousand-meter peak when he skied Pakistan’s 26,740-foot Gasherbrum I (Hidden Peak). Seven years later, in 1989, France’s Bruno Gouvy made the first snowboard turns above eight thousand meters from 27,650 feet on Everest. Gouvy, who was part of the first group to snowboard Mont Blanc a few years earlier, died in 1990 on the Aiguille Verte when Marco was eleven years old, after hitting some ice as he descended a route he had not climbed. Gouvy was twenty-seven years old and became another twenty-something buried in the Alps. 88

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Like first ascents credited to climbers, style and ethic became important discussion points when crediting a skier or a snowboarder with a first descent. Saudan’s Gasherbrum I ski descent is considered the world’s first “complete” eight-thousand-meter descent and is more respected than, say, Yuichiro Muira’s skiing attempt on Mount Everest in 1970. Japan’s Miura descended from near the South Col in Nepal at under eight thousand meters, didn’t stay upright the entire time, and didn’t end at a camp. For these reasons it wasn’t considered a complete descent. It wasn’t until October 7, 2000, when Slovenian Davo Karnicar made Everest’s first complete ski or snowboard descent. He dropped twelve thousand feet from the summit to base camp in under five hours on Nepal’s Southeast Ridge route. Karnicar, who died in 2019 after a tree-cutting accident when he was fifty-six years old, once considered skiing the Norton Couloir route on the north face in the spring but didn’t think it was possible without rappelling. Marco referenced Karnicar after he snowboarded the Norton Couloir without rappelling in spring of 2001; both were aware of known guidelines for complete descents. In Wild Snow, Lou Dawson wrote: “Rappelling, downclimbing and skiing on belay are acceptable descent elements, but Europeans admired glisse alpinists who attack a line with little or no ropework and who stay in their bindings the whole way down. . . . Long, rope-free, uninterrupted descents is the goal, and Italian mountaineer Emilio Comici once said, ‘as a single ball of snow would roll, that is the line I would ski.’ . . . A true premier descent, especially of a remote or difficult line, and conforming somewhat to the ideals covered above, is a legitimate claim that epitomizes the exploratory nature of mountaineering.” Backcountry skiers and snowboarders, or glisse alpinists, adopted these principles and applied them to the Himalaya. To follow this style and ethic in the Alps where maps, charts, and photographs had accumulated from over a century of climbing, it was an achievable standard. To extend that to the Greater Himalaya, where there was less information and fewer climbers, more unpredictable weather and more questionable snow conditions, was a difficult standard for early Himalaya skiers and snowboarders.

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Marco embraced this ethos when he learned to snowboard, and he never deviated from this in the Alps, Andes, or Himalaya. In 2001, unstrapping and downclimbing sections didn’t qualify Stefan Gatt’s snowboard as a complete descent, but what about the use of oxygen? Gatt didn’t use oxygen. Marco used oxygen on the ascent and occasionally on the descent. “Marco tried boarding with oxygen but couldn’t see well enough with the mask on, so he took lots of stops, would breathe in oxygen, then take off the mask and continue snowboarding,” Russ said. “All these people act like using oxygen is cheating. All these do gooders, these heroes, on oxygen, why don’t they go fucking try getting to the summit without oxygen, then I will give them a snowboard and see if they can even put it on properly, and if they can, then they have to snowboard down without oxygen. Marco never thought about doing it without oxygen. If it was important to him to do Everest without oxygen, he first had to do it with oxygen and then we would have sort of idea of how he behaved. But it never got to that. He saw the value. He’s not stupid.” From a purist’s perspective, oxygen is an arguable point. Without oxygen, could Marco have overcome the most difficult aspects of the Norton Couloir? Yes, because Marco had ridden steeper and more difficult terrain in Chamonix. He would have been slower that day without oxygen, both on the ascent and descent, but not using oxygen wouldn’t have erased his talent or stripped away his physical abilities. With oxygen, could Gatt have overcome the sections on the Northeast Ridge that required him to unstrap? No, because there wasn’t enough snow on the Northeast Ridge in spring of 2001 to make a continuous snowboard descent. If Marco had descended the Northeast Ridge route, he too couldn’t have descended on his snowboard the entire time. Still, Marco’s use of oxygen remained a talking point among a subset of adventurers, which included an American snowboarder who attempted the Hornbein Couloir in 2003. The use of oxygen became a delineating, mountaineering-specific standard among eight-thousand-meter climbers by the late twentieth century. But snowboarders and skiers weren’t necessarily considered when that ethic was initially established. In 2001, a “no oxygen” rule was neither dogma nor a generally accepted criterion for a 90

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complete ski or snowboard descent. Gatt’s climb and snowboarding that day was a tremendous physiological display of human prowess, but he didn’t make a complete descent. “If you go to Austria and ask them who the first person to snowboard Everest was, they will say Dr. Gatt,” said Trey Cook, a Chamonix snowboarder and writer. “It’s an important nuance, but Dr. Gatt climbed without oxygen, which is also in pure style. Marco climbed with oxygen, but one hundred percent I give it to Marco. I respect Dr. Gatt for what he did, it was superhuman, but he didn’t make a continuous descent. He deserves a place in the record book, but that’s it.” Lou Dawson further examined complete descents—and the nuances of purity within them—in Wild Snow and agrees with Cook’s summation. Dawson wrote: “The criteria for a great ski or snowboard descent are they begin as high as possible on the peak, preferably from the exact summit, and go all the way down to the base of a mountain, and the line should be continuous and have enough snow to make turns for most, if not all, of the descent. I discourage glisse alpinism that sets up and abandons webs of rope, leaving the mountain with lasting damage, like erosion and bolt holes, so there is an ethics behind it all. . . . For most backcountry skiers, knowing the history of the route, who did it first, is inspiring and enhances their appreciation of the adventuresome and creative human spirit. Italian Comici said, ‘The climber who is able to divine the most elegant way, disdaining the easy slopes, then follow that way . . . that climber is creating a true work of art.’ . . . The sport is ultimately about purity of style and a sense of purpose.” Marco’s Norton Couloir descent was the first overall by a skier or snowboarder and is one of the greatest feats in Everest history. Navigating some tricky cliff sections along the way, he rode a continuous descent line of nearly eight thousand feet from summit to camp. But once below the sixty-foot cliff crux section, Marco still had to reach advanced base camp via the North Col where Russell Brice awaited him. Like jealous spouses, Himex team members joked throughout the expedition that Marco received far more attention than they did from Russ. 91

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Once Marco arrived at the North Col on his snowboard, that attention became adulation. Every team member paid the same price of $36,000 to be part of the expedition, but Marco Siffredi got a bit more personal attention. Marco was funny, he was young, and damn, he was talented, but it was his passion that resonated with Russ. Marco and Russ spent countless hours together, fraternizing over beers in Chamonix or on Everest. They compared childhoods, and as boys they had a similar interest in the outdoors and a similar disinterest in academia. They studied, but they studied weather reports, photos, maps, and illustrations of Everest. Like a college professor leading a class of highly motivated students, Russ had a relationship with his other clients that was business with a trace of personal touch. His relationship with Marco was personal with a tinge of business. Owen West, who turned around at the First Step on summit day on May 23, 2001, arrived at the North Col later that afternoon. He remembered Russ’s tough exterior evaporating in the presence of Marco. “Marco was Russ’s pupil, his star student who was going to ascend this trajectory faster than anything Russ had seen,” West said. “And that’s why Marco got into trouble in 2002. He was so good at such a young age, but also so blind to his abilities that he was also blind to what could go wrong. After what we saw that day in 2001, it was clear nobody was going to stop his trajectory.” After the crux section, Marco rode nearly four thousand feet of steep, but manageable, terrain to reach the tents at the North Col. A fall anywhere along the way would have ended in death without immediate self-arrest, but that wasn’t happening. Marco was in his element in the steep, wide-open couloir. As his friends in Chamonix always said, they never worried about Marco on the way down because he could snowboard anything. And he never fell. He was too talented, too determined, and too confident to make a mistake. At the twenty-three-thousand-foot North Col, he shared a cup of tea with Russ and then continued down to advanced base camp at 21,300 feet. Earlier, crevasses and ice cliffs below the North Col were respected by Marco on his acclimatization hikes and rides. On May 23, 2001, after what he had done that morning in the Norton Couloir, they were of little 92

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concern. Even when the bulletproof green ice below the col rejected his edges, he ricocheted off the ice with alacrity and kept his balance until he found better snow. A spill would have seriously injured Marco, if not killed him, but it never happened. He wormed his way around the crevasses and ice cliffs below the col and reached flatter ground. Marco casually slid into advanced base camp just before 10:30 a.m. and became the first person in history to make a complete snowboard descent from the summit of Mount Everest. In total, it took him four hours. At sea level, Marco would have likely descended in less than an hour. As of 2021, no person besides Marco has snowboarded or skied from summit to camp via the Norton Couloir. Russ interviewed a physical and mentally exhausted Marco, who lay in his sleeping bag inside his tent and struggled to speak later that day. The exchange appeared in Bertrand Delapierre’s film Etoile Filante (which means “shooting star” in English). Russ: “What do you think about snowboarding from summit of Everest?” Marco: “I think it’s not easy, it’s difficult. I’m happy to have a good team and good boss.” Russ: “So you got down through the rock band without abseil?” Marco: “Yeah because it’s good, not so much snow but it’s okay, a little bit, and it’s for the Sloven [ian] [Karnicar] who told me it’s not possible to go down in spring season.” Russ: “But you proved him wrong?” Marco: “Voila . . .” Russ had attempted and pulled off some crazy stuff of his own when he was young like Marco. Team members knew the wily Kiwi mountain guide had a deep admiration for Marco, along with deep respect and a deep responsibility to care for him. Although it came from a goodhearted source, these qualities made them feel somewhat neglected. “We are all on those radios and hearing Russell and Marco communicate all day long, and I remember being jealous, like ‘Hey, what about us? We’re doing something special too,’” said Colorado’s Ellen Miller, half-jokingly, about Russ’s fascination with Marco. “I could tell he needed to get Marco back down safely and that was his main focus. He was 93

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young and he was doing something incredibly difficult and dangerous. Russ was this semi-father figure to Marco. Still, we were all happy and joyous for our own accomplishments, but I wasn’t down yet. I was still at frickin’ Camp 2 and slogging down the mountain while Marco was down at camp eating pizza.” When Miller arrived at advanced base camp, Marco indeed had a sore arm from the high fives. And he most certainly had eaten pizza and consumed not a small amount of alcohol. When Miller appeared on the horizon, Marco sprinted toward her. He seemed happier that she had summited and was back safely in camp than he was about snowboarding Everest. “He wasn’t arrogant, he wasn’t, and I don’t know how that’s possible,” Miller said. “It wasn’t like it went to his head; he was just like a happy kid.” It was an overall successful expedition for Himex. Other than West, and a guide who also turned around on summit day, all the clients on the expedition summited. There were no deaths. For West, who was in his thirties, it was an easy decision to turn around. Before leaving for the summit from a lower camp, the guides summoned the clients and Sherpas into the same tent for a discussion on risk and death. “We said, ‘Let’s talk about all the ways you could die on summit day,’” said guide Chris Warner. “We came up with nineteen ways you could die. When we’re heading to the summit and Owen was nauseous, he said, ‘Look, this is one of the nineteen ways to die and I am not going to die up here.’ He had been to Iraq and all this other stuff; he was such a bad ass. But he had a wife and all this other stuff going for him. He wouldn’t be defined by getting to the top of Everest. It’s just another cool thing to do, not the only thing he’ll ever do. He self-selected to turn around and go down because the plan wasn’t working for him. We weren’t sure if Marco could do that if the plan wasn’t working. “The drama that unfolded with Marco was almost fiction. Marco was so strong and got to the summit so fast in 2001, and he snowboarded down in less than four hours. It was easy for him. It was an amazing ride, and I loved that he was somebody so far ahead of his time. For a twenty-one-year-old or whatever he was, it must have been empowering. But when he went back in 2002, everything was different. The data was 94

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different, the snow was different, the route was different. He was already in the record books, nothing to prove, nothing to gain, but went back anyway.” Physically, it was true, Marco had no bad days during the 2001 expedition. Besides being bored at base camp and on acclimatization hikes, he never struggled. Even the strongest guides had bad days, for one reason or another. Not Marco. Sherpas have no equals among western climbers, but Marco was close. Everything was easy for Marco, maybe too easy. Even though he had no bad days and had a glorious summit day experience, Marco’s best day of the expedition was his last day. But in his mind, every day that crept closer to his actual goal was his best day. Marco derived more pleasure from what lay ahead than behind, which was odd for a twenty-two-year-old. Teenagers and early twenty-somethings are masters of the moment. This described Marco on difficult snowboard routes, but off the mountain, he was rarely content and rarer still was he left goal-less. The future controlled his thoughts and actions in the present, and such ambition can be a curse. For long stretches of the final hike out from advanced base camp to base camp, Marco chatted with West. If it was anybody else who had become the first person to snowboard Mount Everest, West would have expected a fair amount of gloating. It would have been unbearable, especially since he didn’t summit, but expected. Marco, though, didn’t say much at all. Everest became a de facto ATM machine for summiteers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First this to climb Everest, or first that to climb Everest, these distinctions often had resulted in lucrative paydays for those willing to promote themselves through book deals and speaking engagements. Marco didn’t care about that because fame and glory weren’t Marco’s currency. But Marco was comparatively quiet on the hike out compared to other Himex clients who were drunk with joy from their successful summit bids. Marco and West continued their hike to base camp, where vehicles would drive everyone back to Kathmandu for one final night of reveling. Slowly, Marco came out of his shell to West. Marco occasionally released a belly laugh or a smile, but neither lasted long. West was curious if Marco was replaying moments in his 95

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head of his snowboard descent, but that wasn’t it. He was fixated on something else, something captivating, something elusive. Everyone else had Everest in their rearview mirrors, but Marco seemed to be walking right back toward it. “Look, he wanted to go to the Hornbein right after the Nant Blanc, he thought he was ready then,” said French journalist Laurent Molitor. “That’s this guy’s mindset. But he knew he couldn’t go right from Nant Blanc to Everest, he would go step by step, even though they were huge steps. He was patient. He did the progression. But when he got back from Everest, he told me he was thinking about the Hornbein the entire time he was descending [the Norton]. That was the real descent in his mind. Marco was always looking ahead.” As Marco and West neared base camp, Everest’s summit pyramid was visible in the background. The Hornbein Couloir was a vertical ribbon of white slicing through the limestone cliffs of the north face. It was then, as it is now, the most coveted ski or snowboard descent line in the world. The line didn’t mean much to West, but it spoke to Marco and was his beautiful mistress. The dust hadn’t settled on Marco’s historic snowboard descent and he was plotting his next objective. If West could have heard everything Marco said on the hike out, he would have known that Marco had one objective at that point in his life: to snowboard the Hornbein Couloir. The thirty-one-year-old West couldn’t quite remember what his goals were as a twenty-two-year-old, or if any were worth remembering. But by the time they reached base camp, it was clear that Marco would never forget his goal. Marco blabbered on and on about Jean-Marc Boivin, the Hornbein, the history of the Americans who climbed it, the Swiss climbers who slid on their asses from the summit through the Hornbein in 1986. Marco didn’t speak much about his descent of the Norton Couloir. Much of what Marco said was muted by the crunch of earth beneath their feet as they hiked. But at some point, West cut him off mid-sentence and placed a hand on Marco’s shoulder. West wondered if Marco wasn’t humble as much as he was driven. West was also unsure if Marco understood that he was driving a rocket ship but told himself he was steering a beach cruiser. 96

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“Marco, you can’t live on the edge for too much longer before falling off,” West told him before taking his hand off Marco’s shoulder. Marco, who had a copy of The Little Prince in his backpack, responded with a look of confusion, as if to say: Can’t you tell I’ve already been bitten by the snake? “In my opinion, yeah, he was already well beyond the edge,” West said. “I don’t know if anybody could have arrested this trajectory, even if he made it down the Hornbein. He was so young that he wasn’t old enough to have someone who could slow him down and throw down the gauntlet.” Back at base camp, Colorado’s Ellen Miller was preoccupied with caring for a guide who was injured and didn’t spend much time there. Same with West and Marco. They piled into different vehicles with the intention of reconvening in Kathmandu for a proper celebration. “Bye, see you in CAT-MAN-DO!” Marco yelled out the window, a plume of dust enveloping his vehicle as it sped away. That was the last time either saw Marco Siffredi.

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Chapter Six

The Waiting Game

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth. —Raymond Carver, Late Fragment Before leaving Everest base camp for Kathmandu in 2001, at seventeen thousand feet near the Rongbuk Glacier and with a brown valley of rocks in the background, Marco Siffredi extended his arm and snapped a selfie. He could have asked another person to take the picture, but he didn’t want others around. In the photo he’s wearing a blue stocking cap on his head that is encircled with rows of snowflakes. He has a blue sleeveless vest and a cream-colored fleece that covers his arms beyond the armpits of his vest. Sunglasses rest on the beanie and are slightly crooked above his forehead. Two yaks graze behind his right shoulder. His nose is pinked, and white hoop earrings dangle from his left earlobe. Strands of blond hair tickle his upper neck below his beanie and are draped over the temples on either side of his face. The skin around his blue eyes is wind-whipped and creased, aging him beyond his twenty-two years. No snowboard, no ice axe, no Mount Everest. His expression doesn’t reflect the past or the future but the present, the feeling of a proud, confident, and modest man. Marco did not intend 99

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to use the photo for publicity. The genesis of the photo wasn’t vanity but truth, which had emerged from deep within and offered a reassuring message: You did it, Marco, you did it. The picture is his father’s favorite, the one he caresses at home in Chamonix when he remembers Marco, because, “My son looks happy.” The yaks and rocks and snow-capped peaks are fuzzy in the photo. These unimportant details in the photo resharpen after the fleeting moment passes, then Marco leaves for Kathmandu. His objective has crystallized again, and it is singular and uncompromising: the Hornbein Couloir. Upon returning to Chamonix, he spoke with his father. The conversation was like the one following Marco’s descent of the Nant Blanc in 1999, but it didn’t end the same way. “Papa, I will go to Everest,” Marco told him in 1999. It was not a question or a discussion, but a declaration. “I will go to Everest.” In June 2001, confidence again oozed from Marco during their conversation. His father never doubted Marco, or his Everest plans if they included Russell Brice. Philippe didn’t doubt Marco any less for his straightforward tone during this 2001 conversation, which resembled bravado more than confidence. But he was concerned about the specifics of this conversation: “Papa, I am going to Everest. Alone,” Marco told his father in 2001. “Alone? You are capable of going to Everest alone?” “Yes, Papa. With Sherpas, but yes, alone.” The Hornbein Couloir. Alone. No Russ. August-September 2002, post-monsoon. This was serious. The conversation wasn’t over. Over the next year, there would be more exchanges between Marco and his family, Russ and Marco’s family, Russ and Marco, and Russ, Marco, and Phurba Tashi. Russ’s strongest and most experienced Sherpa, Phurba made a rare trip outside his home in the Khumbu of Nepal to participate in these discussions. He had become friends with Marco, but his trip to Chamonix was more business than recreational. Phurba would 100

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be flown over once it was time to finalize specific details and to soothe Marco’s parents’ fears, Russ’s fears, and Marco’s fears. Fifteen months between Everest trips seems like a long time, but it happened fast. Too fast. Russ didn’t like the idea from the outset. He couldn’t accompany Marco because he was committed to leading an expedition to Cho Oyu in Tibet. That alone should have delayed Marco’s plans. Russ’s role as a spotter during the Norton Couloir descent was critical. That’s unfortunate, Marco thought, because he wanted Russ there. We’ll certainly miss you, Marco told him. Russ was aghast. “We’re talking about two conversations, one with Marco and one with his parents,” Russ said. “And there’s another one, money. This will cost a whole lot of money because it’s not as part of an entire expedition but one for himself. In some ways, in hindsight, I should not have helped him, but he would have gone with someone else.” There would be more to unpack before Marco returned to Everest, but for starters, how would a twenty-two-year-old come up with $50,000 for a private Everest expedition? How did a twenty-one-year-old come up with $36,000 for the 2001 Everest expedition? Seriously, how many toilets could Marco clean in a year? Marco Siffredi should be one of the most recognizable names and faces in the history of the winter sports industry. Instead, he’s the least-known best snowboarder in the world for one reason: He didn’t market himself. In 2001, after his flight from Nepal landed in Paris, a French television station wanted to interview him about his Everest descent. Marco declined the request because he wanted to reunite with his buddies who were attending an AC/DC rock concert that night in Paris. Maybe tomorrow? No, he was more interested in eating seafood at a specific restaurant before boarding a train back to Chamonix. Even when he tried to dabble in self-promotion, Marco wasn’t effective. During live television interviews, his movements were awkward, and his body was stiff. To look the part, he’d wear collared shirts that he’d never otherwise wear. His answers to open-ended questions were short, and he was unable to expand them. He was never rude, but he was 101

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never consistently engaging. In one interview, he seemed more at ease answering questions in his workshop. His hair was dyed green, and he wore an orange apron. He was sharpening his Elan snowboard’s edges and simultaneously answering questions. He never refused to answer but initially spoke in fragments and couldn’t articulate his points. He fidgeted and constantly reverted to tuning his snowboard. During that interview, Marco made it clear that the Nant Blanc was more difficult than descending the Norton Couloir. Marco may have been a “beautiful human being,” like pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones once said about him, but he wasn’t widely recognized. Maybe it was his unfortunate timing, or his shyness, or his lack of a publicist for most of his career, or his lack of movie star looks like his idol, Jean-Marc Boivin. Whatever the reason, Marco wasn’t the media darling he should have been. Most of what he did was done in obscurity. His most impressive feats leaked from word of mouth or from the lens of René Robert’s camera. Or, in the case of Mount Everest in 2001, they were too grand to ignore. But respect and acknowledgment proved elusive. He accomplished extraordinary first descents in the town to launch a career: Chamonix. When that didn’t change much, he recorded a first descent on the mountain: Everest. But that didn’t change much either. “Marco was doing these amazing things and not really getting the recognition or the sponsorship that other people were getting for much lesser things,” Russ said. “And that trend continues today with social media where there are people getting fuck all and huge amounts of sponsorship and there are others who really struggle and are achieving much more but they don’t promote themselves. Marco wanted to be recognized for what he had done, but people weren’t taking notice. Marco didn’t want his accomplishments exaggerated and it’s not that he wanted the kudos or people congratulating him, but he wanted the recognition. More than recognition, he wanted respect. “I don’t think he felt respected very much. But I sort of get it, because here’s this kid with blue hair, pink hair, or green hair and studs and earrings hanging out. For lots of sponsors, that’s a bit radical because it was a bit radical for me the first time when I met him. But once you sit down 102

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and talk to the bloke, he was really a fucking genuine and well-meaning and caring person. But these sponsors never knew that side of him.” He may have initially chosen rock concerts and seafood over interviews, but attention did trickle in after Everest. Later in 2001, there was a snowboard industry ceremony in Paris where Marco was named snowboarder of the year. When he walked onto the stage to accept his award, he executed an obligatory kiss-on-the-cheek exchange with a pretty blonde lady, then listened to the emcee. The emcee wore a black sportcoat and was groomed with coiffed dark hair. Marco wore a mustard-colored shirt and had freshly dyed green hair. The emcee highlighted Marco’s accomplishments, but his words came off as a mea culpa and as a justification for the mea culpa. From Etoile Filante, the film produced by Marco’s close friend Bertrand Delapierre: Emcee: “I think we really had a moral debt as journalists [for] Marco as he’s one of the Chamoniards who quietly performs exploits.” Marco looked down, then lifted his head up again. Emcee: “Discovering this at the last minute means we missed out on a lot. He’s done eight thousand meters and more, he’s not here by accident.” Marco felt ashamed more than celebrated. He was precisely the type of athlete a company would want to sponsor—talented, young, and honest—but it never happened. Elan Snowboards and Millet, a French apparel company, supplied him with equipment and clothing, which Marco appreciated, but he never garnered the monetary sponsorships to subsidize his expeditions in the Himalaya. Perhaps if he groveled and refined his demeanor and became more media savvy, he could have been a global icon. The media wanted to like Marco; he just didn’t let them. Despite his aversion to publicity, he was a mythical figure in Chamonix and, by 2002, an underground legend throughout the European Alps, particularly among the younger populace. If a company expected to influence what Marco wore and how he acted on camera, they were doomed. There are few athletes who can 103

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push sponsors around. Marco could have been one of them, but he wasn’t even aware such a corporate tug-of-war existed. Marco was naïve in this respect. He wanted to be acknowledged for what he did in the mountains, but he never grasped that acknowledgment and respect started with media attention. Sponsored athletes that don’t like media attention often bend their character to fulfill contractual duties. They play the game to an extent: give the media and companies enough to justify the financial reward. Fake it, if necessary. Marco was many things, but fake was not one of them. He wouldn’t perform like a circus animal to get the recognition and respect he desired. Either it came or it didn’t, and it never did. “He didn’t care about fame, and he didn’t care about the sponsorships,” said Trey Cook, a Chamonix snowboarder and journalist who once published the largest-circulation winter sports magazine in Europe. “He knew he needed sponsors, but he’d take their stuff and by the next week he would be riding a different company’s snowboard. I am not saying he was bad, he just wanted to climb and snowboard and didn’t understand how the sponsorship thing worked.” Cook worked in the snowboarding industry in the United States in the 1980s when the global snowboard movement began. He moved to Chamonix a decade later. His snowboard roots were deeper than most in Chamonix, and he was likely the most experienced snowboard media figure in Europe at the time. He interviewed Marco in 1999 after his Nant Blanc descent. “I remember sitting down with Marco for the first time and him saying, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and then he laughed,” said Cook, who didn’t laugh. “He didn’t say it quite like that, but I could tell that was what he was thinking. I was older, in my thirties, so maybe I looked to him like part of the establishment. He was punk rock. That hair and his earrings, that was not a costume, that’s who he was. He was edgy. He didn’t take shit off anyone. But after we spoke for a while, all that melted away. He became more relaxed and opened up. He was a super great guy. Just talking to him about the Nant Blanc, his appreciation of the history behind the route, the gravity of what he pulled off—he couldn’t have been a more humble and thoughtful guy.”

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Whether it was his perceived aloofness, disinterest, or his lack of marketability, he never attracted sponsors the way he should have, but there was perhaps another reason beyond quirkiness. By the late 1990s there were only a handful of legitimate professional snowboarders, which means they earned their living entirely off snowboarding and didn’t have to work menial jobs in resort towns. Of those pro snowboarders, most earned their living in freestyle (halfpipe or terrain parks) or racing and were living in established North American resort areas like Lake Tahoe and Big Bear in California and Breckenridge in Colorado. Marco’s style of snowboarding, freeriding, was less popular. Jeremy Jones, one of the most successful and well-paid snowboarders in the world and a master in all disciplines, wonders if Marco was a victim of his era. “When Marco was teeing off, it was a very low point in the history of freeriding, which is why I think he went under the radar,” said Jones, who has since become one of the best-known freeriders and who first heard of Marco through a pro snowboarder from Switzerland. “He was a young punk rock kid going and tagging the most serious lines in the Chamonix valley and doing it in real freeride style. He was riding serious stuff but full on bombing lines that traditionally people were hop-turning down. He’d go in firing on these lines and did them with speed and style. Nobody was doing that yet. If he was alive today, with how big freeriding is now, he would be this huge name in snowboarding.” Marco’s style, best categorized as freeriding but climbing and snowboarding difficult climbing routes, was outside the normal boundaries of freeride snowboarding. Freeriding meant descending a mountain by any means possible and not being confined to a halfpipe or a racecourse. But freeriding didn’t require a snowboarder to descend steep and dangerous slopes, and on questionable snow conditions like the ones ridden by Marco. He referred to firm and icy snow as “cement” and handled those conditions and powder conditions with similar aplomb. When Marco took his style of riding to the Himalaya, he reached a stratospheric level that was unimaginable to other freeriders. It seems counter-intuitive to outdoor companies today that tolerate, if not prefer, unique and controversial athletes who perform dangerous acts. For 105

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Marco, he became more allergic to sponsors after climbing and snowboarding eight-thousand-meter peaks in the Himalaya. “What he did was not sport,” said journalist Antoine Chandellier. “His sport was a little difficult to identify. You can’t put it in a case and sell it. Sponsors were afraid by what he did. If he had an accident, it would be bad for Marco, but that would be bad for the sponsor. It was tough for them to bet on him.” Marco could have learned to become more media savvy without compromising his values, but he wasn’t going to bend for sponsors. And he wasn’t going to change his style of snowboarding for a paycheck. Without sponsors, there was only one way for snowboarders to make money: competitions. “He hated racing and competition,” said his sister Valerie. “He didn’t do these things for the money. He wanted to do them because he had a passion and could be free. He felt the money didn’t make it as pure. I don’t know how to explain it except he had a gift. Marco found his gift at a young age. Being in nature and snowboarding in the mountains was what he wanted to do.” In March of 2002, five months before leaving for Mount Everest the second time, Marco participated in one of the few competitions he would register for: the Verbier Xtreme in nearby Switzerland. The competition was forty miles from Chamonix on the Bec de Rosses, a twenty-six-hundred-foot face that measures between 45 and 60 degrees in steepness. The event, which began in 1996 and continues today, is part of an annual tour that also includes a stop in Valdez, Alaska. Many snowboarders toured the world and participated in the various events, hoping to piece together a living from prize money and sponsorship stemming from their performances. But the world’s top freeriders always participated in the Verbier Xtreme. Marco wasn’t interested in any of that, but he was willing to compete in 2002. He finished sixth overall. American Steve Klassen placed third that year and had earned the competition’s “King of the Hill” award for numerous first-place finishes over the years, including the inaugural event in 1996. Klassen remembers Marco as a kind person in an ocean of supreme ego. Marco wasn’t 106

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out of his element snowboarding-wise but, similar to his yearning to be respected and acknowledged, his defining qualities weren’t featured. Klassen believed Marco may have been too extreme for the Xtreme competition’s judges. “We thought he’d come back, and he never did because he went back to Everest,” said Klassen, now in his fifties and the owner of the Wave Rave snowboard shop in Mammoth Lakes, California. “I remember Marco being gentle and so in touch with the natural world, but his way of riding big mountains was not our way. Judges early on couldn’t tell how steep something was. So, if you put yourself in a radical position, the judges didn’t know how to score it. We jumped cliffs because the judges knew how to score that, but that’s not what Marco did. But a huge percentage of us didn’t want to be on top of Everest because being up there is a big roll of the dice. Too many things can go wrong. A lot of things can go wrong jumping cliffs, but I am probably not going to die doing it. I wasn’t really into scaring myself and knowing I am going to die if I make a mistake on Everest.” About two-thirds into Bertrand Delapierre’s film Etoile Filante (Shooting Star), Marco’s inner-most thoughts were revealed for public consumption. He seemed more comfortable in front of the camera in the segment, and as the subject turned to his lack of sponsors and his style of snowboarding, Marco unleashed a diatribe. From snowboarding contemporaries to eight-thousand-meter climbers, he will be remembered as a thoughtful, funny, and humble person. But even the gentlest human can deliver porcupine quills. During this part of the film, he was struggling to generate funds for his Hornbein Couloir attempt. He was months away from leaving for Everest for the final time. He was stuck in a financial and, perhaps, an ethical quagmire. “I took him very seriously, and I took his objectives very seriously,” Russ Brice said. “So, he does a first descent and do the people really recognize that much? Not really. Well, they say he should have done it without oxygen, and he should have done this or that. They said all these disparaging things, and I can imagine that probably hurt Marco a lot. He goes, well, we did it and I am still not getting recognized. What do I have to fucking do to get recognized?” 107

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Was the Hornbein Couloir Marco’s way of upping the ante and forcing sponsors to adjust to him? Was he applying pressure on himself to do something so spectacular that respect would be compulsory? Money and fame were never his motivators, but Marco’s never-ending quest for acknowledgment and respect may have influenced his decisions more than he’d care to admit, even if it happened subconsciously. For five minutes toward the end of the film, the viewer hears his manifesto. He revealed himself to be a stubborn, sensitive, and vulnerable young man. He was twenty-two years old, the age many Americans graduate from college. Marco didn’t lack direction, but there were glimpses of his immaturity and irritation over how things were instead of how he wanted them to be. Sometimes eloquently and sometimes abrasively, he was more loquacious than ever in this part of Etoile Filante. Translated into English by the filmmakers, he stated: Freeriding is freeriding, skiing is skiing. Freeriders lack concentration, they have trouble reading the mountain. The problem is they confuse Chamonix and Valdez. You can only mess up once in Chamonix, that’s the problem. One day’s great, the next horrible. Cham is Cham, gotta know that. You have to watch Chamonix, you have to have sharp instincts. Once you understand how it works, it’s okay. Sometimes they get carried away here. Then again, you get carried away when you’re young. Everyone has to learn to handle it. Freeriders have high limits, they push their limits. They’re enthused. Enthusiastic. The King of the Hill, world champion of extreme sports. It’s not an attack, I think it’s easy to do a steep slope in Alaska. We’re all world champs in powder. Then on ice, watch out guys. There’s no one left when it’s steep and icy. No one does turns. They make the images look lethal, it’s extreme, they make it look like it is and don’t blabber. Americans made shitty champions. Can’t be a world champion on a 45-degree slope, with powder and sixty-five-foot rods and you fall, you’re okay, you finish. There’s a problem. That’s not extreme. You jump the rock. They’re really good at that. They’re good at jumping, they brake a lot, but the day they jump ten meters on an exposed 55-degree, okay, that’s extreme. 108

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When they jump the Mallory ridge [off the Aiguille du Midi lift], it starts getting extreme. Well, it’s true. It’s not extreme if it’s flat. What’s steep? It’s still the same, 55 degrees with three feet of powder, or 55 degrees or 45 degrees with fifteen hundred feet of cement with a ridge underneath, it’s the same. Everything is relative. Skiing the Mallory in four hours because it’s cement, then doing it in thirty minutes with powder. You get it. If you survived the cement it’s okay. Just make a mistake when it’s steep, you can’t, that’s what’s fun. You concentrate, have fun, it’s strange. Freeride contests are good for business. It’s good for everyone, makes money, but it’s not that. Snowboard contests, however, I don’t like them but go sometimes for the money. The first time was to see what it was like, if you win, you get money. It’s good for you and the sponsors. They do as you like. You get involved or not. In both extreme and freeride contests, you do stupid things. They push you to do dumb things, the freeride contests. You’re at the start, it goes to your head, even though people say it doesn’t. If you mess up in Verbier, you’ll survive, not on Mallory. If you fall on Mallory, you’ll be like a pizza at the bottom. Several people have fallen in Verbier. They got hurt, but they lived. Lots of media for freeriders, not so many for a guy who does steep slopes. There’s the investment, then the return on the investment. They don’t make money because it’s hard to film. It’s a mess. We film in the mountains, not nearby freeriders. You’ll make more money doing porn than extreme sports. If you don’t want to gamble, don’t go to the mountain. Even the best, guides, if you take a guide for security, you’re a bit unconscious (belly laugh). There’s no security on the mountain. A serac could fall on you or a meteorite, I dunno. . . . I don’t mind using ten months’ wages [to pay for Everest in 2002]. I don’t want any companies making money on my back. I won’t do anything for free. They don’t own me for 10,000 francs. Some guys can talk their way to a 500,000 francs budget to do bullshit, and they do it, shit. I’ve already summited and the doors still aren’t opening. 109

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Marco Siffredi’s family owned a campground a block away from their family house in the Les Barrats neighborhood. The forty-eight-site campground, which closed in 2018, was open from late spring until fall each year and was located directly beneath the Aiguille du Midi with views of glaciers covering the Mont Blanc massif. The various campsites were separated with pine hedges and were designed for recreational vehicles that required electric hookups. There were several grassy areas on the periphery for budget-minded travelers, like climbers and backpackers, who pitched tents as they planned to stay awhile. Bathroom, laundry, and kitchen facilities were centrally located across from a wooden chalet with Tibetan prayer flags. This is where Marco stayed when he worked as the campground manager and helped run the family business. Marco was nothing if not industrious. He cleaned toilets, mowed grass, trimmed trees and hedges, checked guests in, and sold Coca-Colas and beers to visitors from around the world. His English was passable and improved as he worked at the campground. Like his mother, he enjoyed watering the flowers in the evening as the starch-white glaciers behind him glowed in the darkening purple sky. It was an ideal job for Marco, who took the reins after high school. The campground was closed during the winter, which allowed him to snowboard on days he wasn’t in school learning how to be a carpenter and mason. He took great interest in both professions, but neither was as fun as climbing and snowboarding. In 1998, Marco flew to South America and recorded a first descent of 19,791-foot Tocllaraju in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca range. He climbed two other peaks on that trip, Alpamayo in Peru and Huaynapotosi in Bolivia. He had planned to snowboard both, but he canceled those plans for questionable route conditions. He also visited the Inca city of Cuzco, Peru. Marco’s mother, being Catholic, encouraged her son to visit the city’s famous sixteenth-century cathedral, which he did. His best friends Philippe Forte, who died in an avalanche the following winter, and Hervé Cocco accompanied Marco. Photographer René Robert documented the trip. The climbing and snowboarding were grand, but for Marco it was more about spending time with his friends and sampling hedonistic substances outside the purview of parents. This 110

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Chamonix crew symbolized everything that was important to Marco: mountains, friends, and adventure. Cocco and Marco were childhood friends and neighbors who shared their first cigarette together. Marco worked to subsidize his trips. His wages from his campground job easily covered the cost of flying to South America and snowboarding and climbing in the Third World countries of Peru and Bolivia, where there were few regulations and permit costs. Marco wasn’t a trust fund baby gallivanting around the world because of his parents’ investments. His parents worked hard to create a comfortable life for Marco and his siblings. And if his parents filled in gaps along the way, well, the amount was never unreasonable and not unlike how any mom and dad would support a son six thousand miles from home. Besides, there are worse fates for parents than a teenage son traveling the Andes to climb and snowboard. But like any serious mountain person, Marco was compelled to find his way to Nepal, which he did by the turn of the century. In autumn of 1999, Marco flew to Kathmandu and made the first descent of 22,848-foot Dorje Lakpa, a peak higher than any other in the world outside the Himalaya. Although Nepal is an inexpensive country, this trip exceeded the cost of his Andes adventure. His campground wages contributed toward much of the total cost of the Dorje Lakpa trip; the rest was covered by a climbing grant from the municipality of Chamonix. Months later, he was in the Himalaya. His descent route on Dorje Lakpa measured about three thousand feet with passages of 55 degrees in steepness. He didn’t use oxygen for any part of the trip, but he felt physically weakened by the lack of oxygen at higher altitudes. He knew he would have to learn more about his body if he hoped to snowboard Everest one day. As a teenager, he had a picture of the north face of Everest. He had a photograph taken in front of it, with his finger pointing at the Hornbein Couloir, not the Norton Couloir. Because of what happened on Everest in 2002, many people cast aspersions toward Marco about his youth and recklessness. But Marco understood that he could not go from snowboarding Mont Blanc to Mount Everest. Marco followed this progression, from climbing and snowboarding in the Alps to the Andes, and then from the Andes to smaller peaks in the Greater Himalaya. Marco’s 111

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path to Mount Everest was not one of recklessness but preparedness. He accumulated significant high-altitude and climbing experience between 1997 and 1999, so his age was just that, a number. With success at every step of the way, Marco was confident he could elevate his projects to the highest altitudes. Permits for eight-thousand-meter peaks are not cheap, and Marco entered a new realm of fundraising. Showing off his capitalistic spirit, Marco made T-shirts and stickers with the slogan “JMB Represent” in honor of his idol Jean-Marc Boivin and sold them around town. Income earned from them covered little more than partying money, but even if Boivin couldn’t fundraise Marco’s future trips in the Himalaya, he would inspire them. From Marco’s earliest days as a snowboarder, Boivin was his beacon for exploration and adventure in the mountains. Of all the things Boivin accomplished in his thirty-nine years before he died, Marco remembered Boivin for what he didn’t do: the Hornbein Couloir. Aesthetically, Boivin knew it was a beautiful line and raved about it since it was the “direttissima,” a climbing term for the most direct route on a difficult mountain face. Boivin had seen enough of the couloir that he once mentioned that the hardest part of skiing it would be finding the upper entrance to the couloir from the summit. But at the moment, the hardest thing for Marco was finding someone to take him to Mount Everest. Marco’s success on the Nant Blanc before Dorje Lakpa gave him the confidence to try his first Himalayan summit. No guides, no excessive permit fees, just Marco and his friends on a self-supported expedition. But his success on the Dorje Lakpa then gave him the confidence to set up a meeting with Russell Brice after his return to Chamonix from Nepal. After two years of ticking off first descents and repeating classic lines in Chamonix, then notching first descents in the next level of the high-altitude game in the Andes, Marco took the next step on his own and descended a seven-thousand-meter peak in the Himalaya. After that, Marco’s father made it clear the only way he would allow his son to snowboard Everest was if he spoke with Russell Brice. By the end of that week, Marco set up a meeting with Russ at The Pub along Rue Paccard in Chamonix.

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Over beers, Russ told Marco he wouldn’t take him to Everest until he proved he could function above eight thousand meters. To convince him of that, Russ required Marco to first climb and snowboard Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world at 26,899 feet above sea level. Nine months later, in the spring of 2000, Marco and his snowboard friend Bertrand Delapierre climbed and snowboarded Cho Oyu. No oxygen, no drama. As strong as Marco was on Everest on 2001, he and Delapierre were equally as strong on Cho Oyu. Colorado’s Ellen Miller, who befriended Marco on Everest in 2001, was on the 2000 Cho Oyu trip as her precursor to Everest. She knew then that Marco was special. “The kid knew how to climb; I never doubted his ability for one minute after seeing him on that trip,” Miller said. “He was climbing with Phurba Tashi. They were way ahead on summit day, and they were going to get there long before the sun came up. I was concerned they were going to freeze on the summit before Marco could snowboard because they’d be there in the dark. That’s how fast they were going. And Bertrand too, because he was there to film Marco. These guys were on another level.” Marco easily passed the Cho Oyu test, but the price tag was unlike any other trip thus far, in the range of $15,000. His monthly wages as a campground manager didn’t cover the bill. So, starting with Cho Oyu and continuing with the $36,000 bill for Everest in 2001, Marco’s parents would make up the difference between whatever Marco had saved and the remaining balance. His parents’ money wasn’t a handout. They advanced him money in exchange for future wages working in the family business. But the accounting didn’t always add up, and the ledger became more confusing to track as his Himalaya trips overlapped. When Marco returned from Everest in 2001, Marco’s father didn’t have a problem with their agreement. Marco was a diligent worker whom campground guests raved about. His training as a mason and carpenter proved invaluable around the property, and Marco always worked off the balance. But when Marco told his father he was going to Everest again in 2002, alone and without Russ and that the cost was $50,000, Philippe Siffredi refused. Marco pleaded with his father, who couldn’t support the idea without more deliberation. It was an enormous amount of money,

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even for Marco’s parents who had worked hard, invested well, and owned property, but there was more to it than that. For Philippe it was a practical hurdle and a financial one. For his mother, Michele, it was neither financial nor logistical. Michele, who declined to be interviewed for this book, knew her son was engaged in dangerous activities. Her first son, Pierre, had died in an avalanche when Marco was eighteen months old. She felt fortunate to have averted disaster with Marco. Considering her faith, Michele wasn’t convinced a divine power hadn’t played a role in keeping Marco safe. She couldn’t understand why Marco wanted to snowboard Everest again if he had already snowboarded it. She knew about her son’s hero, Boivin, but in her mind his goals had been accomplished. Marco assuaged her concerns the best he could but directed his response to his father. “He always thought it was not possible for him to die,” Philippe said. “He told me, ‘Papa, if I was going to Everest to freeze, I would not be going.’ He did not think it is possible for him to die in the mountains. My wife was always worried and thought it was possible. For me, not too much because I told myself that God might have taken our first son, but not the second. I didn’t want to think about that. I couldn’t imagine a story like that. I refused.” Marco never liked hearing “no” from his parents, but rarely did he hear it. He could be a charmer, if needed, but that wasn’t usually necessary. He always did what he said he would do, he always came home safely, and he worked harder than he needed to. Philippe didn’t approve of his Hornbein Couloir pitch immediately. But after hearing more logistical details and believing his son would pay off the debt, even if it took years, he was less averse to the idea. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t no. Success in Marco’s mind. Next came Russ Brice, who was unsure whether Marco was fulfilling a dream or chasing an obsession. “For some reason, he thought somebody else was going to do it first,” Brice said. “He was putting a lot of pressure on himself. He felt if he didn’t do it, somebody else would and that they’d get the recognition and respect.” 114

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Back in Chamonix after the 2001 expedition, Brice and Marco had several discussions about this next project. These discussions usually happened over beers at The Pub, the same drinking establishment along the Rue Paccard where their relationship began two years prior. Each conversation started this way: Russ: “Marco, this is not a good idea. You won’t have me there to help direct you.” Marco: “I have been there before and will be fine.” Russ: “Not really, Marco, it’s a huge, vast area. I don’t think it is a good idea. I need to speak with your parents about this.” Marco would persuade his parents if that was the determining factor, but Marco’s parents hadn’t agreed to advance him the money. They were still in a discussion phase. Brice spoke with Marco’s parents and outlined every concern. Chief among them was that he wouldn’t be there to act as a spotter. Philippe and Michele equated Brice’s presence with their son’s safety. He was there for Marco’s Cho Oyu and Everest climbs, and each time Marco returned safely. If Marco would be patient and wait until the autumn of 2003, Brice would join him and structure the trip properly. He would set up one spotter at the North Col, which provided a clear view of the upper part of Everest’s pyramid, and Brice would then position himself on an adjacent mountain that had an unobstructed view of the lower half of the north face. Both spotters could communicate with Marco via radio. Two spotters provided an extra level of safety and important route-finding assistance that Marco utilized in 2001. From the North Col, the bottom half of the Hornbein-Japanese Couloir route is invisible. Even if Marco found the entrance to the Hornbein Couloir and someone was tracking him from the col, he would be on his own for nearly eight thousand feet until he resurfaced on the Central Rongbuk Glacier at the twenty-thousand-foot level. Brice would establish a camp at the bottom of the north face on the glacier where Marco would spend the night after descending. A Sherpa would manage the camp. Marco and the Sherpa would return to base camp the following 115

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day. That part of the plan would remain the same whether Brice was there or not. But without Brice there, the thought of not having a spotter and Marco being invisible for most of the descent seemed fatalistic. “They were even more scared than I was,” Brice said of Marco’s parents. Advantage Russ. Marco explained he was confident about route-finding in that part of the mountain since he had been there the year before. Since there would be abundant snow covering the north face, Marco explained that he would be less likely to suffer from a fall or technical mistake. In powder snow, snowboarding can be easier to descend, not necessarily to traverse, but a fall in soft snow conditions is more arrestable and typically less serious. Marco was confident he could find the entrance of the Hornbein Couloir by simply traversing a little farther than he did in 2001. If Marco could convince everyone of his route-finding abilities, this concern over the conditions of the route was more to his advantage. In 2001, Marco couldn’t have survived a fall. Even if Brice thought he was mounting a rescue effort, it would have been a body recovery. The thin, firm snow conditions were such that a fall wasn’t likely arrestable. Whether Brice was viewing through a telescope or was thirty miles away on Cho Oyu, he couldn’t stop a fall or change the consequence of a fall. But if he fell in softer snow conditions in 2002, Marco had a wider margin of error. Marco was more likely to arrest the fall and the consequences would likely be less severe. These are narrow margins, but if Marco was confident in the route-finding aspect, the snowboarding itself could be safer in 2002 than in 2001. Sensing Marco was not deterred by Brice’s absence, he tried to spook him with the lack of crowds on the north face that time of year. Without other experienced expedition leaders in the vicinity, Marco would be further removed from rescue efforts in the event of an accident. But Marco had resigned himself to the reality that any mistake in the mountains would be fatal. He had made that agreement with himself long before he snowboarded in the Andes or Himalaya. “I think twenty-two years old is the right time to do things like that,” Hervé Cocco said of Marco’s Mount Everest trips. “When he is thirty 116

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years old maybe not, or maybe not when he becomes a dad. But at twenty years old, you don’t stop. You are supposed to do these things at twenty or twenty-two.” If rescue capability didn’t concern him, maybe the overall feel of the expedition would worry him. Brice could only provide three Sherpas, not counting a cook and base camp manager. It would be a small expedition, and no other expeditions would be there in autumn of 2002. The post-monsoon season of August-September has never been a popular time to climb Everest, but five human beings occupying the entire north face of the mountain is rare, and also a bit eerie. There are hundreds of climbers and Sherpas there during the busy spring season, but being the only westerner might make Marco believe he was more vulnerable. “Being alone up there is wild,” Brice said. “Not only would I not be there, nobody would be there. He would be completely alone. But he had the confidence from being there before and thought he knew the route down and knew how the oxygen works, all of that. That took away any subconscious energy he may have had. He’s still by himself, but Marco is still not being persuaded.” Marco’s rebuttal was Phurba Tashi would be there with him. Normally Phurba would be guiding with Brice on Cho Oyu, but, in the absence of himself, Brice would reassign Phurba to Marco’s Hornbein expedition to provide the best help possible. Phurba had become friends with Marco, starting with Cho Oyu in 2000 and continuing through Everest in 2001. Those who knew Marco’s abilities on a snowboard believed the ascent, not the descent, was his obstacle. And if something did happen on the ascent, there would be no better person to help Marco than Phurba. Advantage Marco. Brice was at the mercy of a boy and his dream, but mostly, a boy and his conviction. He could have prohibited Phurba from joining Marco’s 2002 expedition. But it became increasingly evident that if Brice didn’t provide the support Marco needed, Marco would find it elsewhere. It wasn’t a mean-spirited threat by Marco, but it wasn’t an idle one. Brice knew that if he couldn’t be there, Phurba provided the next best safety line. Brice felt it would be negligent to allow Marco to hire a cut-rate 117

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operator who would offer basic food, transportation, and logistical support, but also wouldn’t care about Marco. And whatever Sherpa the cutrate operator provided would not be Phurba Tashi. Brice could have restricted Phurba’s availability and called Marco’s bluff. No way Marco would go there alone without me or Phurba. But Brice was convinced Marco was returning with or without his support. He was in a difficult spot, and to make an unsafe expedition as safe as possible, Brice offered his best Sherpa in addition to his logistical support. Advantage Marco. “He was committed, and so I helped him the best I could,” Brice said. “I gave him my head man at the detriment of my Cho Oyu trip. I never thought it was a good idea, but Marco was going to go with or without my help. Lots of people would like to point the finger at me and say I didn’t look after him, but I tried. He was well aware, his parents were well aware, but Marco was going to go regardless. I couldn’t stop him. Nobody could stop him.” There was still the money issue. Although Marco’s parents agreed with Brice that Marco should wait another year, their son wasn’t waiting. Much like Brice, they knew he would go with or without their blessing. With Brice offering Phurba and logistical support, it was the best deal his parents would get. His parents were more than willing to pay Brice, whom they trusted, before paying for a cut-rate operator whom they didn’t trust. They wanted their son to be safe, although nothing about snowboarding Mount Everest is safe. In the end, his parents agreed to front Marco the money—nearly a year’s worth of his future wages—so he could snowboard the Hornbein Couloir. In July of 2019, Philippe Siffredi stood in his hair salon along the Rue Paccard, not far from The Pub where Russ and Marco first met and hatched Everest plans. He spoke about his son and his snowboarding career, starting with the purchase of his first snowboard in 1995. Did you buy him his first snowboard? Almost apologetically, Philippe responded: “Yes, yes. Maybe that is the reason that he is dead, because I always paid for everything. It is not good to buy your kids everything.”

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Chapter Seven

Himalaya

The true mountaineer is a wanderer, and by a wanderer I do not mean a man who expends his whole time in travelling to and fro in the mountains on the exact tracks of his predecessors—much as a bicyclist rushes along the turnpike roads of England—but I mean a man who loves to be where no human being has been before, who delights in gripping rocks that have never previously felt the touch of human fingers, or in hewing his way up ice-filled gullies whose grim shadows have been sacred to the mists and avalanche since “earth rose out of chaos.” —British climber Alfred Mummery, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus The smell of damp wood at this Chamonix party was strong, but not as pungent as the marijuana smoke that covered the apartment in a thick haze. Marco, with his blue eyes, gap-toothed smile, and blond hair, stepped onto the balcony for some fresh air. Laurent Molitor followed him outside. Marco sucked on a joint and exhaled. “Stephanie wants to start a family,” Marco said of his girlfriend’s wishes. Molitor said nothing. “But they need a father,” Marco continued. “I’ll never be that.” Besides fishing, snowboarding, and mountains, Marco was never serious about much, but he seemed serious about this. You’d be a great 119

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father, Molitor told him, someday there will be more to life than snowboarding mountains. “Marco, you’ve done everything. What else can you do?” “Maybe there’s a mountain on Mars.” Molitor said nothing. It may have been the weed or the alcohol, but Molitor had never seen this side of Marco. As far as he knew, neither had anyone else. Marco took another hit of the joint and exhaled. “Maybe I will settle down after Everest this time.” Molitor later said, “Stephanie never knew that Marco once thought about having kids with her.” Marco left for Kathmandu a few weeks later. Marco arrived in Kathmandu on a steamy afternoon on August 8, 2002. He stayed two nights at Hotel Tibet, not far from the Tibetan-flagadorned alleyways of the city’s Thamel tourist district. As Marco entered the lobby, he glanced at the sculpted wooden beams and the burgundy couch and chair cushions that were draped with ornamental blankets. He stepped onto brightly colored rugs and skirted painted chest drawers toward the reception area. Mirrors were nailed to walls, and hanging from them were paintings of men and women in traditional Tibetan clothes. Marco was comforted by the familiar surroundings. He had stayed at the hotel for all four of his Himalaya expeditions, both on arrival and departure. The hotel owner knew him by name. Hotel Tibet is located down a narrow street that splinters from one of the city’s chaotic boulevards. Choked with motorcycles, cows, rickshaws, bicycles, and pedestrians, Kathmandu’s streets are a “real-live slalom (or rat race)” said Marco’s mother, Michele, who would visit two months later to collect her son’s belongings. At the hotel later that night Marco met with Phurba Tashi and two other Sherpas, Da Tenzing and Pa Nuru, who were part of the expedition. They all spent time together on a rooftop deck of the five-story hotel, and then the next day Marco heard a knock on his door from Elizabeth Hawley. Hawley moved to Kathmandu in 1960 and worked as a correspondent for Time and Reuters for nearly a quarter-century. Beginning in 120

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1963, she covered every climbing expedition in the Nepal Himalaya, including those that traveled through Tibet. She interviewed expedition leaders before they left Kathmandu and after they returned. No matter what an expedition claimed they accomplished, it wasn’t official until Hawley wrote about it and verified it. Over the next five decades she compiled the world’s most detailed and comprehensive climbing reports anywhere in the Himalaya. This led to the creation of the Himalaya Database, a publicly accessible vault of information where her reports are digitally stored. Her appetite for information and her meticulous reporting often intimidated climbers. Mountaineers joked that her interviews resembled interrogations. Nobody was recognized for any accomplishment unless she signed off on it. By the time Hawley died in January of 2018 at the age of ninety-four, she had earned the nickname “Chronicler of the Himalayas.” At the time of her death she lived in the same Kathmandu apartment she moved into in 1960, and she never replaced her 1963 blue Volkswagen Beetle. Whatever handwritten documents of hers that weren’t converted digitally to the Himalaya Database are archived at the American Alpine Club in Colorado. Even though climbers were annoyed at her questioning, they knew a visit from Miss Hawley legitimatized their expedition. And not visiting with her wasn’t a choice. “She would show up at my hotel and I didn’t even tell anybody where I was staying,” said Craig Calonica, who attempted to ski Everest three times and operates a helicopter skiing business in Nepal. “I have no idea where she got her information, but she knew everything.” On August 9, 2002, Hawley met Marco at Hotel Tibet. It was the second time she had spoken with him; the first time was during his 2001 Everest expedition. Like most people, she took a liking to Marco right away. Hawley conducted about fifteen thousand interviews in her more than five decades of reporting on Himalaya climbing. With nearly thirty-five thousand deaths in the Himalaya by 2007, according to a study that Hawley coauthored with Richard Salisbury, she had become less and less affected by death. Her job was to unearth minute details and understand what happened on each expedition, which often meant questioning the motives and actions of climbers, who can be an egotistical and sensi121

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tive bunch. She developed a calloused exterior from so much tragedy and death, and by the twenty-first century, she had heard it all. It would take somebody, or something, rather unique to pique her interest. Marco Siffredi did. In Keeper of the Mountains: The Elizabeth Hawley Story, author Bernadette McDonald wrote that Hawley thought Marco was “very nice, interesting and so very, very young—twenty-three years old. He was doing remarkable things and he was excited about his opportunities—his life was in front of him.” When the Siffredi family visited Nepal in October of 2002, Hawley learned that Marco’s mother lost her first-born child, Pierre, to an avalanche. After speaking with her following her other son’s disappearance on Mount Everest, Hawley was distressed. “He just disappeared!” Hawley said in McDonald’s book. “That one really did sadden me. He was so full of life and had tremendous enthusiasm. It was a wonderful world for him, and it just went up in smoke!” When Hawley met with Marco at Hotel Tibet, they discussed his plan to become the first person to ski or snowboard the Hornbein Couloir. His ascent route would be the Northeast Ridge. His descent route would be the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs, two distinct clefts bridged by a hanging snowfield. Altogether this route snaked directly through the north face of Everest from summit to glacier. He would depart Kathmandu the following day, on August 10, and arrive at base camp on August 15. In what became a pattern on this expedition, Marco’s party arrived a day earlier, on August 14, at base camp. Traveling overland from Kathmandu, they stayed one night at Kodari, a town on the Tibet-Nepal border at seventy-five hundred feet. The next three nights were spent at Nyalam (12,300 feet) and then Tingri at over fourteen thousand feet. There was no skateboarding in Tingri on this trip. On the morning of August 14, they left Tingri after securing the last of their supplies and drove beyond the Rongbuk Monastery to base camp. Unlike 2001, when there were hundreds of climbers residing in red and yellow tents dotting the brown landscape, there were only a few locals loitering about when Marco’s team arrived in 2002. For the next three weeks, Marco’s team was the only one attempting to climb Everest. He was more alone than ever at a base camp. 122

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Marco told Hawley his team would establish high camp, Camp 3, at 27,225 feet. He told her they would use supplemental oxygen to climb and sleep at Camp 2 (25,900). Camp 1 would be at the North Col (twenty-three thousand feet), with advanced base camp at 21,300 feet. Marco’s camp locations mirrored the ones on the 2001 expedition. This would be one of the few similarities between the two expeditions. At base camp, Marco got his first unobstructed view of Everest’s north face during the post-monsoon season. It seemed to be a totally different mountain than the one he saw in spring of 2001. “The monster has come out . . . we saw Everest, it’s fluorescent white, it’ll be hard work to climb,” Marco said in his video diary. Months of consistent snow since the spring had changed the north face’s complexion, but the biggest difference between 2001 and 2002 was a blue check mark on a document completed by Hawley. Marco was the designated “expedition leader” and not a “climbing member.” This would be the first time he would be the expedition leader on an eight-thousand-meter peak in Nepal. He indicated to Hawley that he was living with his girlfriend at 32 Chemin de la Croix Verte, which was the address for his family’s campground in France. Marco and Stephanie had developed a romantic relationship that began during his earliest days as a snowboarder. They were teenagers when they fell in love, and although the seriousness of their relationship ebbed and flowed over the years, they couldn’t have been more committed to each other when Marco left for Everest in 2002. When he arrived in Kathmandu on August 8, he took a taxi directly to Hotel Tibet and called Stephanie. Owen West, who climbed with Marco during the 2001 Everest expedition, didn’t think Marco had someone that could stop his trajectory. His parents and friends were unsuccessful in suppressing his adventurous spirit. Like most others, they believed Marco was a bird who had no cage. Trying to confine him to one now would change him, and nobody wanted that. Marco often called Stephanie during these Himalaya expeditions. By the time the 2002 expedition ended, he had racked up a $2,000 satellite phone bill, mostly from calls to Stephanie. Ellen Miller remembers Marco talking constantly about Stephanie during the Cho Oyu trip in 2000 and on Everest in 2001. At the time 123

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she couldn’t determine if they had taken the next step and were living together, but by 2002 they were living together in the chalet at the family campground. Stephanie loved Marco, Marco loved Stephanie, but she never put conditions on him. Marco’s exchange on the balcony with Laurent Molitor, in fact, was the first time he had mentioned children, but Marco understood that having children meant becoming a father, and becoming a father meant responsibility. With his Hornbein obsession stronger than ever in 2002, he wasn’t changed by the vagaries of a serious relationship. “Kids, marriage, we didn’t speak about that,” said Marco’s friend Bertrand Delapierre. “He was quite famous in town and lots of girls liked him. He could collect many girlfriends, but he was very serious with Stephanie.” His quip, “Maybe there’s a mountain on Mars,” suggests that The Little Prince, his favorite children’s book and the one he brought to Everest in 2001, was more prophetical than philosophical. Peter Pan syndrome permeates ski towns, where men and women have difficulty understanding that they can’t stay young forever; that, as they age, they can’t have a life revolved around climbing, skiing, or snowboarding. Many ski town residents have rejected that notion and the trappings of typical adulthood, but this wasn’t a Peter Pan syndrome. Marco was just twenty-three years old, the age many begin their life as a ski bum or a climbing bum in these towns. In Hawley’s notes, she listed his occupation as “pro snowboarder” and listed other eight-thousand-meter peaks he had summited: Cho Oyu, 14 September 2000; Everest, 23/5/2001; Shishapangma, October 2001. He snowboarded two of them but didn’t descend Shishapangma because of unsafe conditions on the summit ridge. Anybody who labeled Marco a reckless kook with a death wish would be hard-pressed to find somebody more willing to turn around when things weren’t right. Hawley documented every expedition interview with a one-page “On Arrival” sheet and a one-page “On Return” sheet after the expedition ended. Often her detailed approach led to her notes spilling onto an additional page. Still unsatisfied with his ascent details, Hawley quizzed Marco on the specifics as she filled out her “On Arrival” sheet at Hotel Tibet on August 9. 124

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Marco said he planned to make his first summit attempt on September 15 but would give himself a fifteen-day window. In the event of poor acclimatization or bad weather, he would make a summit attempt as late as September 30, but in the same breath he said that his return flight to France was September 27. His return flight, Marco clarified with Hawley, was changeable and could be extended to October 12 to accommodate for Olivier Besson. A mountain guide from St. Nicklaus near Chamonix, Besson was seventeen years older than Marco and an enigmatic figure. He was listed as a climbing member of the expedition in Hawley’s notes. (Phurba Tashi and the two other Sherpas weren’t climbing members but workers.) Marco always preferred someone to join him on his expeditions, but Bertrand Delapierre didn’t join him because, he said, “This was Marco’s dream, not mine.” According to Marco’s family and friends, Besson and Marco had no previous climbing experience together and were not friends. To this day, his family has no idea why Besson joined Marco’s expedition, and they never understood his role. Delapierre revealed that Marco wanted to share the cost of the permit fee. Besson’s inclusion on the Everest climbing permit would have accomplished that. But Besson was not there to be a spotter for Marco and aid in his descent. He was there to summit Everest, and if possible, ski the north face with Marco. Delapierre said of Besson: “He’s not a very good skier, but if he reached the summit, he would try.” The only problem in all of this was that Besson didn’t travel with Marco and was not on the same acclimatization schedule. Instead of traveling with Marco, Besson remained in France for nearly three more weeks to finish the summer season working as a mountain guide. Besson’s inclusion baffled Russell Brice. “Olivier has always been a difficult character and I never really got to know him,” Brice said. “I am not really sure [what his role was], but I suspect he was there to support Marco. But of course, he never went at the start of the expedition, so [he] was of very little help. So, actually, by the time he did go, he was of no use whatsoever. Nobody ever spoke to me about what Olivier was there for.” According to Hawley, she interviewed Besson in Kathmandu on August 26—two weeks after Marco arrived at Everest base camp. Besson 125

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wouldn’t arrive at base camp until September 2, but she noted Besson hoped to summit with Marco, then hopefully ski the north face of Mount Everest with him. The timeline didn’t add up, and Besson’s plan was doomed from the start. He was weeks behind Marco’s acclimatization schedule, and even if Marco waited until September 15 to make a summit attempt, Besson wouldn’t have been acclimatized and in position to summit just thirteen days after arriving at base camp. Marco arrived on August 14 and summited twenty-five days later, which was considered aggressive. In 2001, Marco arrived in Lhasa in early April and didn’t summit Everest for almost fifty days. Besson’s plans for a summit bid with Marco were never going to happen, and as it turned out, Marco and Besson never saw each other. Besson’s role on the trip and what transpired could have been clarified had he responded to repeated interview requests over the years, but he never did. Besson, though, would play a crucial role after Marco disappeared. Had Marco officially incorporated him into his plans, Besson would have been a capable partner. Married and a father of three, Besson summited Cho Oyu in 2000 and attempted Everest twice in the early 1990s via the South Col route in Nepal. Both attempts were unsuccessful, but he had hoped he would find success on his third attempt. When Marco and Hawley met at Hotel Tibet on August 9, 2002, he never specified Besson’s role and, surprisingly, Hawley didn’t press him for more details on Besson’s inclusion. Based on her history, if it was anybody else, Hawley wouldn’t have ignored this important detail and wouldn’t have allowed the interview to continue. Maybe it was Marco’s spunk, his charm, or his ambition, but whatever it was, Hawley was less concerned with Besson than Marco, whom she fancied as a talented, engaging athlete who wasn’t relying on Besson’s services. Hawley and Marco continued fleshing out the details at Hotel Tibet. Marco would spend six days at base camp, resting, acclimatizing, and participating in a puja ceremony. One day during that span, Marco and Phurba would carry supplies on the Central Rongbuk Glacier and travel to the base of the north face. At 19,200 feet they would establish a glacier camp and stock it with food, fuel, and sleeping bags. The camp was ten thousand feet below Everest’s summit, which wasn’t visible because of 126

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the face’s convex shape. On summit day, as Marco, Phurba, Da Tenzing, and Pa Nuru climbed from high camp, a Tibetan yak herder would be stationed at the 19,200-foot glacier camp and await Marco’s arrival. Once he left the summit, Marco would ride through the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs and arrive at the glacier camp. He would spend the night at the glacier camp with a yak herder, then they would both leave the next day and hike to base camp and join the other expedition members. Fair enough, Hawley thought. Hawley scribbled in her notes, “If couloir snow conditions not good, might descend Great Couloir instead.” The Great Couloir, also known as the Norton Couloir, was Marco’s snowboard route in 2001. In her notes, however, she didn’t clarify if Marco’s alternative descent route meant he would snowboard the Great/Norton Couloir to the glacier camp at 19,200 feet or if that meant he would follow the same descent route as in 2001 and return to the North Col (Camp 1). This was another important detail for Hawley to iron out, but it was in the mid-80s outside on the bustling streets of Kathmandu and, relaxing in the cozy confines of Hotel Tibet, that was the extent of Marco’s plan. Perhaps Marco did tell Hawley and she never wrote it down, or maybe those details weren’t important until Marco assessed snow conditions. Either way, nothing unfolded the way it was designed on September 8, 2002. Jean Troillet is a Swiss climber from the village of La Fouly, which is squeezed against the Mont Blanc massif underneath 12,539-foot Mount Dolent at the intersection of France, Italy, and Switzerland. In the summer of 2002, a fifty-four-year-old Troillet was tending his garden when he received a phone call. On the line was a snowboarder from Chamonix who introduced himself as Marco Siffredi. Troillet had heard about Marco prior to the call, but the extent of his knowledge was that he was a snowboarder from the other side of the massif in France and that he had made the first complete snowboard descent of Everest, with the use of oxygen. “Jean, my name is Marco,” Troillet remembers Marco hurriedly explaining. “I want to go to Everest and snowboard the Hornbein, can you give me some advice?” 127

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If Jean-Marc Boivin was the reason Marco wanted to snowboard the Hornbein Couloir, Troillet was the reason he believed it could be done. Sixteen years earlier, in 1986, Troillet and Swiss partner Erhard Loretan accomplished perhaps the most impressive feat in mountaineering history. From the base of the north face, and not far from where Marco’s camp was established at 19,200 feet, Troillet and Loretan started climbing at 11:00 p.m. on August 28, 1986. They climbed during the night and used their headlamps to guide them up through the Japanese and Hornbein couloirs. When the sun rose over the Tibetan plateau on the morning of August 29, the climbers stopped to rest during the day. When the sun set and the snow hardened, they began to climb again. At mid-morning on August 30, the two exited the Hornbein Couloir. Veering right toward the West Ridge, they roughly followed the same route as Americans Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, who were the first to ascend the couloir in 1963. Troillet and Loretan arrived on the summit at 2:00 p.m., the same time Marco arrived there on September 8, 2002. Just as Marco did, they spent about an hour there in comfortable weather. A little after 3:00 p.m., just as Marco did, they descended, but the similarities end there. Troillet and Loretan sat down and slid on their butts for ten thousand feet, an action known as glissading. After glissading for three and a half hours, they arrived back at camp. In total, the climb took 43.5 hours, which remains the fastest ascent and descent in Everest history. The speed of their climb was indeed record-breaking, but it was the style in which they performed that made their climb truly remarkable. They climbed alpine style without Sherpas, fixed ropes, and established camps. Also climbing without oxygen, their alpine-style ascent was performed in the purest style imaginable and on the largest stage possible, Mount Everest. “If they went down on their asses, for me the snowboard will be easy,” Marco once told his father, Philippe. What Troillet and Loretan accomplished has never been repeated. There have been plenty of climbers who are also competent and fit, but it takes more than ability to pull off what Troillet and Loretan did. On Everest, route and weather conditions are often more important. 128

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Although the Swiss men climbed in the post-monsoon season, it’s still common in late August for storms to cover the north face in deep snow. But there hadn’t been any significant storms in the days leading up to their climb, nor in the two days during their climb. That was similar to Marco’s summit push. But having spent six weeks in and around the Rongbuk Glacier, climbing smaller peaks and increasing their red blood cell count, they were fully acclimatized for an oxygen-less ascent. On Everest, in late August of 1986, everything broke in their favor. “Loretan and Troillet demonstrated supreme confidence and superb competence,” Walt Unsworth wrote in Everest: The Ultimate Book of the Ultimate Mountain. “They had luck with the weather, but everyone needs that and their astonishing achievement is one of the greatest mountain climbs of all time. . . . It’s enough to make one doubt the difficulty of the climb—could it possibly be difficult, given the circumstances? As if in answer to the unspoken question, Roger Marshall, an Anglo-Canadian on his third visit to the mountain, was killed the following year trying to repeat the climb.” When Marco called Troillet in 2002, he revealed he wanted to snowboard a route that had rarely been climbed. Troillet did not discourage Marco, but he knew that the young snowboarder would have to overcome some formidable history. During a fifty-seven-year span from 1963 to 2020, nine teams had attempted the Hornbein/Japanese Couloir route and three succeeded: Japan’s Tsuneoh Shigeiro and Takashi Ozaki were credited with that route’s first ascent in 1980; Troillet-Loretan were next in 1986; and Sweden’s Lars Kronlund was the last to repeat the route in 1991. During that same fifty-seven-year span, twelve expeditions attempted to reach the summit by circumventing the lower Japanese Couloir and approaching the Hornbein Couloir from a different angle. Of those twelve teams, three were successful: Americans Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld were credited with the Hornbein Couloir’s first ascent in 1963; Canadians Sharon Wood and Dwayne Congdon climbed the Hornbein to the summit in 1986; and Poland’s Andrzej Marciniak and Eugeniusz Chrobak climbed the Hornbein to the summit in 1989. According to Everest chronicler Alan Arnette, as of December 2019, there have been 10,155 Everest ascents. Of those 10,155 ascents, eleven 129

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involved climbing through the Hornbein (.001 percent). Marco was the first to make a serious attempt to snowboard through the hallowed walls of the Hornbein. “When you are doing first descents, there is so much voodoo involved,” said American snowboarder Jeremy Jones, who has notched numerous first descents and is a preeminent voice on big mountain snowboarding. “The classic scenario is you die doing it and then everybody says ‘Yeah, that was a stupid idea.’ But it’s not that simple. There’s a reason why nobody has ridden that route before, but every route must be ridden first. So, you have to have a ton of self-confidence, and on something like Everest, there’s a bunch of money and time involved. Nobody is going to tell you that it’s a good idea. You need so much personal confidence and drive to overcome all of that. You have to be able to say, ‘I can do this, I can do something that has never been done.’ And then when someone succeeds, people follow in your footsteps and suddenly it makes more sense to ride it.” Troillet and Loretan encountered favorable snow conditions in 1986, just like the ones experienced by Marco Siffredi in 2002. Those conditions seduced Troillet to make his own Hornbein snowboard descent. Three years earlier, Troillet first saw Everest’s north face as part of an Italian-Swiss expedition in 1983. Nobody on the team summited, but Troillet vowed to return. He was captivated by the north face, and after his record-breaking climb in 1986, he was convinced a snowboard descent was possible. “When you arrive in the Rongbuk and see that face, it’s so beautiful and pretty and it just goes straight up,” Troillet said in 2019 from his home in La Fouly, Switzerland. “The [northeast] ridge is too long and uninteresting. I knew I would be back after 1983 because the face was too nice and too beautiful to not try again. (In 1986) we climbed at night because you don’t sleep above 7,000 meters. You expend energy doing nothing. When you climb at night you don’t stop because it’s cold. There’s nothing to see. We had two good days of weather. We didn’t know we would have that weather; we just went. We were young and crazy. We had sleeping bags and dug platforms to rest during the day. We had a little bit of food, two cereal bars and one chocolate bar, and half liter of water and 130

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some snow. We had no storms, no wind, it was perfect, it was something special. But I remember saying, ‘If I have a snowboard, that powder, oh boy, it would be best thing in the world to do.’” Troillet, a capable snowboarder, returned in August of 1997. He planned to snowboard the Japanese and Hornbein couloirs, but avalanche danger at twenty-four thousand feet forced him to switch his objective to the Northeast Ridge. Climbing without oxygen, the forty-nine-year-old carried his snowboard and reached 28,536 feet, less than five hundred feet from the summit. It was late in the afternoon and Apa Sherpa, his trusted partner, recommended that they turn around. It was almost 2:00 p.m., it was cold, and the winds were fierce. It wasn’t like the conditions Troillet had experienced in 1986. Apa was concerned about summiting too late and felt Troillet trying to make a snowboard descent in these worsening conditions would be suicidal. Troillet agreed. He downclimbed about a thousand feet and began snowboarding at 27,500 feet. “I was feeling good and it was clear . . . I was ready to go to the summit and snowboard down, but I had to listen to Apa,” said Troillet, whose then-girlfriend and now wife was waiting for him at advanced base camp that year. “I called my girlfriend on the radio and she said I had to listen to the Sherpa. She was right, he had much more experience than me. I sat down and thought about it, but I knew it was the right decision. I learned before that the summit is not the most important thing, it’s coming back that is most important.” Troillet linked a series of beautiful turns over the next few hours and returned safely to his girlfriend’s arms in camp. With turns starting at 27,500 feet, he set a world-altitude record for a snowboarder that stood for nearly four years until Austria’s Stefan Gatt snowboarded from the summit in 2001. Troillet, who climbed ten eight-thousand-meter peaks in his life, never made another attempt. But when Marco called him in 2002, he was touched by the Frenchman’s determination and his detail-oriented questions. If anybody could snowboard the Hornbein, Troillet hung up the phone that day thinking it would be Marco Siffredi. “It was quite a long conversation, he asked all the right questions about the Hornbein,” Troillet said. “He asked about my experience. He asked about the difficulties. We talked about how it was the nicest slope 131

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in the world, and I told him he should do it. I told him he would need a single rope to rappel down but with the snowboard at his feet, and the rest would be good. He was young and single and not thinking about the future. He seemed very excited. He left for Everest not long after he called.” On August 20, 2002, yaks arrived, and the expedition’s gear was mounted to their backs. Everyone departed for advanced base camp with a stop at an interim camp along the way. Marco arrived at 21,300-foot advanced base camp on August 22 and, like his impressions at base camp a week earlier, the environment was completely foreign. No clusters of shiny expedition tents, no westerners, and there was an eerie silence as they walked into the camp with yak bells ringing. “Nobody is here, only remains of the spring camps,” Marco said in his video diary that appeared in his friend Bertrand Delapierre’s film Etoile Filante.” “It’s changed in about two years, incredible. We’ll stay here for about a month, it’s our new home. We’ll quickly set up camp, drink and eat pasta with parmesan. I’m dreaming of that, with Corsican sausage. I’m hungry [for] parmesan pasta, Corsican sausage, and red South African wine. It’s not great, but we’ll make do.” The Sherpas fixed the expedition’s generator, which allowed them to recharge batteries for the camera to film Marco snowboarding. The repaired generator also allowed Marco to call his girlfriend from the satellite phone. When not thinking about Stephanie, Marco’s mind was focused on the weather. Without Russell Brice’s reliable forecasts, Marco regularly called Yan Giezendanner, a trusted meteorologist in Chamonix. The forecast was spotty: partly sunny in the morning before increasing clouds in the afternoon, then the cloud ceiling would drop by evening and snow would fall each night. Marco thought that the sun was more intense, and temperatures seemed warmer in August than in May, which increased avalanche danger after fresh snow. This weather pattern was troubling and would persist until the end of the month. A foot of snow fell overnight their first night at advanced base camp. An avalanche shook the valley by the time he awoke the morning of August 23. Recent avalanches wiped away all the fresh snow and left 132

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behind a palette of ice in their wake. Marco described the face as a “festival of avalanches” according to a 2006 Transworld Snowboarding article written by Trey Cook. Looking at the slopes below the North Col the morning of August 23, the sun reflected off the ice and was more treacherous than in the spring of 2001. Marco had hoped to assess snow conditions on the summit pyramid and the Hornbein Couloir, but both features remained hidden behind curtains of low-hanging clouds. Still, it was only August 23, early in the expedition, and his summit attempt wasn’t scheduled for another three weeks. As Marco acclimatized, the Sherpas started the process of fixing ropes to higher camps. On August 28, the team climbed to the North Col and spent the night. The next day, he made his first turns snowboarding from the col to advanced base camp. Phurba and Da Tenzing snapped pictures and filmed him descending. The Sherpas even strapped into the snowboard and made a few clumsy turns themselves. The mood remained light and upbeat the night of August 29 once everyone returned to advanced base camp. Marco listened to AC/DC in his tent and said in his video diary, “Sleeping well without pills. . . . I’m great, the Sherpas are always great.” The monotonous, methodical nature of expedition life was evident, but Marco was on schedule. Despite the weather, a September 15 summit attempt seemed feasible, but where was Olivier Besson? On August 30, Marco wrote a letter to Besson from advanced base camp and updated him on the expedition’s progress. Marco gave the letter to a yak herder and asked him to deliver it to Besson, assuming he found him at the bottom of the valley. According to the French-language book The Trace of an Angel, written by Antoine Chandellier, Besson received the letter when he arrived at base camp on September 3, a day later than what Besson had told Elizabeth Hawley. “Your arrival will give me motivation,” Chandellier wrote the letter saying from Marco to Besson. “I’m waiting for you. We’re going to rip that Hornbein apart. Ciao!” Besson couldn’t have known it at the time, but Marco had already climbed to the North Col for the final time by the time he received the letter on September 3 in base camp. Also unknown to Besson, Marco was 133

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not waiting for him. Marco himself didn’t even know that, when he wrote his initial letter, because Marco changed the climbing schedule between August 30 and September 2. On August 31, the team returned to the North Col at 22,960 feet and made their first big altitude push the next day, on September 1, to Camp 2 at 24,600 feet. Marco had climbed through waist-deep snow and returned to advanced base camp that night, exhausted. He was strong and climbed as fast as reasonably possible, but the conditions were more difficult than in 2001. He was slower and, unlike in 2001, he struggled to keep up with the Sherpas. On Monday, September 2, Marco called Yan, who had a favorable weather report. After days of poor weather and unstable snow conditions, Yan told Marco that the weather would get increasingly more stable throughout the week. There would be intermittent clouds with light precipitation, but nothing more than flurries. The weekend was shaping up to be the best two-day weather stretch of the expedition thus far. In fact, September 8 was expected to be a clear and cloudless day with little wind. After that, Yan said the weather would become unsettled again. After weeks of horrendous weather and a theater of nonstop avalanches, Marco viewed this forecast as his opportunity. As far as he knew, it was the only weather window he would get before the jet stream dipped south and obliterated the north face and shut the mountain down for the winter. Marco may have not been perfectly acclimated, but then again, what’s the point of being acclimated if the weather didn’t cooperate and he could never mount a summit attempt? Being sufficiently acclimated is important, but that process is somewhat controlled by the climber with patience and diligence in understanding how one’s body adapts to higher altitudes. Getting a weather window is the real barrier when climbing Everest, and that is not controlled by the climber. There are traditionally more weather windows in spring than autumn, and because of incessant winds, there are usually no more than a dozen possible summit days in a calendar year. All Marco cared about was getting one. Some climbers wait days or months and that opportunity never comes. But if it does, one hopes to be ready. This concept was not lost on Marco. 134

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“He had only been there a few weeks, and that wasn’t enough time to acclimatize even if he was Superman,” said Chamonix resident Craig Calonica, who attempted to ski Everest three times in the late 1990s. “But Marco saw that there was a weather window and he took it. You need a series of weather windows, one to allow for acclimatization and one for getting the route all set up, and then one for the summit. Sometimes two weather windows will do it, one for the set up and one for the summit, but Marco went for the summit on the first weather window. Hey, I get it. When I tried to ski Everest this one time, I watched my entire route get blown away in a single day. The route went from looking like a ski area in mid-winter one day to nothing but rock and ice the next day. Marco was dialed in with Yan, who is really accurate, and he told him he had a window. Even though maybe Marco wasn’t quite ready, he was quite confident, and he jetted up there. But Everest is a big-ass place and you don’t know where you are. You go up there and nobody is spotting you, good fucking luck.” For the first time on a climbing expedition, Marco left his good-luck cross given to him by Hervé Cocco’s mother in Chamonix, but Marco’s luck, in his mind, was Yan’s weather report. Snowboarding the Hornbein Couloir aside, he needed more than luck to summit via the Northeast Ridge route in autumn. Between 1920 and 2002 there had only been twelve non-commercial expeditions to attempt the route in autumn. Of those, two successfully had placed a climber on the summit, but Marco would be the third. Change of plans, sorry Olivier Besson: September 8, 2002, was the day Marco Siffredi would snowboard the Hornbein Couloir on the north face of Mount Everest. Armed with Yan’s weather report at advanced base camp, Marco asked the Sherpas to establish Camp 3 at 27,225 feet. Constructing the high camp was the last hurdle before a summit attempt could be launched. In deteriorating weather conditions, though, the Sherpas were forced to cache gear two thousand feet below Camp 3 and retreat to a lower camp. The weather had remained unsettled. The Sherpas’ tracks that ended at the cache remained etched in the snow for the next four days. It wasn’t until September 6 that conditions improved enough for 135

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the Sherpas to return to the cache and climb the remaining two thousand feet to Camp 3. On September 2, Marco committed to summiting on September 8, but the Sherpas didn’t construct Camp 3 until September 6. According to The Trace of an Angel, Marco wrote a second letter to Besson informing him that he was leaving advanced base camp and would be at the North Col on September 3 and at the summit on September 8. Marco would leave all necessary equipment, the letter stated, for Besson to make his own summit bid. Besson didn’t receive the letter until Marco had already started his summit push. Just as he stated to Besson in his letter, Marco climbed to the North Col on September 3. As he walked onto the col, a red bandana attached to his head and clouds floating in the background, he said in his video diary: “Theoretically, this is the last time I’ll ever climb it. I hope so, anyway. It’s the right time, push, push, push.” The Sherpas’ tracks that revealed their failed attempt to establish Camp 3 were visible when Marco arrived at the North Col. If there was a reason to follow the planned schedule he had outlined for Hawley and which the Sherpas were operating under, it was those tracks and how they ended two thousand feet below where they should have. Upon arriving at the North Col, Marco said: “There are (the) tracks from last time to 7,700 meters. We’ll make it. We have to, anyway.” Besides Yan’s weather report, there was nothing to suggest it was prudent to accelerate the schedule. Marco had returned exhausted from his initial climb to Camp 2, his only trip above twenty-three thousand feet before attempting to summit. According to a 2006 Transworld Snowboarding article by Trey Cook, Phurba urged Marco to wait for Olivier Besson for an important logistical reason. He figured Marco was strong and fit enough to make the summit, but Besson had something else far more important, a set of repaired two-way radios. Upon Marco’s arrival in base camp, the radios weren’t working. Phurba ordered them to be fixed and returned later. Without the radios, Phurba couldn’t communicate with Marco once they separated from each other near the summit. Without those radios, neither Phurba nor Marco could communicate with the yak herder waiting for Marco at the glacier camp at the base of the north face. Without those radios, once Marco 136

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left the summit, he would be alone on the north face of Mount Everest, and once that happened, he would be the loneliest, most isolated person on the planet. As it were, with Marco standing at the North Col on September 3, the expedition’s sole communication device was a satellite phone that Marco continued to use to call Stephanie, his friends and family, and Yan in Chamonix. Marco told Phurba he didn’t want to wait for Besson and risk missing this upcoming weather window. They would continue climbing to the summit as he had decided. For the first time in his extreme snowboarding career, Marco seemed to be relying more on intuition than reason. He was dangerously shaving already thin safety margins. Not having a spotter, not waiting for route conditions to improve, not acclimatizing fully, and now, not waiting for two-way radios. Marco was clearly committed to a summit attempt, but at least the weather improved during his two-day stay at Camp 1 atop the North Col. One of the days, Marco lay shirtless in his tent. He was fidgety and restless. In his video diary, around lunchtime, he said, “We hydrate, make water and prepare food. Chicken and rice, it’s simmering. . . . It’s 3:00 p.m., four more hours to be bored before we go to sleep.” Marco put on a long-sleeve shirt by late afternoon. He opened the flap on the front of his tent, and the north face of Everest filled the opening. “At 5:00 p.m. it clears up nicely. All white with a layer of snow on top of it.” With an unobstructed view of his ascent and descent routes, Marco’s spirits lifted but his restlessness continued. He raised his voice and excitedly said, “6 p.m., it’s pasta time.” He clacked his tongue, and wearing a down jacket, he commented: “The temperature changed. The watch said 45 Celsius [113 Fahrenheit] when we were half naked, 7 degrees now.” As he leaned toward the front opening of his tent, he said: “But look at the scenery back there, slightly foggy, the goddess of the mountains is showing herself.” Marco’s face reappeared into the camera frame. He raised his right hand and extended his index finger. He shook it back and forth and, in a playful warning, said to himself: But the hardest part has yet to be done, don’t get carried away. 137

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The morning of September 6, Marco’s spirits were further lifted as a cloudless sunrise illuminated the route. After a light breakfast and tea, he left the North Col and climbed to Camp 2 at 24,600 feet. The Sherpas were above him establishing Camp 3. Afternoon clouds had partially smothered some peaks that looked like white fangs sticking out from the Tibetan plateau. Marco sat in the snow and noticed the wide tongue of the Central Rongbuk Glacier about a vertical mile below. He identified his planned exit route on September 9 from the 19,200-foot glacier camp: “You can see the glacier, I’ll cross to the right of the crevasses that look like Spiderman.” Dressed in his yellow down suit, Marco called a friend in Chamonix and assessed the conditions this way: “It’s not icy, it doesn’t appear to be. The descent shouldn’t be a problem.” Marco called his parents, but according to a 2006 Transworld Snowboarding article, he told them he was at advanced base camp. His friends knew differently, but Marco didn’t want to worry his parents knowing that he was already headed for the summit. Marco began using supplemental oxygen to sleep and climb at Camp 2, and the next day he climbed to Camp 3 at 27,225 feet. The weather was better on September 7 than the previous two days; both would have been suitable summit days. One could light a match without the flame being extinguished, and none of Marco’s calls on the satellite phone were muffled by even the hint of a breeze. He called Yan for an update: September 7 and September 8 would be clear; winds would increase by the late afternoon September 8, with nonthreatening clouds below 26,500 feet that may temporarily disrupt visibility but that’s it. But the next day, September 9, Yan revealed that an unsettled weather pattern would develop again. According to Trey Cook’s 2006 Transworld Snowboarding article, their final conversation unfolded this way: “You won’t have many chances.” “Okay, merci. Adieu, Yan.” “Yeah, we’ll talk tomorrow, Marco. Call me when you’re down.” “Yes, but adieu, Yan. Adieu.” The phone call ended with a stunned Yan. Adieu. That didn’t sound right. In French when people intend on seeing each other again, the 138

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phrase is “Au Revoir.” Adieu is normally used only when people don’t intend on seeing each other again. In Chamonix, adieu can be used between friends—depending on how one says it. “Yan is kind of freaked out by Marco’s sign-off,” Cook wrote in his article. The satellite batteries running low, Marco called Bertrand Delapierre. “I’m so close to the Hornbein I could touch it,” Cook reported Marco as saying to his friend. “It’s right here. The snow is great. I feel strong.” Unlike Yan, Delapierre heard a familiar Marco, the same one he grew up snowboarding with, the one that descended the Nant Blanc, the one he climbed Cho Oyu with, and now one who was hours away from fulfilling his dream of snowboarding the Hornbein Couloir. “I was truly confident he would make it,” Bertrand Delapierre said in 2018 about his final phone call with Marco on September 7, 2002. “Marco only sometimes had problems on the way up, never on the way down. I told him to call me at the bottom but don’t call too early because he was six hours ahead there. Last time he was at the top at 6 a.m., which was midnight in France. I didn’t want him to wake me up too early.” Their call ended. The phone died shortly thereafter and was never used by Marco again during the expedition. Marco readied himself for whatever sleep possible before he would leave to the summit at 1:30 a.m. Over six thousand feet below, Besson arrived at advanced base camp that evening on September 7. Besides the expedition’s cook and flocks of black crows, advanced base camp was deserted. Besson unpacked and removed the two-way radios. Useless, he thought, because there was no way to communicate with Marco. “They could have waited,” Antoine Chandellier wrote when describing Besson’s feelings in The Trace of an Angel. Marco Siffredi stumbled onto the summit of Mount Everest just after 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 8, 2002. He had climbed through waistand chest-deep snow for twelve and a half hours. It took him more than three times longer to summit in 2002 than it did in 2001, but he did not care about that. Marco spent an hour at the summit in relatively calm and

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comfortable weather. When Phurba Tashi greeted him at the top, Marco was hunched over and only spoke in fragments. “Tired . . . tired. Too much snow. Too much climbing,” Marco told Phurba. Dressed in a yellow down suit, Marco scanned the horizon and surveyed the vast brown expanse of the Tibetan plateau, ten thousand feet beneath him. Marco wasn’t buoyant, but his spirits and energy had increased at the summit. A light wind pushed colorful prayer flags into Nepal. Clouds billowed, as Yan predicted, but the snow was as stable as one could have hoped. At one point, Marco raised his snowboard above his head in a conquering pose. Phurba urged him to descend via the Northeast Ridge route and, for the second straight year, abandon his Hornbein attempt. Marco declined Phurba’s suggestion and made his final adjustments. Shivering in his yellow down suit, the temperature was dropping, and he had to get going. At 3:15 p.m., he checked that his bindings were secure and ratcheted the straps tighter. Phurba exchanged Marco’s empty oxygen bottle with a new one. Strapped into his snowboard, he pointed his right arm toward the Hornbein as the ice axe in his left arm poked the sky, then Marco started down. “Okay, see you, see you tomorrow, take care,” Phurba said as Marco waved his ice axe in a goodbye motion and descended from the summit. “Okay, Phurba, see you tomorrow.”

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Chapter Eight

Rainbow Valley

It is clear that the stake [the mountaineer] risks to lose is a great one with him: it is a matter of life and death. . . . To win the game he has first to reach the mountain’s summit—but, further, he has to descend in safety. The more difficult the way and the more numerous the dangers, the greater is his victory. —British Climber George Mallory, in 1924 On Sunday, September 8, there was promise of a warm summer day in the alpine valleys surrounding the Mont Blanc massif. Thinking their son was at a lower camp and not climbing to the summit, Marco’s parents spent the day visiting friends on the opposite side of Mont Blanc, in Italy’s Aosta Valley. They’d receive an update from Marco in a few days once he was farther up the mountain, which meant they could relax on this glorious Sunday in the Alps. Philippe and Michele, however, left their home that morning not realizing that their twenty-three-year-old son was standing on the summit of Mount Everest. In fact, since it was late afternoon in Tibet, he had already started his descent as his parents’ car entered a tunnel that connects France and Italy. Back in Chamonix, as on most summer weekends, an event was being held, and on this day it was an annual bike race that attracted mostly Chamoniards. David Autheman, who worked as a host for local adventure sports network Mountain TV, was the race’s emcee. Autheman 141

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had interviewed Marco before he left for Everest and, as an avid climber and skier, was curious about Marco’s current whereabouts. Autheman received a satellite phone call from Olivier Besson, who was tracking Marco’s progress through binoculars from advanced base camp at 21,300 feet. Besson told Autheman he saw Marco reach the summit just after 2:00 p.m., Tibet time, and witnessed the beginning of his descent about an hour later. The six-hour time difference was a minor nuisance to Marco’s close friend Bertrand in 2001 when Marco called him from the summit of Everest after midnight local time in Chamonix. But now, the six-hour difference between France and Tibet was about to create the most distressful seventy-two hours possible for everyone in Marco’s life. It was evening in Tibet and early afternoon in Chamonix when Besson first revealed the news to Autheman. He was hoping for another update before he told anyone in France, but by the time the bike race’s awards ceremony started at 2:00 p.m., Autheman hadn’t received a second call from Besson. He couldn’t delay the announcement any longer. He raised a megaphone to his lips, and with the event’s participants gathered in front of a horizontal stage, Autheman shouted, “Marco Siffredi has arrived at the summit of Everest!” Heads snapped toward their neighbors, followed by an eruption of cheers and applause. Marco was the first Chamoniard to reach Earth’s highest point the year before, and now he stood on the summit for the second time in two years. Smiles were smeared on everyone’s faces, and a tremendous sense of pride settled in. For the rest of the day, townspeople rejoiced and expected to wake up Monday morning—or perhaps go to bed that night—with news that their native son had safely reached the tent at 19,200 feet on the Central Rongbuk Glacier. “For me, once I heard Marco was at the summit, it was done,” said photographer René Robert. “The challenge for Marco was always to go up, not down.” When the bells rang at 6:00 p.m. and vibrated the outer stone walls of St. Michel Church, every Chamoniard had heard he made the summit, including Marco’s parents, who had returned from their day trip to Italy. There was just one problem. Once they shook off the initial confusion that 142

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Marco was not at a lower camp as he had told them, Philippe and Michele Siffredi performed basic math. It was midnight in Tibet, and nobody had heard again from Marco? There should have been another update. Marco had called home countless times since mid-August to talk about the expedition’s monotonous details—details only a mother would be interested in—so why didn’t he call after completing the biggest accomplishment of his life? But once they learned from Delapierre that the batteries for Marco’s satellite phone died the night before, his lack of communication made a bit more sense, but why nothing more from Besson? Something has happened, Michele thought. Call it a mother’s intuition or the reaction of any parent, but it was a fitful night of sleep for Philippe and Michele Siffredi. “My wife was very worried,” Philippe said. “After Pierre, my wife didn’t want it to happen a second time. One was too much, two would be impossible.” That day in Tibet, Besson hadn’t seen anything to suggest Marco didn’t arrive safely at the bottom of the north face by sunset, as was his plan. Yet, Besson couldn’t confirm Marco’s arrival because he couldn’t communicate with Norbu, the Tibetan yak herder who was waiting for Marco. Also, the expedition’s two-way radios remained in Besson’s tent at advanced base camp and there was no way for him to communicate with the Sherpas descending the Northeast Ridge. It was maddening that he could talk with people thousands of miles away in France but not speak with people thousands of feet away in Tibet. For all he knew, Marco had reunited with Norbu and they were drinking a celebratory tea. Something felt amiss, but Besson told Autheman basic facts in their initial conversation on Sunday, September 8, and spared him the details that will forever remain embedded in Besson’s memory. Besson arrived at advanced base camp the evening of Saturday, September 7. He awoke the following morning to a brilliant clear sky. A perfect summit day, he thought, and by noon he pulled out his binoculars to scan the upper mountain. He spotted four dots on the ridge below the summit: Marco and the three Sherpas. They were making slow but steady progress, and then he witnessed Marco step onto the summit at 2:10 p.m. Clouds boiled that afternoon on the lower flanks of Everest, but it never precipitated and there were occasional cloud breaks that provided 143

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Besson a fish-eye view of Marco. During one cloud break after 3:00 p.m., Besson identified Marco’s snowboard tracks: two distinct curves etched in the snow below the summit. The turns were vintage Marco, controlled and precise. At over twenty-eight thousand feet, the turns confirmed he was beginning the quarter-mile traverse across the north face to the top of the Hornbein Couloir. He’s going for it, Besson thought. The clouds enveloped Marco and never surrendered another view of him the rest of the day. As it grew darker, Besson found himself alone in his tent. His mind was spinning. He called Autheman and offered that initial fact-based update over the phone: Marco reached the summit about 2:00 p.m. and started his descent after 3:00 p.m., and that is what Autheman relayed to the people of Chamonix. A few hours later in Tibet, just before 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 8, Besson found himself unable to sleep. He left his tent and walked toward the North Col. Not sure what he’d find, he soon heard the crunch of boots stepping on dirt, then saw three figures emerge under the moonlight: Phurba Tashi Sherpa, Da Tenzing Sherpa, and Pa Nuru Sherpa. They had been climbing for over twenty hours and seemed exhausted. But once their facial expressions became more visible under everyone’s headlamps, they seemed more scared than physically drained. The four climbers returned to camp where they sipped tea and talked until past midnight, which would have been 6:00 p.m. in Chamonix. This was about the time that Marco’s parents had returned from Italy and heard the news that Marco reached the summit and began his descent. Earlier that night, as they descended to the North Col, Phurba and the other Sherpas witnessed something in the expiring daylight. Michele Siffredi was right, something had happened. What they saw could only be described as paranormal, but whatever they saw convinced them that Marco was dead. Marco and the three Sherpas separated on September 8, 2002, less than five hundred feet below the summit at about the 8,750-meter mark (28,700 feet), above a rock outcropping on the Northeast Ridge known as the Third Step. With the Sherpas leaning against the slope and attached 144

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to the fixed ropes, Marco crossed the ropes that spilled down the ridge and directed his snowboard onto an open snowfield. As focused as he was, Marco was careful not to damage the ropes and risk compromising their integrity. Once on the other side of the ropes, no more words were spoken. He proceeded to carve a series of turns on idyllic snow. Soft and light, the snow was not deep enough to strain and impede his progress but deep enough that a fall would be forgiving. It was hero snow, which transforms intermediates into experts because it allows them to confidently snowboard terrain they couldn’t otherwise. For Marco, there couldn’t be more favorable snow conditions. It’s unclear if these snow conditions continued the rest of that afternoon because, once he dropped below the Sherpas and began the angled traverse toward the Hornbein, he disappeared from Phurba’s view. As Marco was swallowed by the same clouds that prevented Besson from further tracking his progress from advanced base camp, Phurba looked down admiringly at Marco, who was a friend, not merely a client. That summer, he spent fifteen days with Marco’s family at their home in Chamonix. Part of the trip was work-related to help organize details around Marco’s descent, but there was time to recreate and sample French cuisine and wine. Phurba doesn’t often leave the Khumbu region, but he fancied the French Alps because they reminded him of his home in Khumjung, Nepal. Although they were benign, the clouds never dispersed the remainder of that afternoon. Phurba hoped to see his friend the next day. “He was always very funny, and his behavior was quite different than the others,” said Phurba, who first met Marco in 2000 when the Frenchman climbed and snowboarded Cho Oyu with Russell Brice’s company Himex. “He was a totally different type of person who always wanted to do his best.” Now out of Phurba’s view, Marco was entirely on his own. Besson could no longer see or communicate with him from advanced base camp, Phurba could no longer see or communicate with him from the Northeast Ridge, and Norbu couldn’t see or communicate with him from the Central Rongbuk Glacier valley. After Marco skidded past the fixed ropes after 3:15 p.m., he was the most unreachable and isolated 145

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human on the planet. It was total commitment, but it’s doubtful that concerned him as much as invigorated him. “There isn’t a single person I know who wouldn’t have come up with an excuse to not drop in that day,” said American guide Chris Warner. “Marco was already in the history books, nothing to prove, nothing to gain, but he still decides to drop in. Here was a kid who was a total mama’s boy, who was so afraid of pain and who wouldn’t let us take a piece of popcorn out of his mouth, and he still decides to drop in. You have to be 100 percent obsessed, there’s no way you put yourself in that situation if you’re not obsessed. He had no margin for error.” Below Phurba and hidden in the clouds, Marco curved to the left and started to repeat his traverse line from the previous year. He likely stayed high above the small cliff that caused him trouble in 2001, but this time he had to somehow not lose any momentum and yet maintain his height to successfully complete the traverse to the Hornbein Couloir. This would be no easy task. There was a nine-thousand-foot drop to the glacier below on his right, and immediately beneath him was a three-hundred-foot cliff that was part of a thick, horizontal ribbon known as the Yellow Band. This prominent rock feature stretches across the entire north face and connects Everest’s North and West ridges. Despite the yawning exposure, the steepness along the traverse was perhaps 30 degrees, similar to an intermediate slope at a ski resort. But it was never going to be the technical snowboarding aspects of the traverse that would trouble him; it would be the vast, remote nature of the terrain. “Jean-Marc Boivin always said the hard part of the Hornbein is finding where to start,” Philippe Siffredi said when recalling a conversation with Marco about his son’s route. The next day, on September 9, eyewitness accounts from advanced base camp and the North Col placed Marco’s snowboard tracks at 28,215 feet, somewhere between the Norton and Hornbein couloirs. It appeared his track ended closer to the Norton Couloir, but that doesn’t mean it did. Although it was possible from the North Col and advanced base camp to see the top of the Norton Couloir and the start of his traverse, it was not possible to see all the way across to the top of the Hornbein Couloir. The 146

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convex shape of Mount Everest’s north face creates a bulge that would have eventually hidden Marco’s progress. But Marco’s snowboard track was etched in the snow and still visible the next day from the North Col, which suggests snow conditions at the start of the traverse were as favorable as the hero snow he encountered below the summit. “It’s difficult to say what happened, but I don’t think it was a technical problem because the snow is easy where his tracks ended,” said Marco’s close friend Bertrand Delapierre. Had Russell Brice been with Marco in 2002 and positioned someone at a location with an unobstructed view of the north face, as was his plan, Marco wouldn’t have been invisible at any point. As it was, even under a sunny and cloudless sky, Marco would have remained invisible to Phurba on the Northeast Ridge or Besson at advanced base camp. He would have remained invisible until he entered the Hornbein at twenty-eight thousand feet and exited the couloir at 26,200 feet, where he would then emerge onto a wide-open snowfield between the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs. At that point, his tracks could be seen again from the North Col (but not advanced base camp). Besson climbed to the North Col on September 9 to see if Marco’s tracks were below the Hornbein, but there was still a long way on the afternoon of September 8 before Marco reached that area. When Marco discussed with his father that finding the top of the Hornbein would be a challenge, it was the first time Philippe sensed any doubt from his son. Marco was confident he would find the entrance but, through no fault of his own, he wasn’t certain. Marco had studied photographs, charts, and trip reports on Everest’s north face—and that information was pinned to his bedroom wall in Chamonix—but nothing could prepare him for navigating the traverse line between the Norton and Hornbein couloirs. Only a handful of people on Earth had been in the environs above the Hornbein, and nobody had been to the exact location where his snowboard track disappeared beyond the bulge of the north face. “It’s a pretty unimaginable place to put himself, on a snowboard and coming off the top of Everest and navigating from the top down and not having climbed the route,” said Sharon Wood, a Canadian mountaineer 147

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who climbed to the summit via the Hornbein Couloir in 1986. “I can’t imagine that idea without a GPS coordinate or a spotter. It’s pretty big country there. Even if he’s studied photographs, finding it from above seems difficult to me. Even if he’s on oxygen but suffering from exhaustion or some form of hypoxia [oxygen deficiency], I can’t imagine negotiating the top of the couloir. I wouldn’t use the word impossible; I would use the word unthinkable.” Nevertheless, Marco continued his traverse to the Hornbein between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m. on September 8, 2002. With the sun setting at 8:00 p.m., he had roughly four hours to reach Norbu on the glacier by nightfall. It may have only taken him four hours the previous year to descend to camp from the summit, but Marco soon learned that nothing about this descent would be like 2001. Time was of the essence. With Marco traversing on his snowboard at over twenty-eight thousand feet, Phurba and the other two Sherpas had to employ some urgency themselves in safely descending the Northeast Ridge. Most climbers typically take seven or eight hours to descend from the summit to Camp 3, and then another three hours from there to advanced base camp. Sherpas, though, aren’t typical climbers and wouldn’t need ten or eleven hours to descend the more than seven thousand feet to advanced base camp that night. But with sunset at 8:00 p.m., they were undoubtedly pressed for time. When they separated from Marco at 28,700 feet at about 3:30 p.m., they had been outside over fourteen hours and risked frostbite, or worse, if they didn’t reach a lower altitude by nightfall. Without a client to slow their progress, they quickly moved down the fixed ropes. They started toward Camp 3 at 27,225 feet, which was only fifteen hundred vertical feet below them but hours away because the Northeast Ridge’s technical difficulties still lay before them. They made good time descending the Third Step at 28,500 feet and then reached the top of the Second Step, a one-hundred-foot cliff that bisects the Northeast Ridge at 28,140 feet and is the route’s crux. In 1975, Chinese climbers installed an aluminum ladder to aid them in getting past the most difficult section of the cliff, a near vertical thir148

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ty-foot section just below the top of the step. Without the presence of the ladder, nobody officially climbed the Northeast Ridge until 1975. (A Chinese team claimed they reached the summit in 1960, but without the ladder or an obligatory summit photo, historians were skeptical.) Without the ladder or fixed ropes, the climbing ability needed to surmount the Second Step is beneath that of a weekend rock climber who wears tight-fitting climbing shoes. But for someone who is wearing clunky mountaineering boots and metal crampons at over twenty-eight thousand feet and is staring at the most exposed section of the route—almost an eight-thousand-foot drop to the Central Rongbuk Glacier—the ladder provides physical and psychological comfort. Although the ladder makes the Northeast Ridge route easier and safer, fatal accidents still happen. Whether climbers are ascending or descending the ladder, or if they glance toward their right while approaching the Second Step from below, they can see those who have fallen to their deaths. Of the more than three hundred climbers who died on Everest between 1922 and 2020, about a third died on the Tibetan side of the mountain, and most of those climbers died on the Northeast Ridge route, according to the Himalaya Database. The database concluded that, historically, falls cause 23 percent of deaths on the mountain. Falls are the leading cause of death for western climbers, whereas avalanches are the leading cause of death for hired Sherpas. Regardless of where or how the deaths occurred, dead bodies have turned Everest into a high-altitude graveyard. Body recovery expeditions are available but can cost more than $70,000 to perform. Even if the precise location of a body is known, families of the deceased understand that retrieving a body and returning it would endanger the lives of the rescuers. For that reason, perhaps more than cost, body retrieval is uncommon. As a consolation, companies like Russell Brice’s encourage their hired Sherpas, if possible, to move bodies to avoid other climbers sensationalizing them by taking photographs of the deceased. Phurba has had the unpleasurable task of extricating bodies, which consists of dislodging a frozen body by chipping away ice and rock with an ice axe. Once unhinged from the mountain, the body requires several people to move it. Moving a body twenty yards away and ensconcing it 149

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behind rocks takes a considerable amount of time, sometimes an hour or more depending on the altitude and other variables. And that’s just for intact bodies along the main routes with the likely cause of death being exposure or altitude sickness. Many bodies are not easily accessible and are part of the mountain’s topography, but inaccessible does not mean invisible. The most notorious mausoleum on Everest is called Rainbow Valley, a zone below and just east of the Second Step and below the Yellow Band. Comprised of shale, scree, and patches of snow on awkwardly tilted ground, the steepness of this area is significantly less than terrain above, so bodies that fall here seem to lose their momentum. The bodies are identifiable because of climbers’ colorful goose down suits, which have become the standard outerwear for Himalaya climbers in the twenty-first century. Most of the one-piece suits reflect one of the seven colors of the rainbow (red, orange, green, blue, violet, indigo, and yellow, the color worn by Marco Siffredi). While descending the Northeast Ridge on September 8, 2002, Phurba and the other two Sherpas could not see many of these colorful suits, as they remained covered in monsoon snow. As they downclimbed the ladder and descended the fixed ropes below the Second Step, they knew they were there because they see them each spring when there’s less snow. Phurba couldn’t have known it at the time, but the search for Marco, even though he did not end up in Rainbow Valley, would be influenced by his yellow down suit. “You can easily spot the bodies in colorful clothing from quite a distance,” said German Jochen Hemmleb, one of the world’s preeminent historians of George Mallory, who was part of four Everest expeditions designed to determine if Mallory and Irvine summited in 1924. “Even from far away, I could see some of these from my telescope from advanced base camp, and I clearly remember seeing one body very close to the Second Step and plainly visible from advanced base camp and the North Col. There are bodies everywhere.” The most famous body in Rainbow Valley is that of Mallory, who was stumbled upon by American climbers in 1999, seventy-five years after he and Irvine disappeared. On May 1, 1999, Conrad Anker, Tap Richards, 150

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and Jake Norton comprised one of two search groups that fanned out from their camp that morning. The other group of climbers searched a nearby zone. Using information from Mallory’s fateful expedition in 1924 and subsequent expeditions that yielded clues about Mallory and Irvine, Hemmleb created a map that revealed the likely locations for one of the climbers. He figured the most promising area was in the vicinity of the 1975 Chinese camp at twenty-seven thousand feet. A climber on that 1975 team said he saw a dead English climber not far from their camp. Stationed at base camp in 1999, Hemmleb listened to both parties’ progress over the radio. Shortly after they began searching that morning, the climbers entered Rainbow Valley. “We found ourselves in a kind of collection zone for fallen climbers. . . . I wasn’t eager to get close to these bodies; besides once I saw colorful Gore-Tex or plastic boots, I knew it was neither Mallory nor Irvine,” Richards said in Ghosts of Everest. “Death is like a fog that looms in the air over the North Face of Everest; it hit me really hard. Seeing those first few bodies was eerie, grim, and humbling.” Anker was the first to arrive at Mallory’s body, which was bleached white. He was found face down with part of a hemp rope tied around his waist. He had a broken leg, with his good leg covering his broken one. It was a discovery for the ages, but it didn’t help answer this question: Did Mallory and Irvine summit Everest nearly three decades before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? The absence of the ladder and the difficulty of the Second Step have convinced many climbers that Mallory and Irvine couldn’t have climbed the Second Step, thus they couldn’t have summited. The 1960 Chinese expedition claimed that they summited without the ladder since they employed human ingenuity in the form of standing on each other’s shoulders. Without more conclusive evidence such as artifacts of the 1924 expedition found near the summit or at least above the Second Step (or a summit photograph), Hemmleb remains skeptical the mystery will be solved. The last of Hemmleb’s four search expeditions was in 2011. He’s maintained that finding Irvine likely would provide the best chance at determining if the legendary British climbers made the summit. Surprisingly, many of Mallory’s contents, including his body, were well preserved 151

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in the thin air with low oxygen levels. The search team did not find a camera on Mallory, which suggests Irvine could have been carrying it. If Irvine has the camera, experts say the film could be developed (it’s assumed that if they reached the summit, they would have taken a summit photo). But nobody has found Irvine, who accounts for one of five Everest deaths classified as disappearances from 1922 to 2002, according to the Himalaya Database. Since 2002, three more climbers have died by disappearance, but out of 306 deaths from 1922 to 2020, death by disappearance accounts for less than .029 percent of all deaths, making it the rarest form of death on Everest. The database uses a strict definition for a death to be classified as a disappearance. Sometimes if a body isn’t found but there is a witness to the accident or presumed cause of death, it isn’t classified as a disappearance. In 1982, for example, American Marty Hoey was climbing the Norton Couloir when she fell more than five thousand feet to the Central Rongbuk Glacier. Nobody has seen her since, although it is believed her body tumbled into the bergschrund at the bottom of the north face. Her death was classified as a fall and not as a disappearance because her partner witnessed the fall, which made the death explainable. If a body isn’t found and there aren’t any witnesses to the cause of death, or if there aren’t any witnesses to the circumstances that likely led to a climber’s death, only then is it classified as a disappearance by the Himalayan Database. There’s one notable exception to the database’s definition: Marco Siffredi. “Liz presumed that he fell,” said Richard Salisbury of the database’s Elizabeth Hawley, who was responsible for categorizing Marco’s death in 2002 (Salisbury worked alongside Hawley). “It is unclear where his body ended up.” Nobody has spent more time scouring the north face of Mount Everest than Hemmleb. While his focus was on Mallory and Irvine, Hemmleb’s knowledge was critical in determining what likely happened to Marco on September 8, 2002. When contacted in 2020, he commented that Marco’s story is the mountain’s most intriguing mystery since Mallory and 152

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Irvine, and in some ways more so because it’s not only rare for a body to disappear, but Marco’s snowboard tracks placed him at a specific height and he hasn’t been seen since. Marco was wearing a bright yellow down suit that would be visible against Everest’s brown rock in spring, which was the time of year that Russell Brice searched for Marco through a telescope for seven consecutive years. (Brice started his initial search about a week after Marco disappeared in 2002.) Nobody spent more time scouring the north face than Hemmleb, but nobody spent more time searching for Marco on the north face than Brice. Since Brice scanned each inch of the face and found no trace of Marco, Hemmleb concluded that Marco is likely in one of three locations that is invisible from where Brice conducted his searches. It may have taken seventy-five years before Mallory’s body was found, but there are glaring differences between the two searches. During a nine-year period from 1924 to 1933, there were no expeditions to the north side of Everest, which negated any chance for an immediate search for Mallory. Besson and Phurba started searching for Marco the day he summited, and that search continued the next day and when Brice arrived a week later. In the case of Mallory and Irvine, there were only six foreign expeditions between 1933 and 1947 and none from 1947 to 1979. (In 1950, Tibet was closed to foreigners for almost three decades.) Besides the Chinese expeditions in 1960 and 1975 that yielded some information about Mallory and Irvine’s whereabouts, essentially nobody visited Everest from 1924 to 1999 with the objective of finding the climbers. Dead bodies, particularly if they landed in Rainbow Valley, are constantly moving from rockfall and avalanches. Mallory’s body was at a lower elevation than where the 1975 Chinese team reported seeing the body of a dead English climber. “It’s very difficult to find something up there, although on the other hand if stuff is up there and has not been removed, it is surprising what is preserved,” Hemmleb said. Even if one of the five British expeditions that attempted Everest between 1933 and 1938 was focused on searching for Mallory and Irvine, they had significant hurdles to overcome. The first hurdle was 153

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that there were not many clues left over from 1924 to help locate either body. Irvine’s ice axe was found in 1933 on the Northeast Ridge, but that was more the result of good fortune than acute knowledge. When it was discovered in 1999, Mallory’s body was found about one thousand feet below Irvine’s ice axe but directly beneath it, suggesting a fall doomed Mallory and separated the two climbers on their descent. The second hurdle was that Mallory and Irvine’s tweed clothing blended in with the mountain. If either had been wearing a bright yellow down suit, it wouldn’t have taken seventy-five years to locate them. After all, they were the only climbers in that area before subsequent climbers, and in the case of Marco, nobody had ever been, let alone died, in the area his tracks were last seen. “Having a bright yellow suit with nothing else around, that would absolutely show up against the black rock or white snow,” said Alan Arnette, who writes about Everest for Outside magazine. “It all depends on if he’s in a shallow section where there are huge boulders. It’s not inconceivable, even if his bright yellow down suit is intact, that he is nestled between two large boulders and out of sight.” The third hurdle for Mallory and Irvine detectives was that telescopic technology in the twenty-first century is vastly superior to previous decades, so not only would the lack of clues and brown clothing make it difficult to pinpoint two bodies in an ocean of rock, a telescopic confirmation likely wouldn’t be detailed enough to identify the body from afar. “Conrad Anker almost missed him and basically stumbled upon Mallory, who wasn’t wearing a bright down suit but a tweed jacket,” Arnette said. With his telescope, when used from twenty-three thousand feet on the North Col and zoomed in on the summit at twenty-nine thousand feet, Brice could identify what brand of down suit a climber was wearing because he could see the company’s logo stitched to the chest area. In addition to his yellow down suit, Marco wore a green beanie and was attached to a black snowboard with yellow-tinted binding straps. Black could blend in with the mountain, but next to yellow or green features, Brice would be able to see that contrast. Of course, this is assuming that Marco didn’t end up in one of the three locations on the north face that 154

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Hemmleb said Brice could not see with his telescope from the North Col. “His track in the snow was clearly visible to 8,600 meters (28,215 feet), but no trace whatsoever of him, his snowboard, or his track was visible anywhere beyond that point,” wrote Elizabeth Hawley in a 2003 American Alpine Club article. “One would immediately guess that he might have plunged into a crevasse, but there are no crevasses where his trail ended. No one knows what became of him. He simply vanished.” Safely below the Second Step on September 8, 2002, Phurba and the other two Sherpas skirted Mushroom Rock and moved past the First Step at 27,890 feet. They had less than an hour to descend the six hundred feet to their tents at Camp 3 at 27,225 feet, which they accomplished without a problem. Once there, they started to Camp 2 at 25,900 feet. To his surprise, Phurba saw someone at the tents atop the North Col. All three Sherpas, in fact, saw someone, but they didn’t speak to each other about the initial sighting as it didn’t make any sense that anybody would be there. It was near this same elevation that Britain’s Noel Odell last saw Mallory and Irvine on June 8, 1924. Like Olivier Besson who watched Marco from advanced base camp, Odell identified two dots moving toward the summit at 12:50 p.m., which were Mallory and Irvine on the Northeast Ridge. Odell’s description was ambiguous and changed over the years. Either way, he didn’t clearly delineate where they were in relation to the three prominent rock steps. Clouds swirled around them that day, “then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more,” Odell was quoted in Ghosts of Everest. Later that afternoon, the clouds dispersed, and Odell saw no more traces of Mallory and Irvine. They had disappeared. Mallory left behind a wife and children. “I don’t think climbers climb to risk death; I think they climb to prove to themselves that they are not already dead,” Hemmleb said in Ghosts of Everest. Whether Mallory and Irvine were the first to summit remains Everest’s greatest mystery, but the circumstances surrounding Marco’s disappearance are more mysterious. He should have arrived safely to the 155

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glacier camp at 19,200 feet by the time Phurba and the others reached Camp 2. It was now after 7:00 p.m. and the sky was turning purple. Perhaps the fading light tricked their eyes when the Sherpas spotted someone at the North Col. Phurba considered staying the night at the twenty-three-thousand-foot camp as it would be dark when they arrived, but as they descended below Camp 2, the Sherpas again saw someone at the tents. “Before, they are coming across the face and see the North Col and they reckon they can see someone at the tents,” said Russell Brice, who was told the Sherpas’ story by Phurba. “They think ‘Oh crap, Olivier has turned up. He must be down at the North Col.’ So, they come down a bit more and they reckon they can still see someone at the tents, then it gets dark and they are coming down with their headlamps. They are getting down the final slopes above North Col and thought, ‘Well something has pissed off Olivier because he hasn’t even put a light on for us or come to us. He knows this was summit day, so why doesn’t he put on a light or something?’ The Sherpas are now a little pissed off that Olivier isn’t helping them. But then the Sherpas get to the tents and there are no footprints, the snow hasn’t been knocked off the tents, and no one is there. And nobody has been there, but they are convinced that twice they saw someone there. They all saw a body, but it’s not a body because Marco couldn’t slide there from where he left them.” “Each of them are sure they have seen a mystifying apparition,” Chamonix snowboarder Trey Cook wrote in a 2006 Transworld Snowboarding article. It couldn’t have been Olivier because he was at advanced base camp, and nobody else was on the mountain. Spooked, Phurba and the others raced down to advanced base camp. Then, shortly after 10:00 p.m., they met Besson, who had left his tent and hiked toward the North Col. Besson didn’t quite believe what he heard from the Sherpas, but they were adamant about what they saw. “Sherpa culture is quite spiritual, and Sherpa culture is all about your future,” Brice said. “That is what all their prayer flags are about; give me life in the future. Their life doesn’t matter now, it’s all about their lives in the future and what is going to happen to their spirit. That sort of 156

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explains why they would recognize a body, or what they thought was a body, as Marco’s spirit. Marco is this caring bloke and they think, well, there is this caring, likable spirit there. I am only saying what they told me. That is their theory, that isn’t mine, but if that was his spirit, he would have to be dead for them to see that.” Without communication between advanced base camp in the Eastern Rongbuk Glacier valley and Norbu in the Central Rongbuk Glacier valley, there was no way of knowing if Marco had arrived that evening. As Phurba sipped tea at advanced base camp, it was entirely possible that Marco was also sipping tea but in another valley. But Phurba knew that wasn’t happening. He sat in his tent that night, convinced Marco was dead. “We don’t have these philosophical conversations with Sherpas,” Brice said of his talks with Phurba and other Sherpas about the subject of death. “They aren’t philosophical people in their own culture, and they aren’t very forthcoming with guys doing interviews. It’s just not their way; they don’t come from that sort of society. Sometimes they don’t even talk to each other all day long. Why? Because they don’t.” It was a fitful night of sleep for everyone on Sunday, September 8, for Besson and the Sherpas in Tibet and for Philippe and Michele Siffredi in Chamonix. On Monday, September 9, 2002, Olivier Besson awoke at advanced base camp under a brilliant blue sky and climbed to the North Col. According to The Trace of an Angel, written by Antoine Chandellier, Besson left at 8:30 a.m., ascended the fixed ropes, and arrived at 1:00 p.m. The expedition’s two tents were there, but nobody was inside either of them. The sun was intense and illuminated the north face, including the starch-white slope below the Hornbein Couloir. It hadn’t snowed overnight. If Marco made it through the Hornbein, his tracks would have been visible below the couloir at 26,200 feet. But no further tracks were visible besides his initial traverse tracks at 28,215 feet the previous day, and those were swallowed when it met the bulge of the north face’s convex shape. “Besson saw no more snowboard tracks below 8,600 meters, saw no black snowboard or Siffredi yellow clothing or any other trace of him,” 157

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Elizabeth Hawley reported after interviewing Besson later that month in Kathmandu. Feeling the effects of the altitude, Besson returned to advanced base camp. According to Chandellier’s book, Besson walked into camp and immediately saw Norbu, the yak herder who had been waiting for Marco at the base of the north face. Confirming everybody’s fears, Norbu told everyone that Marco didn’t arrive the previous night. Norbu awoke early that morning, exited his tent, and looked for signs of Marco on the north face. Nothing. Unable to communicate with others but knowing he needed to report to Phurba, Norbu left the glacier camp by noon, walked down the Central Rongbuk Glacier valley, and then hiked up the Eastern Rongbuk Glacier valley. A journey that could have taken ten hours took him about five hours. Norbu glanced back often in the hopes he saw a sign of Marco, but he saw nothing. Sherpas often appear numb to calamities, but there was a profound sense of dread emanating from Norbu when he arrived at advanced base camp on September 9, 2002, in the late afternoon with bad news. Like all Sherpas connected to Brice, Norbu was fond of Marco. In many ways, Marco had become a mythical figure for local yak herders and Sherpas. Norbu’s brother, Karsang, had been taught to climb by Brice and was on Cho Oyu in 2000 when Marco snowboarded from the 26,906foot mountain. Karsang reached the summit that year and became the first Tibetan yak herder to summit an eight-thousand-meter peak. It was a major accomplishment and source of pride for the Tibetans. Brice threw a raucous party at base camp and invited other teams. One attendee was a Chamonix climber and snowboarder with a reputation as a fighter. He possessed a combination of disdain and jealousy toward Marco and aggressively approached the gap-toothed twentyone-year-old. He leaned in and tried to punch Marco, not knowing that Marco had endeared himself to the Sherpas the previous four weeks. The Sherpas intervened and prevented Marco from getting clobbered. But when the melee ended, the Sherpas were not finished. They left and then returned. “They had knives in the back of their jackets and were ready to chop this bloody guy up,” Brice recalled. “They wanted to chop him up and 158

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put him in the glacier, all for Marco. And it’s true, they would have if we didn’t stop them. Marco had a connection to the Sherpas and maybe it was because I did as well. If I like Marco, maybe they should too. Sherpas are always dealing with a bunch of wooly woofers who struggle going up and struggle going down; they carry loads for people who never give them the proper recognition. Then they see someone like Marco who is carrying his own stuff and then putting on a snowboard and getting down on his own. And he was this genuine, caring bloke that talked to them differently than everyone else. They thought the snowboard and all that was quite radical and were totally intrigued by him, but what they really liked was his modesty.” With Norbu and the other Sherpas congregating, Besson called Autheman and gave him what would be his second and final update. It was late afternoon at advanced base camp in Tibet. “It wasn’t until the next morning [in Chamonix] that Olivier called me again and had to tell me that he had no more news of Marco who was to arrive in another valley [and didn’t],” said Autheman, who sensed more than a tinge of despair in Besson’s voice. Like the previous day, the news traveled fast around Chamonix. The smiles on people’s faces from Sunday afternoon had been erased by Monday afternoon. “I was in my truck when I found out,” said Marco’s childhood friend Hervé Cocco. “I knew that he was finished. It was a sad day.” “Twelve hours later with no news, I knew he was dead,” said photographer René Robert. There was no more news on Monday. And while Phurba and Besson left advanced base camp the next day for the base of the north face to continue searching for Marco—and Brice would arrive from his Cho Oyu expedition the following week to conduct his own search—there was no more news on Tuesday, September 10. The communication between Tibet and Chamonix ceased. “On Tuesday, the French embassy in (Peking) Beijing called me,” said Philippe Siffredi. “The man on the phone said, ‘Your son did not arrive. We will send a rescue expedition, but it is not possible at this time.’” “No, it is not possible,” Philippe said, then hung up the phone. 159

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Philippe was a climbing guide and Michele a ski instructor. Even without the tragedy of losing their first-born son to an avalanche two decades earlier, they possessed enough collective outdoor experience to know that nobody survives two nights out in arctic temperatures on Mount Everest, not even their electron of a son. “We should not delude ourselves,” Michele Siffredi said in a 2002 National Geographic Adventure magazine article. “He is dead.” With nothing more to accomplish on Monday, Phurba and Besson left advanced base camp on Tuesday, September 10, and made the long hike to the glacier camp at the base of the north face. They saw nothing but Marco’s traverse track that Besson had seen the previous day, but this one extended farther west than what either could see from advanced base camp or the North Col. They stayed the night there, then returned to advanced base camp on Wednesday, September 11. The glacier camp was taken down and equipment returned to the drive-up base camp at seventeen thousand feet. The next day, Thursday, September 12, Phurba and Besson returned to advanced base camp, then climbed to the North Col and spent the day looking through a telescope, according to Elizabeth Hawley’s report. They saw nothing besides the same track. On September 13, they brought the expedition’s two tents back down to advanced base camp, while Da Tenzing Sherpa and Pa Nuru Sherpa climbed to Camp 2 and brought those tents back down; Camp 3 was abandoned. The weather remained perfect in the days after Marco left the summit, but no further signs of him emerged in either valley. “We never thought he would be found,” Philippe Siffredi said. “I know it is too difficult. The mountain is too big, too harsh, the conditions too cold. One night in those conditions and you’re finished. And I know it’s not possible for men to look for another man, and it is even more difficult to bring another man down. We organized a ceremony for a few weeks after in October [in Tibet at the base of Everest].” Hawley reported that Besson, Phurba, and all Sherpas left the 21,300-foot advanced base camp and walked to the seventeen-thousand-foot drive-up base camp on September 14. Besson left base camp

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on September 15, arrived in Kathmandu on September 18, then returned to France on September 19. Almost twenty years later, despite repeated requests for this book, Besson would not speak about Marco. Phurba hung around the valley and awaited the arrival of Russ, who was on Cho Oyu and still unavailable to help with rescue or body location efforts. When he arrived the next week, and Marco’s friends and family the next month, there were more questions than answers: Did Marco succeed, disappear into society, and start living a reclusive existence in Tibet? Did he fall into a crevasse high on the north face? Did he die in an avalanche high on the north face? Did he fall along the traverse and fall nine thousand feet to the bergschrund below? Did he get lost on the traverse and turn around and traverse back to the Norton Couloir? Did he fall in the Norton Couloir and land in the bergschrund at the bottom? Did he retreat to the Norton Couloir and become hidden in the rocks near the top? Did he stop along the traverse to the Hornbein, sit down, and never get back up? Did he reach the Hornbein and have an accident at the crux? Each of these theories remains plausible, though Marco having disappeared into society seems the least likely. “You don’t snowboard down Everest and disappear into life,” Brice said. “There is a trail and, especially there, it’s an inaccessible place and all the locals know exactly what is going on.”

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Knowing that—and knowing that Marco was last seen high on the mountain—why then did Russian climbers, eight months later, find an undamaged snowboard at the exact elevation of Marco’s camp at the base of the north face, nine thousand feet below where his tracks ended?

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Few of us climbers can really accept the role of sheer luck in our survival. It is natural that climbers need to believe that there’s a reason they didn’t get killed, that they can actually control the risk. . . . A concomitant myth to which good mountaineers have flaccidly subscribed over the years is that there is nothing competitive about climbing—or that the only competition going on is between an athlete and his limits, or a cragsman and the rock he treads. This is pure nonsense. . . . There is, alas, no getting around the fact that climbing has always been intimately tied up with fame and glory, with a dark urge to triumph over rivals, with the greedy ego gratification of being recognized as the best. —David Roberts, On the Ridge Between Life and Death In 2003, nearly nine months after Marco disappeared, a Russian climbing team was the first of the year to visit Everest’s north face. Yury Koshelenko and his partners were stationed at their advanced base camp at 19,200 feet, not far from the location of Marco’s glacier camp the previous year. Koshelenko was part of an elite team of climbers that was exploring new routes. The expedition was strictly reconnaissance as their permit only allowed them to climb to seven thousand meters (22,960 feet). The following year, in spring of 2004, Koshelenko and others indeed established a new route on the north face, starting at the bottom and 163

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snaking up cliff bands between the Hornbein and Norton couloirs. Near the upper edge of the Norton Couloir, once through the Yellow Band, the team’s route swung back toward the west and aimed directly for the summit. At 28,215 feet, their route crossed almost exactly where Marco’s tracks were last seen as he traversed toward the Hornbein. Koshelenko admitted he knew about Marco and “this sad history.” From 2002 to 2020, nobody climbed the Hornbein or Norton couloirs, meaning the Russians were the only climbers during that span to enter the vicinity of Marco’s last known whereabouts. If there were any clues regarding Marco’s fate in that specific area, they would have been found by the Russians. Surprisingly, it was not in 2004 but during their 2003 reconnaissance expedition that the Russians found what could have been the key piece in the Marco Siffredi mystery: a snowboard. In May of 2003, while on an acclimatization hike near their camp, Koshelenko and his partner Victor neared the edge of the Central Rongbuk Glacier. In the distance, no farther than half a football field away, Victor spotted a snowboard in some rocks near Tilman Meadows, named after Britain’s Bill Tilman, who led a 1938 expedition on the glacier. “In front of our ABC (advanced base camp) under the wall we found a board and thought that maybe this board belonged to Marco,” Koshelenko said. It was certainly not from any of the other five previous official snowboarding expeditions to Everest’s north side. That same month in 2003, a Czech Republic snowboarder was on the north side, but he stayed entirely on the Northeast Ridge route. Before 2003, there were only four other official snowboard expeditions: two were Marco’s, one was Austria’s Stefan Gatt in 2001, and the earliest one was in 1997 when Spain’s Jordi Tosas snowboarded sections of the North Ridge, a location far from the Central Rongbuk Glacier. Although not recorded as an official snowboard expedition, Switzerland’s Jean Troillet considered a Hornbein snowboard attempt in 1997 before abandoning his plans and climbing and snowboarding the Northeast Ridge. For about a week that year, Troillet was in the same valley where the Russians found the snowboard, but Troillet said in 2020 that the snowboard found by the Russians was neither his nor did he know whose snowboard it could have been. Tosas 164

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echoed Troillet’s thoughts. A close friend of Marco’s, Tosas remembered receiving a call from Marco’s father in September of 2002 informing him that Marco never arrived back at the tent and was missing. “I remember like it was yesterday,” Tosas said of the call. “That year I was snowboarding K2 and Broad Peak (in Pakistan) and he (Marco) knew about my plans on K2. We talked about planning a trip for us both, and we finally went our own ways. That [Hornbein] descent was a bet between Marco and myself. I believed that it was possible to do it without abseils [rappels], but Marco had his doubt on this matter. The bet was a chocolate croissant and a milk coffee at his family’s campground. I came back to Chamonix after Pakistan to work as a guide and his family told me that he already went for Everest.” Tosas was on his way to India for his own snowboarding trip when Philippe called and said, “‘Marco died on the descent.’ We were both crying. I was shuttered.” A few weeks later, in October of 2002, Tosas completed the first descent of Shivling, a striking 21,467-foot peak in northwestern India that bears a resemblance to the mountain in the Paramount Pictures logo. Tosas achieved success on the best snow he’d experienced in his snowboarding trips to the Himalaya. “It was my final goodbye to my brother,” Tosas said of Marco’s passing coinciding with his Shivling descent. “It was my last prayer for him. And in one way or another Marco was with me on Shivling’s slopes. Marco was one of the most special people in my life. He will always be in my heart, and his smile is shining in my soul.” But if the Russians found Marco’s snowboard at 19,200 feet in the spring of 2003, the most logical explanations for his disappearance no longer made any sense. In fact, they were no longer possible. All the plausible theories placed him nine thousand feet above where the undamaged snowboard was found at the exact elevation where Norbu waited for Marco. Now, there were suddenly new possibilities and theories. The one of Marco slipping into Tibetan society gained more traction, or at least became more likely. “I do love the theory that he tagged the line and then the fairy tale ending that he walked out into his own valley,” said American snowboarder Jeremy Jones. 165

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But for him to escape into the Tibetan wilds on September 8 or 9—before Olivier Besson and Phurba Tashi ventured into that valley to look for him—Marco would have needed to alert Norbu of his plans, because there was no bypassing him undetected. In his quest to leave behind a clue (his snowboard) that he succeeded on the world’s most coveted backcountry snowboard or ski line, Marco would have had to be certain that Norbu could keep a secret till death. Yet, since there hasn’t been a confirmed Marco Siffredi sighting since 2002, Norbu would be upholding his end of the arrangement. An intentional disappearing act by Marco, however, remained far-fetched considering that Marco was a mama’s boy. There is no way, according to his closest friends and family members, that he would disappear knowing the pain it would cause his mother. Yet, his focus on the Hornbein and his perceived lack of acknowledgment and respect seemed to be all-encompassing when he left for Everest in 2002. Marco was unflinching in his convictions and so maybe this was part of his plan all along, to purposely leave behind the snowboard as part of his messaging. “There was always a part of me that wondered, did he just take off ?” said American Ellen Miller, who befriended Marco during the 2000 Cho Oyu and 2001 Everest expeditions. “Marco would do it. If anybody would do it, he would do it.” If Marco didn’t disappear into Tibet, the most plausible explanation for Marco’s board being found by the Russians was that he arrived after Norbu left the camp and after Phurba broke down the camp, then he died afterward and his body hasn’t been found. In effect, this would suggest that the very people who were responsible for Marco’s safety were the very people who abandoned him. Russell Brice often touted his Himex company’s safety record on Everest, claiming that no climbers had ever died on one of his trips. He lost a Sherpa one season in a non-climbing event when he died of a stroke. “And I can’t really be blamed for that,” Brice said in 2018. But when the story of Marco emerged in the 2008 book Dark Summit, author Nick Heil wrote, “Brice had been perfectly willing to support his climb, but the snowboarder was on his own for the descent, and Brice felt his death shouldn’t reflect on Himex’s sterling safety record.” 166

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“Technically,” Brice told Heil, “Marco’s contract expired at the top.” If that was the directive from the big boss, perhaps Norbu and the others, no matter how much they liked Marco personally, didn’t feel responsible for him professionally on September 8, 2002. But if they abandoned him and he descended upon the camp’s location after Besson and Phurba left with the camp’s gear, that meant Marco survived at least three nights out on the north face without food and water, then stumbled to the exact elevation of his tent only to find nothing there. At that point, he would have had to remove his snowboard and, while walking to urinate or do something else, he had fallen into a crevasse on the glacier. That suggests Marco endured one of history’s greatest survival epics and nobody would know until his body emerged. All that occurring seems more far-fetched than him escaping into society, but if he did end up in the glacier, that theory could be proven sooner rather than later. In 2018, CNN reported that the bodies of two Icelandic climbers who disappeared while climbing Nepal’s Pumori in 1988 emerged from the glacier after three decades of being buried. In 2015 on Everest, the BBC reported that ten dead bodies that were previously buried beneath glacial ice had resurfaced and had to be removed from the mountain. “Because of global warming, the ice sheet and glaciers are fast melting and the dead bodies that remain buried all these years are now becoming exposed,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, the former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, told the BBC in 2019. Back to the snowboard. If he didn’t disappear into Tibet and discard his snowboard, and if he didn’t survive and return to the camp after Phurba left only to remove his snowboard and die another way, how did Marco’s snowboard get there? When contacted in 2020, Brice was adamant that he had no idea whose snowboard it was and reiterated that he knew the details of every expedition to the north face since the 1980s. (The modern version of a snowboard hadn’t been invented before then.) The snowboard also could not have been that of American Stephen Koch, who made a Hornbein-Japanese Couloir attempt in 2003. Koch wanted to climb the route alpine style with Eric Henderson and photographer Jimmy Chin, who planned to ski the route and then document 167

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Koch’s achievement. Koch was attempting to snowboard from the highest point on each of the seven continents on Earth, and while he could have chosen an easier route on Everest to achieve his goal, he opted for the Hornbein and adopted a strict ethos. He wanted to climb with no fixed camps or oxygen. “It’s the most beautiful line, the direttissima,” Koch said of the Hornbein. “It looked incredibly attractive and daunting at the same time. I never had the attraction of doing it with oxygen on one of the normal routes just to tick it off, so it was always my idea to do it in the ultimate way and on the ultimate route, which was climbing up the Hornbein without oxygen. I always wanted to climb up what I was going to snowboard down. When you descend what you didn’t ascend, you don’t have that intimate knowledge of the conditions.” Hoping to replicate Troillet and Erhard Loretan’s record-breaking climb in 1986, Koch and his team were unable to ascend higher than 22,304 feet. They made two summit attempts but were forced to descend both times because of avalanche danger. Koch said he saw no traces of Marco from his base camp up until his highest turnaround point at 22,304 feet in the Japanese Couloir. But the snowboard the Russians found couldn’t have been Koch’s since he didn’t arrive in the glacier valley until August of 2003, three months after the Russians were there. Adding to the intrigue, Koshelenko revealed the discovery of the snowboard on May 22, 2020, which would have been Marco’s forty-first birthday. He didn’t initially provide the color or brand of the board, but when he did, the board was in good condition, the bindings were mounted to the board, and the binding straps were intact and unbroken. Phurba confirmed that Marco only had one snowboard on the 2002 expedition. If this was Marco’s board, where was Marco? Koshelenko took pictures of the board and posed for photos with it in front of the north face, but the snowboard was not Marco’s. This snowboard was blue; Marco’s snowboard was black. This board had cream-colored bindings and straps; Marco’s bindings were black with yellow straps. Marco rode “regular,” meaning he rode with his left foot forward on the board and thus his bindings were positioned accordingly. This board’s bindings were positioned for someone who rides “goofy” or 168

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with their right foot forward. Koshelenko nearly made a landmark discovery, and anybody with an inkling of whose snowboard that could have been has repeatedly said they have no idea how the board got there. After taking several photographs, the Russians left the snowboard among the rocks near Tilman Meadows. And the mystery persists. In the middle of September of 2002, after Besson left Everest base camp for Kathmandu and after it was determined Marco had disappeared, it took several days for the news to reach Brice, who was guiding clients on nearby Cho Oyu. It wasn’t long before he drove to Everest base camp. He wasn’t sure what he’d accomplish once he got there, but he felt a certain responsibility for Marco, who was closer to a son than a client. Brice’s arrival preceded the arrival of Marco’s family and friends, who flew to Nepal on September 27 and arrived in Kathmandu on September 28. Marco’s friends and family did not come expecting a search or to conjure an explanation of Marco’s death, but rather to celebrate his life at the location where the Little Prince left his planet. The Siffredis arrived at Hotel Tibet on September 28, 2002, and for the next twelve days they retraced the steps Marco had taken during his Himalayan expeditions. When they arrived at Hotel Tibet it was “very emotional because Marco stayed at this hotel four times and the hotel’s owner spoke to us about him,” his mother Michele wrote in a journal that she kept on the visit. She remarked on a silk rug being made for an American at the hotel, then she left the hotel and ate lunch in the Thamel tourist district. The family hired a taxi to take them back to the hotel where they were greeted by Sitaram, who had driven Marco and the three Sherpas to base camp two months prior. “Surprise, Marco’s driver is waiting for us,” Michele wrote. “Very emotional, we spent one hour talking to him, he bought us a cup of coffee, it is not like the coffee that we are used to. Very generously he offers to be our guide tomorrow, he wants to do anything to help us.” The next day, the Siffredi family visited a monkey temple that offered a panoramic view of Kathmandu and then another “very beautiful temple that was erected on an enormous white dome, encircled by prayer flags 169

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and the street was surrounded by prayer wheels,” Michele wrote. The family also visited a rug factory, and the next day Sitaram drove them to three more temples. They witnessed a cremation ceremony for a rich Nepalese family, Michele wrote in her journal. Early on October 1, they left Hotel Tibet for their flight to Lhasa, Tibet, the same flight Marco took in 2001 as part of Brice’s Himex expedition. “Left at 9:50 a.m. . . . Flew over Himalayan mountain range, always emotional and anxious,” Michele wrote. They arrived at their hotel that afternoon in Lhasa. They strolled the city center where Marco became famous to local children by riding his skateboard around town. “Walked around the surrounding area to digest . . . trash everywhere, very dirty, the adults are playing a Chinese game, sitting on a sidewalk, billiards even the monks!!!, some women are knitting and others are sorting seeds. It is still sunny at 8 p.m., the shops are open, the temperature is nice.” On October 2, the Siffredis continued acclimatizing by visiting Lhasa’s Potola Palace, ate a traditional lunch of tsampa, tongue, rice, beef, and vegetables, visited the Jokhang Temple, and then strolled the circular walkway where Marco’s team members lost track of him upon their arrival in Lhasa in 2001. On October 3, the family continued their journey toward base camp via the city of Shigatse, just as Marco once did. They would meet Russell Brice and Phurba Tashi in two days, but for now, Michele seemed impressed by the landscape. “The road is beautiful, along the river the water is blue turquoise with yellow birches,” she wrote in her journal. “There is cultivation at the end of Lhasa, old Tibetan villages, herds of cattle and sheep. The sand covers the mountain slopes and creates sand dunes at the foot of the mountain . . . a large blue sky. After one hour of driving the valley recedes into a gorge and then widens again; crops of threshing barley.” Since leaving Kathmandu on September 30, Michele Siffredi hadn’t mentioned Marco in her journal. Although she visited the temples, markets, and tourist sites that her son visited, the journey hadn’t proven to be cathartic. Her descriptions were devoid of emotion, and between October 1 and October 4 her entries seemed no different from any tourist’s travel log to Tibet. But all that changed on October 5 when they met Brice and 170

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Phurba at a checkpoint and when their vehicle tackled switchbacks and crested a mountain pass that afforded “a gorgeous view of the mountain range and of the Hornbein.” They descended from the pass and drove through Tibetan villages, the ones Marco would have had to pass through undetected weeks earlier if he escaped into society. The Siffredi family arrived at the Rongbuk Monastery at 2:00 p.m., then continued on a dirt road until they reached base camp at the toe of the Central Rongbuk Glacier. Michele foraged around base camp, collecting anything she thought Marco may have touched. “I walk through the camp and pick up a piece of string, or stones, as souvenirs,” she wrote. Brice reintroduced the Siffredi family and Marco’s friends to Phurba, then introduced them to an inordinate number of Sherpas, including Marco’s expedition cook and yak handler. Not all of them knew Marco, but all had heard of him and respected him. Although ceremonies for dead western climbers are usually attended by locals, Marco’s ceremony drew an unusually large crowd. Dozens embarked on a pilgrimage to pay homage to Marco, who was a symbol of generosity and kindness. Brice planned the ceremony to last about an hour. Phurba and other Sherpas constructed a large stone memorial, or chorten, and logged long hours to ensure it was completed for Marco’s family when they arrived. Marco’s chorten included a small plaque with a drawing of a sun and an etching of his name. Within a few years, Philippe Siffredi would return and replace the plaque with a larger bronze plaque and attach it to the chorten. Also during that time, he returned with Marco’s sister Shooty and her husband and they all climbed to the North Col with the intention to get closer to Marco and also collect rocks and bring them home. At the start of the ceremony on October 5, 2002, the Sherpas led the family to the chorten and gave everyone rice to clasp in their hands. Besides his parents, those in attendance included Marco’s sister Valerie, his girlfriend Stephanie, and his friends René Robert, Simon Favier, and Ludovic Collet. It had been nearly a month since he disappeared, but according to his friends, Marco’s final snowboard track remained etched in the snow high on the north face. 171

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“You could see it at that certain time of the day even without binoculars, when the track was making its own shadow,” Favier said. “The wind blew the fresh snow away, but the track stayed because it was compact. It was a crazy mad, huge turn. Only a guy like Marco could do a mad turn like that on top of Everest.” Collet, who became Marco’s marketing manager and de facto agent ahead of his 2002 Hornbein descent, said, “Only the corners of the start of his track were still visible, it seems to me. I only understood Marco’s real challenge when I faced the north face of Everest on the day of his farewell ceremony. One cannot imagine how immense it is. It was important to say goodbye to Marco, it was a journey of great sadness. I miss him every day. Marco will always remain in my eyes the best extreme snowboarder in the world.” Marco’s other sister, Shooty, couldn’t attend and remained in Chamonix. Since she was pregnant, her doctor suggested it wasn’t safe for her to travel. Before he left for Everest, Marco walked into a shoe shop where Shooty worked and said what turned out to be his final goodbye. “You have such huge boobs!” her little brother shouted at her. “Yeah, because I work with shoes and eat sandwiches every day,” Shooty responded. “I didn’t tell him I was pregnant, and I didn’t want to tell him because I didn’t want him to worry so he could focus on Everest, the north face. But he knew, and he was happy. When I heard that Marco disappeared, I forgot about my baby for like three weeks (until my family left for Tibet) and I felt like I had freezing water on top of my head. I always told myself that Marco will never die because my parents cannot lose two children.” Although Shooty couldn’t attend the service, she contacted Jean Troillet, who lives on the other side of the Mont Blanc massif in La Fouly, Switzerland. While Shooty’s family was in Tibet, she spoke with Troillet. “She wanted to understand what kind of brother she had,” Troillet said. “I told her she had a special brother. It is difficult to talk with a family member and be the one to explain that it’s not the length of the life that is important, it is the type of life you live, whether it is 50 years, 40 years, or 100 years. Snowboarding was his life, and he lived for today, not tomorrow.” 172

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Back in Tibet, the conditions for the farewell ceremony were perfect: no wind, no clouds. “It is so beautiful . . . a gift,” Michele wrote. And then, the prayers stopped. The moment passed. There was nothing more to do except walk away. Marco’s parents left toward their accommodations that night near the monastery. In the evening, Philippe and Michele took a walk together in the fading daylight. They crested a ridge and removed a plant and brought it back to their bedside. They placed the plant next to the string and stones Michele had collected earlier in the day. “It is 7 p.m., the sun is setting,” Michele wrote in her journal. “We can see the Hornbein and a beautiful sunset outside of our window.” And then, an indelible memory undoubtedly emerged: The sheets pulled tight against his chin, Marco listened intently as his mother read him his favorite bedtime story, The Little Prince. Outside his bedroom, the moon glowed gray as the silhouette of the snow-covered French Alps colored an otherwise inky sky. Many nights during Marco’s childhood were spent like this: his mother Michele reading stories to him as his bright blue eyes the size of marbles bounced back and forth between his mother’s lips and a window that revealed the world outside. Michele loved reading stories to young Marco, especially that one. It made him smile, made him ponder life, made him dream. If Michele could have spoken to her son during his last moments on Everest in 2002—as she was there during his first moments on Earth after he was born in 1979—one could imagine their dialogue being similar to the final one between the pilot and the Little Prince in her son’s favorite story: Little Prince: It’ll look as if I’m suffering. It’ll look a little as if I’m dying. It’ll look that way. Don’t come to see that; it’s not worth the trouble. Pilot: I won’t leave you. 173

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Little Prince: You were wrong to come. You’ll suffer. I’ll look as if I’m dead, and that won’t be true . . . Pilot: I said nothing. Little Prince: You understand. It’s too far. I can’t take this body with me. It’s too heavy. Pilot: I said nothing. Little Prince: But it’ll be like an old abandoned shell. There’s nothing sad about an old shell . . . Pilot: I said nothing. . . . He was a little disheartened now. But he made one more effort. Little Prince: It’ll be nice, you know. I’ll be looking at the stars, too. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out water for me to drink . . . Pilot: I said nothing. And he, too, said nothing, because he was weeping . . . Little Prince: Here’s the place. Let me go alone. Pilot: And then he sat down because he was frightened. Then he said: Little Prince: You know . . . my flower . . . I am responsible for her. And she’s so weak! And so naïve. She has four ridiculous thorns to defend her against the world. Pilot: I sat down, too, because I was unable to stand any longer. He said, “There. . . . That’s all.” He hesitated a little longer, then he stood up. He took a step. I couldn’t move. . . . There had been nothing but a yellow flash close to his ankle. He remained motionless for an instant. He didn’t cry out. He fell gently, the way a tree falls. There wasn’t even a sound. . . . Now I’m somewhat consoled. . . . But I know he did get back to his planet because at daybreak I didn’t find his body. He fell gently, his mother could only hope, and later that night a million stars twinkled in the Tibetan sky. Looking at the sun set over the Hornbein Couloir on October 5, 2002, Michele wrote, “There is not a better time to imagine that Marco is watching over us. I hear him tell me, ‘Don’t cry mom.’” 174

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And then, Philippe and Michele Siffredi left the next day. It took two days for them to arrive back in Kathmandu, and after breakfast on October 8, they visited Brice’s office to retrieve Marco’s bags. As she rummaged through them, Michele wrote, “Two terrible and poignant hours and additionally, as of today, it has been one month since he went missing. It is still like a bad dream. We left the Sherpas all of the medicine, socks, boxer shorts and gloves and said goodbye to them with tears streaming down our faces.” At Hotel Tibet later that afternoon, the tears had dried and Michele visited the garden terrace. She spent the afternoon there, alone. “I feel like I am home, I have a picture of this place from Marco; the place is in the middle of Kathmandu, it feels like being in the country with the rooster’s crow welcoming dawn . . . I am surrounded by green plants and leafy trees, the water jet from the pond is refreshing and makes me feel cheerful. Marco bought cards and stamps (for us), I am going to write on them and post them for him.” After dinner that night, Michele returned to the hotel by 9:00 p.m. Everyone left the hotel the next morning at 6:00 a.m. for their 10:15 a.m. flight to France. Michele and Marco’s girlfriend, Stephanie, respectfully declined to be interviewed for this book. They simply weren’t interested in excavating and exposing whatever it is that remains beneath their emotional scars. Once everyone returned to Chamonix, Marco’s sister Valerie wanted to organize another ceremony for Marco. She wanted Chamoniards to celebrate their native son and so all of Marco’s friends could offer their respects. Michele and Shooty refused. “I told my sister and mother who didn’t want a service for him that we can’t let him expire like a dog,” Valerie said. “We have to remember him, we have to have a ceremony, but it was a hard time for our family.” “I kept telling myself it is just a dream,” said Shooty, who figured he would walk into her shoe shop the next day. “I was tired for the church service, not physically or from being pregnant but because of sadness.” In the end, they organized a ceremony at St. Michel Church on November 8, 2002, two months after Marco disappeared. It was a 175

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standing room only crowd. The line to enter the church extended outside and toward the plaza’s lower terraces. Afterward, Marco’s friends and family visited pubs, consumed many beers, and kept Marco alive for one more night. In a twisted irony, Marco was no longer disrespected by anybody in Chamonix. “All the town was supportive of him,” said his childhood friend Hervé Cocco. “He had the respect he always wanted.” The ceremony itself and the post-ceremony beverages provided a pretty, but temporary, bow on what transformed into an ugly reality. Without a body to bury in the cemetery next to Marco’s brother Pierre, there was no closure. The family suffered. “We didn’t want to accept his death,” Valerie said. “I cried every day for a year. When I woke up in the morning and went to bed, from sunrise to sunset, I cried every day. I woke up in my bed crying and went to sleep in my bed crying. My children wept. I cried with my parents every day, but after a year I didn’t cry so much. It hurt more but I wasn’t crying as much, it just felt like there was a hole. We just had to survive each day. The first ten years, I couldn’t look at the Aiguille du Midi, which is hard to do in Chamonix. The Aiguille du Midi was Marco and it reminded me of him. I kept thinking he might walk through the campground or come back, but those thoughts eventually went away. Now, he is just a memory.”

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Chapter Ten

The Decision

“The people who succeed and do not push onto a greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been.” —Carlos Buhler, reading a quote from a piece of paper for a 1989 Climbing magazine article In spring of 2003, about the time Russians found a snowboard near the Central Rongbuk Glacier, Russell Brice was in his tent at advanced base camp on the edge of the Eastern Rongbuk Glacier. Anybody who’s been around Brice will readily admit he rarely cracks from emotion. With silvery hair and weathered skin shaped by years under the Himalaya sun, he is the epitome of stoicism. But one afternoon in 2018 at a pizza restaurant in Kathmandu’s Thamel district, he fought to maintain his composure. His voice cracked and his lips quivered as he described what happened at advanced base camp in 2003, nearly eight months after Marco disappeared. “I have never told anybody this before,” Brice said as he paused and stared blankly at his pint glass, his eyes welling with tears. “The yak men and Sherpas are constantly talking, hacking away, birds are flying around, the bells on the yaks are ringing, it’s never quiet. All that was going on this one night while I was in bed, but then everything went quiet. The yak men stopped talking, the birds stopped chirping, the 177

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yak bells ringing. There was no noise, no Sherpas, no yak men, no yaks, no birds, everything stopped. Everything went dead quiet and then something flew over us. Well, I felt like something flew over and then there was a loud boom. I reckon that was Marco going by us. Then the bells started ringing again, and the yak men started talking again.” Brice didn’t judge Phurba when he was told the story of how the three Sherpas believed they saw a spirit at the North Col while descending from the summit in 2002. He was convinced by Phurba that there was something that night on the North Col, just as he was convinced he felt something months later at advanced base camp, and just as he was convinced he saw something decades earlier while hunting in New Zealand. To finance his trip around the world in the 1970s, the one that caused him to fall in love with the Himalaya and its people, Brice hunted deer in New Zealand forests and sold what he could from those trips. One night, in an area known as Arthur’s Pass, Brice and his friend were walking back to their vehicle. There was a railroad track in the distance. They saw the flashing red light blinking above the tracks, but then they saw something shoot into the air and quickly disappear. Brice and his friend looked at each other, spooked, and confessed they saw the same thing. As they crossed the tracks there was nothing but the red signal. No other people were in the area. “People believe in flying saucers or whatever, and I believe there are unexplainable situations,” Brice said. “We were two sane people, or we thought we were sane, while walking back from shooting deer that night. Mind you, I haven’t taken drugs and I am not a conspiracy theory person. So, no drugs, we’re not out there for a fucking party, we’re just out there to shoot deer. I saw something walking back that night from shooting deer, and I felt something that night at advanced base camp that I believe was Marco. That is my explanation for why everything stopped and why I felt a presence but never saw it.” Later that season in 2003, Brice was positioned atop the North Col as his team attempted to climb Everest. As he did for the next six years, Brice monitored his clients and tracked them with his high-powered telescope from a tent vestibule. Glaciers melt faster than people climb, it 178

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seems when watching them in real time, so Brice lowered his telescope and began scouring the north face for signs of Marco. Every year until 2009, when he moved his company’s operations to the Southeast Ridge route in Nepal, Brice spent several hours a day during the climbing season searching for Marco. Nobody has spent more time searching for Marco than Brice, and perhaps besides Jochen Hemmleb, who looked for George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, nobody has spent more time searching for a body that disappeared on Mount Everest than Brice. “I am at the North Col by myself every year and I spent hours, upon hours, upon hours there by myself, with a telescope, looking under rocks and all sorts of things on the north face. It’s pretty detailed. I can see how thick a rope thread is or what type of clothing somebody is wearing. This went on for years, but there is nothing. No yellow. No snowboard. Nothing. Marco is nowhere to be found.” Before Marco’s family arrived in late September of 2002, Brice arrived at base camp from Cho Oyu and immediately climbed to the twenty-three-thousand-foot North Col. He set up his telescope and began inspecting the north face. Phurba told him that they separated from Marco a short distance below the summit on September 8 and confirmed that he could see Marco’s snowboard track on September 9 with Besson from advanced base camp. The track was aiming toward the top of the Hornbein, but when Brice got there nearly two weeks later, “I do not remember seeing a track from the summit to where Marco left the main ridge and started the traverse across the north face. But, of course, we know that Marco made it that far as this is the normal descent route for the Sherpas.” Brice also didn’t see a track confirming the traverse above the top of the Norton Couloir to the top of the Hornbein Couloir. This also isn’t surprising since he was there for the first time that season and it had snowed between the day when Marco disappeared and the day when Brice arrived at the North Col. If freshly fallen snow didn’t cover his snowboard track, wind could have also wiped away any track. But how were Marco’s friends adamant they saw a snowboard track high on the north face from the ceremony at base camp in early October? “You need a telescope or powerful binoculars to see these tracks. I stayed in the area until Marco’s family arrived for the memorial, and I 179

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am sorry, it is not possible to see his tracks even through a telescope from base camp. You need to be at advanced base camp or North Col, and I do not even remember seeing a track at that time. Some speculators can say what they want about tracks seen or they assumed were seen . . . but did they go specifically looking for these tracks? If not, then it is not something that a casual observer would ever notice. I think this is similar to writing about Mallory . . . we can assume a lot of things, but we will never be sure.” Since there is no body and there are no eyewitnesses to Marco’s physical location beyond Phurba watching him disappear into the clouds, it’s a rather complicated, overwhelming process to determine what happened to Marco. But using what is known about Marco, using what was seen that day, using information from Brice’s searches, and using Hemmleb’s knowledge, it’s a much simpler process to determine what didn’t happen that day. Although it remains impossible to know exactly what happened to Marco on September 8, Hemmleb has narrowed the most likely final resting place of his body to three locations. Each one carries a unique set of actions that could have caused his body to end up in that location, but once one works backwards from the least likely to the most likely outcome, his body can only be in one location. 1. Did Marco succeed, disappear into society, and start living a reclusive existence in Tibet? The most romantic theory for some, but the least likely for reasons already stated, chief among them being that he wouldn’t do that to his mother. 2.  Did he fall into a crevasse high on the north face? Marco couldn’t have fallen into a crevasse because there are no crevasses on that part of the mountain. 3.  Did he die in an avalanche high on the north face, or did he fall along the traverse and fall nine thousand feet to the bergschrund below? Upon returning to the North Col in September of 2002, Brice said, “There is no avalanche, we don’t see any signs of an avalanche.” Medium to large avalanches, and even small ones, have release points known as 180

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crowns, but there was no evidence of crowning. Crowns are horizontal lines cut across the snow, and a snowboard track, particularly a snowboard traverse track, could be confused with a crown. It wouldn’t take much of an avalanche, or a slight shifting of snow, to unbalance Marco, send him tumbling, and knock him unconscious (Marco wasn’t wearing a helmet but a green beanie on his head). Avalanches leave behind marks—crowning, debris, deposition zones—and there were none. If he was knocked unconscious and perished or never regained consciousness, he would be visible. Marco was wearing a bright yellow down suit and, besides three locations on the north face, he would have been visible anywhere else through Brice’s telescope. The area his tracks were last seen on the traverse between the two couloirs was not steep. In the soft snow conditions Marco encountered on summit day, a fall along the traverse would have more likely knocked him unconscious and kept him close to the traverse line. If it was a large enough avalanche to send him hurtling toward the glacier nine thousand feet below, he would have fallen over increasingly steep terrain that consisted of cliff bands of varying heights, including a three-hundred-foot cliff section in the Yellow Band. On such a steep, inconsistent fall line, it wouldn’t have likely deposited him in the large crevasse at the bottom of the north face known as a bergschrund, a location where he would not be visible through Russ’s telescope. In that scenario, his body would have likely been ripped apart and scattered along the terrain between the Norton and Hornbein couloirs. Russian climbers climbed directly through this area in spring of 2004 and reported no signs of a body, parts of a body, a snowboard, or yellow clothing. “If he had a bad fall, it’s likely that his body came apart as he came down thousands of meters,” said Everest journalist Alan Arnette. “There might not be a yellow down suit or body to find.” In 2017, when Swiss climber Ueli Steck died while climbing solo on Nepal’s 25,791-foot Nuptse, this is what happened. (After Nuptse, Steck was planning on climbing the Hornbein Couloir, which would’ve helped solve the Marco mystery.) Rescuers found his body in pieces, but while this could have also been the fate of Marco, it’s more likely such a catastrophic fall would have happened in the crux section of the Hornbein Couloir than the relatively gentle snow slopes between the two couloirs. 181

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“I have searched all of that, nothing is there, but that area and terrain is all totally within his ability and out of danger,” Brice said. “If a fall happened there, he wouldn’t have fallen too far down the slope.” 4. Did he get lost on the traverse and decide to turn around and traverse back to the Norton Couloir where he had success the previous year? An experienced mountaineer and snowboarder, Marco had the mountain sense to change course if necessary. He hinted in interviews that the Norton was his alternate route if he deemed conditions to be unsafe in the Hornbein. But if he decided to snowboard the Norton instead of the Hornbein before leaving the summit, Marco would have told Phurba, and he did not. If he got lost on the traverse and changed course, there is no physical evidence that he turned around. According to Phurba and Besson, Marco’s tracks never zigzagged back toward the top of the Norton Couloir. While the snow could have hardened in parts of this area and not allowed for a retreat track to be imprinted, he would have been visible somewhere in the Norton Couloir. “And he isn’t there,” Brice said. 5. Did he fall in the Norton Couloir and land in the bergschrund at the bottom? His body was never found in the Norton Couloir, but he could have fallen all the way to the bergschrund, which is where the glacier pulls away and separates from the north face. In 1982, American Marty Hoey fell to her death in the Norton Couloir and her body was presumed to have landed in the same bergschrund. According to Hemmleb, the innards of the bergschrund is one of the three locations where Brice could not see through his telescope from the North Col. Yet, this is the least likely location of the three because, first, there’s no evidence Marco went back to the Norton Couloir and, second, it’s unlikely that a fall in soft snow conditions would have sent Marco tumbling uninterrupted for thousands of feet. Hoey’s accident occurred on hard-packed snow during the spring, but even in firm conditions, it’s not certain that a fall would end in the bergschrund. In the spring of 2006, Swedish skier Tomas Olsson died while rappelling a cliff section in the Norton Couloir. He fell nearly five thousand 182

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feet from where his rappel anchor failed and was unable to arrest his fall. This happened in the area that challenged Marco in 2001, where Brice thought he would rappel but Marco snowboarded instead. Brice was part of the rescue team for Olsson, who was attempting to repeat Marco’s descent route. After his rappel anchor popped out of the snow, Olsson fell with the rope attached to him. His body didn’t reach the bergschrund but rather was found tangled in his rope near the bottom of the couloir at twenty-two thousand feet. Brice spent considerable time in September 2002 looking in the Norton Couloir for Marco. It’s not likely he would have fallen almost eight thousand feet without a trace of yellow clothing, a black snowboard, or red blood left behind. Besson also looked in the couloir on September 9 and there were no signs of Marco, and no snow had fallen overnight to cover such remnants. “He’s not there,” Brice said. “I looked in there, from the top to the bottom, and that area is clearly visible from the North Col. He would have to be somewhere where I can’t see.” 6. Did he retreat to the Norton Couloir and become hidden in the rocks near the top? The two places in the Norton Couloir where Brice could not see Marco’s yellow clothing or his black snowboard through a telescope were in the bergschrund or a corner area at the top of the couloir. Brice briefly lost track of Marco in this exact section in 2001 when he was tracking him from the North Col. Marco launched a cliff and went out of view for a few minutes. Marco later told Brice he knocked the wind out of himself on the landing. The area is riddled with large boulders and cliff sections that could hide Marco’s body despite his bright yellow clothing. This is the second most likely location for Marco’s body since it is hidden from the North Col and it has physical depressions that could catch his body from falling farther. This scenario is more likely than a catastrophic fall in the Norton Couloir because such a fall would have left remnants. Not only is there no evidence he turned around and returned to the Norton Couloir, there is no evidence that he fell thousands of feet on the couloir’s starch-white 183

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slope where a combination of Marco’s red blood, yellow clothing, or black snowboard would have been seen by Besson the next day—or by Brice nearly two weeks later. So, two unlikely actions would have had to occur in the previous scenario, whereas only one unlikely action would have had to occur for him to be hidden in the rocks at the top of the Norton Couloir. Still, this outcome isn’t likely because there was no evidence he abandoned his Hornbein attempt, and why would Marco end up dead in rocks in soft, forgiving snow in 2002 when he had minimal trouble negotiating bulletproof snow and ice in this section in 2001? Even if he fell in this section, the slope’s angle is perhaps 50 degrees, and even a fall in soft snow at that steepness would have catapulted him far beyond the rock depressions that are invisible from the North Col. In this scenario, his body would have ended up in an area that was visible to Brice. But, it’s at least possible that his body became lodged in the rocks and never moved any farther. This outcome, however, seems less likely than the next theory because there’s no reason to suggest he would fall in this particular section and in those snow conditions. 7. Did he stop along the traverse to the Hornbein, sit down and never get back up due to exhaustion, and succumb to the altitude and cold? Or if he did turn around and abandon his Hornbein attempt and return to the Norton, did he sit down in the rocks hidden from the North Col and never get back up due to exhaustion and succumb to the altitude and cold? “He was stoned at the summit,” said Laurent Molitor, a French journalist who was close with Marco. “I saw the video of him up there on the summit. He was putting his gloves on the wrong hands. The altitude was affecting him.” It took Marco more than twelve hours to summit in 2002, three times longer than in 2001. The conditions were considerably more difficult in 2002, and Marco wasn’t fully acclimatized. In 2001 Marco spent more time acclimatizing under Brice’s strict schedule than when he was in control of the schedule. Marco told Brice that he didn’t like snowboarding with the oxygen mask on his face and so he stopped periodically to breathe oxygen before continuing. Knowing he did that when he was 184

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more acclimatized, it’s reasonable to assume that Marco did the same in 2002 when he was less acclimatized. Phurba confirmed that he replaced Marco’s empty oxygen bottle with a new one before they left the summit. The oxygen system and regulator Marco used had a flow rate of two to three liters per minute. If he was continuously breathing oxygen and snowboarding with the mask over his face, his oxygen would have lasted him six to eight hours. “But if he was only using it occasionally, it would’ve lasted forever really,” Arnette said. It was late in the day and he was tired, but the idea that Marco would sit down and never get back up would be the antithesis of Marco Siffredi. Nothing he did ever diametrically opposed his mountain DNA. It’s improbable that he would fundamentally change on the fly while attempting his crowning life achievement, which embodied the essence of his being. “Guys like Marco don’t sit down and freeze to death,” said guide Chris Warner, who worked for Brice on the 2001 Everest Himex expedition. “When you go to the summit of Everest you see lots of dead, frozen bodies. These were people that sat down or laid down because they were overcome by exhaustion and never got back up again. But badasses don’t get that tired. They know the consequences of doing that, so fear alone will get their ass in gear and get them to start moving. They might die after they get up, but badasses are like, ‘Bring it on motherfucker. Come on, I am ready.’ And Marco is the biggest badass of all badasses. He wouldn’t have sat down and let death come to him. That’s why I think it was something split second he had to react to.” 8. Did he reach the Hornbein and have an accident at the crux? This is the most likely resting place for Marco. According to Hemmleb, this would be the third and final location that his body, his yellow clothing, or his black snowboard could not be visible through Brice’s telescope from the North Col. Assuming Marco didn’t end up in the bergschrund at the bottom of the north face, or he is hidden at the top of the Norton Couloir, the deep cleft at the top of the Hornbein is the only location that is invisible from not just the North Col but everywhere else on the north side of Everest. 185

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The top of this cleft also features the route’s crux, “a sixty-foot verticality where he could get airborne,” said Tom Hornbein, who in 1963 with his partner Willi Unsoeld was part of the first American team to summit Mount Everest. “It was really gutsy by him to take off from the top and go down and not knowing the terrain. There are a lot of areas above the drop where he could get going in the wrong direction. What it would be like to snowboard there, it is beyond my realm. I can only really speculate.” In 2001, Marco wanted to make the first complete snowboard Everest descent. He stayed true to his ethos and didn’t deviate as he descended the Norton Couloir’s crux without setting up a rappel or unstrapping. But for the Hornbein Couloir, Marco knew a rappel would probably be required. “The hardest section would definitely be the abseil at the top,” Brice said. “Marco couldn’t hop it like he did before. This is quite narrow and it’s quite a hard rock climb, vertical rock. Once he got in there and at the bottom of this area, it was all totally within his ability.” There is more evidence to suggest he reached the top of the Hornbein than he stopped mid-traverse and returned to the Norton Couloir. The 2012 book Wen Die Gotter Lieben by Ulrich Remanofsky published a sketching of Marco’s final snowboard track on September 8, 2002. The sketch placed Marco farther west than Elizabeth Hawley’s sketch. Numerous attempts to reach Remanofsky and verify the veracity of his sketch were unsuccessful by press time. Hemmleb, though, corresponded with Remanofsky several times and heard enough from him to confidently state that his sketch is the more accurate of the two. “[His] is a more detailed sketch,” Hemmleb said. “If it is accurate, and I assume it is, then it would have been difficult to see him from the North Col for at least the second half of the long diagonal traverse to the end of the tracks at the top of the Hornbein.” Remanofsky’s sketch would eliminate the idea that Marco’s body ended up somewhere at the bottom or the top of the Norton. It placed him at the entrance to the Hornbein at about 28,200 feet. But reaching the entrance and descending the sixty-foot cliff at the entrance are completely different objectives. It’s easy to imagine that Marco’s ability 186

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and gusto would propel him across the north face, but once he got there, Marco would have sensed the terrain was closing in on him. He would have paused above the crux section. With the clouds swirling around him, it was likely after 4:00 p.m. as he approached the cliff. It would have been difficult work for Marco to maintain his heel-side edge for the quarter-mile traverse, but it was within his ability. His thighs would be throbbing, and his pace would have eased. As he neared the cliff, the wide-open nature of the traverse across the north face’s gentle slopes would have turned claustrophobic. He would have sat down, inhaled oxygen, and pondered his next move. In August of 1986, Swiss climber Jean Troillet and his partner made their record ascent and descent via the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs. There was significantly more snow in the couloir in autumn than when Hornbein and Unsoeld climbed it in drier conditions in spring of 1963. On Troillet’s ascent, there was deep snow leading toward the cliff and then, “[w]e saw that the cliff was icy, and we could see ropes. The ropes were under ice, encrusted in the ice and we had no idea whose ropes they were. On our way down in that section, we had to turn around and down climb. We did not rappel. Once below there and back in the Hornbein, there was much less snow than above the Hornbein.” According to the website Everest.net, “four of the five successful ascents along the full direct route ( Japanese and Hornbein couloirs) have taken place during the pre-monsoon season in May; all parties used oxygen and ropes.” Sweden’s Lars Kronlund, who successfully climbed the route in spring of 1991 and lost several toes from frostbite in the process, ascended the cliff and aimed toward the summit by veering left, which would have been the direction that Marco approached the crux from in 2002. Marco would have been the first person since 1986—and the first in 2002—to experience post-monsoon snow conditions in this section. Everybody else had been there in the spring. So, if Troillet said the cliff had some ice in 1986 where Marco would enter the Hornbein, then that’s most likely what Marco encountered. And if Troillet said there was significantly more snow above the icy section than below, but there was soft snow once in the couloir, then that’s also most likely what Marco encountered. 187

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There was several hours of daylight remaining, but Marco would have been compelled to make a decision. He had three options: Set up a rappel and descend into the couloir, unstrap his snowboard and downclimb like Troillet, or attempt to snowboard into the couloir in a similar fashion to what he did the previous year in the Norton Couloir. “I could not snowboard that icy section, no way,” Troillet said. It had been nearly fifteen hours since Marco left high camp earlier that morning at 1:30 a.m. He was exhausted and battling the longest day of climbing and snowboarding in his twenty-three years of life. Marco would have opted for the safest, but least cumbersome, way to descend, and not necessarily in that order. If he unstrapped, he would have to find a secure way to attach his snowboard to his backpack, grab his ice axe, and downclimb. This would have been slower, less secure, and more awkward than setting up a rappel. Also, he brought a rope for a reason, and this was it. If choosing between not using the rope to find a way to shimmy down on his board or not using the rope to downclimb, he would have ignored the rope and made a purer descent. He also would have wanted to be connected to a rope if he was going to turn around and climb blindly into the abyss. On a snowboard, he would at least have an edge to arrest a fall. “He wouldn’t stop if he fell, there is no stopping point,” said Canadian Sharon Wood, who climbed Hornbein in the spring of 1986. “It’s alpine terrain, it is complex; it’s not incredibly intricate route-finding there, but you don’t just downclimb it. You lose sight over the break over, the vertical horizon point. It’s not very far but you can’t tell and it’s on steep ground.” Marco would have to decide between rappelling, which was safer and more cumbersome, or snowboarding, which was more dangerous and less cumbersome. Wood said during her ascent that she saw abandoned climbing gear high on the couloir walls, which suggests low snow levels during her spring climb. Depending on where Marco fell or the fall’s trajectory, Troillet believed in August of 1986 that the snow was deep enough and soft enough that a fall could be arrested and perhaps not result in a fall of several thousand feet. There is one section of the couloir below the cliff that is no wider than shoulder width, so that alone could 188

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block a fall, especially if a body is attached to a snowboard that extends wider than one’s shoulders. Troillet doesn’t think a fall would be survivable, especially without a helmet, but the post-monsoon snow depth would make a fall more arrestable. Ultimately, Troillet believes if Marco fell on his snowboard while trying to descend this section he would’ve fallen to the glacier below. Below this sixty-foot cliff section, Troillet said, “We were sliding on our butts pretty fast but could brake the whole way until we got out around 8,000 meters [26,500 feet].” Marco learned this information when he spoke with Troillet. Without anybody filming or witnessing his descent, would Marco risk certain death for the purest descent possible? He had done it before, but considering his rather tenuous situation on Everest, he could forgive himself for eschewing a complete, slightly less pure, descent of the Hornbein and opting to rappel. Then again, Marco’s closest friends often said he climbed and snowboarded routes alone in the Alps and maintained strict ethics without witnesses. They believe he may have ticked off several more first descents around Chamonix that others later received credit for, but nobody was around to verify the descent. So, there seems to be no reason he would adopt a different set of ethos on September 8, 2002, and there’s no reason to believe rappelling was safer than snowboarding. To rappel, he would have had to rely on building a snow anchor under the command of an oxygen-starved brain and, at some point, shift his entire body weight onto an anchor buried in unconsolidated snow. A combination of tiredness and his lack of acclimatization undoubtedly slowed his progress on summit day, but an oxygen-starved brain would have dulled his brain functions at a time he needed them sharp. The use of supplemental oxygen simulates an altitude three thousand feet lower than the elevation at which a human is breathing the oxygen. If Marco began using oxygen at 29,028 feet at 3:15 p.m., his body would be functioning as it normally would at twenty-six thousand feet that day. But, until he made his summit push, Marco hadn’t been much higher than twenty-three thousand during the expedition and had been in the death zone (above 26,500 feet) for nearly fifteen hours by the time he reached the top of the Hornbein Couloir at 28,200 feet. He also wouldn’t be out of the death zone until the bottom of the couloir at about 26,200 feet. So, 189

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in effect, he had been dying for quite some time even before he stopped at the top of the couloir. Still, he had to decide his next move. At this altitude, even climbers using oxygen and who are fully acclimatized exhibit cognitive difficulties. There have been countless studies about low oxygen levels found at high altitude and their effect on the human brain. In one study conducted in the death zone on Everest, climbers on oxygen couldn’t repeat simple sentences when prompted. So, while rappelling seems safer as it involves a rope, trusting an anchor built in unstable snow with a faulty brain doesn’t seem safe either. “I read a bit of his story and he was a fast rider and very soon he was boarding some extreme routes,” said Wood, the Canadian who climbed the Hornbein in 1986. “Lots of talent and at that age, he was so ambitious. I was immortal too in my 20s and was more exhilarated by rising [in the climbing world] and more interested in pushing the envelope. All of that eclipsed any risk I was taking.” None of the options was particularly safe, but Marco was here for one reason: not just to snowboard but to snowboard beautifully, not to be restrained and judged but to be unencumbered and free. He snowboarded with purpose, and his past decisions seemed to hint at future actions. There’s no reason to believe that would change. He brought a rope to rappel, if necessary, but he brought a rope in 2001 and never used it. Of course, there was no way he could descend the cliff section guarding the top of the Hornbein without downclimbing or rappelling, just as there was no way he could descend the cliff section in the Norton without downclimbing or rappelling. But Marco often snowboarded terrain that others rappelled, even on Everest. It was decision time. His father believed he sat down to make a decision and never got up. “I think Marco is asleep at the beginning of the Hornbein now,” Philippe said. “Sleeping and freezing but sleeping because maybe he found the beginning and said ‘Okay, I wait five minutes and rest.’ I think he’s tired and sleeping at the top of the Hornbein. For me, that is my explanation.” His body is most likely in that area, but it’s this author’s belief that, just after 4:00 p.m. on September 8, 2002, Marco Siffredi arrived at the 190

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top of the Hornbein after a long traverse from the Northeast Ridge. He sat down in the snow and breathed in precious breaths of oxygen. He had never been more tired in his life. He never unstrapped and never set up a rappel. “I believe that Marco could have been capable to snowboard the top of the Hornbein if the conditions were good,” Troillet said. Marco stood up, peeled the oxygen mask from his face, and, by a combination of supreme confidence, altitude-impaired judgment, and unparalleled athletic ability, started snowboarding again. “The landing is pretty skinny and from there on down it would be moderately tight but not as tight as above,” Hornbein said. “If he made it, it would be pretty much snow all the way out of the couloir onto the open snow below.” The snow was not perfectly stable but manageable, then Marco gained momentum. The slope steepened and he could see across to the other side of the couloir, which allowed him to gauge the drop to the couloir below. It was farther than he had imagined, but he could not turn back. It was here that the surface hardened and his snowboard’s edges scraped against ice. He saw a set of colorful ropes encrusted in the ice, then Marco tumbled. The man who never fell . . . fell. There had been nothing but a yellow flash close to his ankle. He saw a world of black and white and then saw nothing as he slammed into an intersection of snow and rock at twenty-eight thousand feet. He remained motionless for an instant. He didn’t cry out. He fell gently, the way a tree falls. There wasn’t even a sound. But I know he did get back to his planet because at daybreak I didn’t find his body.

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Every climb, particularly an alpine climb, has some element of risk, chance, the grand gamble. Obviously, we win most of the time, or the sport wouldn’t be getting so popular. By acts of will and technology, we think we have it together, that we’re in control, and that our knowledge and skill will bring us through again. . . . Rock is hard, and flesh is mortal. Nothing new in that, but lessons in mortality are not easily won. What happened out there in the sleepy rock morning? Did my good karma run out? Was my number up? Was it just my turn on the wheel of fortune? —Alan Miller in his essay “Thoughts,” published in a 1983 Climbing magazine article Marco felt pressure to snowboard the Hornbein Couloir, as he was convinced somebody else would. As of December 1, 2020, no climber, skier, or snowboarder has climbed the Hornbein. In the years after Marco’s disappearance, interest has waned in skiing or snowboarding eight-thousand-meter peaks. “We thought about having a ski program for climbing these mountains, but it doesn’t really work,” Russell Brice said. “I think it’s sort of died its own natural death because this stuff isn’t particularly cool, it’s really difficult, and the success rate is low. The snow is also horrible at that altitude.” In August of 2018, American skiers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson recorded a first descent on Lhotse, Everest’s neighbor and the fourthhighest peak in the world at 27,940 feet. Their plan was to first succeed

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on Lhotse, then parlay that success and attempt the Hornbein. As of this writing, they have not attempted the route. In the spring of 2018, Polish skier Andrzej Bargiel recorded a first descent of Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second-highest peak at 28,250 feet. K2’s terrain is steeper and more unforgiving, and its weather more severe than Everest’s. If Bargiel could ski any route on K2, he could ski the Hornbein. Andrei planned to make a ski descent of an undetermined route on Everest in the fall of 2019, but he never executed his Everest plans. Although the Everest climbing season was canceled in the spring and fall of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic that affected tourism and travel around the world, the Hornbein Couloir remains the most coveted first descent in backcountry skiing and snowboarding. “I think it will get ridden, but it won’t be by me,” said American Jeremy Jones, who is friends with Morrison and Nelson. “I continue to hear Marco’s name come up over and over. In that way, Marco and that line is still very present.” For climbing purposes, the next person to climb the Hornbein Couloir will be the first to be in that area since Marco in 2002. Almost all Everest climbs follow the two commercial routes. If someone were to ski, snowboard, or climb the Hornbein beyond 2020, their resulting trip report would confirm whether Marco’s body is there and whether it’s above the crux section or below. If his body is not there, it’s likely that it will never be found. “If we were to find his body, I would be interested to see where it was and why we did not see it,” Brice said. “If we happened to find his body, it would explain a little bit more about how far he had gotten or didn’t. But that would be harder for me to find a body. Frankly, it’s kind of tidy because you don’t see him.” Brice remains involved with Himalayan Expeditions but has transferred operations to a colleague. Phurba Tashi, who turned fifty the year this book was published, held the world record for ascents of eight-thousand-meter peaks (thirty) in 2021 and, at one point, held the world record for most Everest ascents (twenty-one). Phurba lives with his wife and children in Khumjung, Nepal, and remains close with Brice. 194

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Both were featured prominently in the 2015 documentary Sherpa, but Phurba vowed to no longer climb eight-thousand-meter summits and he primarily works on the operational and support sides of Himex’s expeditions. He will be forever grateful to Brice, who first hired him to be a cook in the 1990s and quickly promoted him. In 2020, Phurba received a percentage of Himex’s profits based on an agreement with Brice. He also operates a lodge and restaurant in Khumjung and lives a modest life that includes intermittent farming. Although he’s befriended and gotten to know hundreds of clients over the years, Phurba said nobody compares to Marco. He thinks about Marco often, he said. Marco’s family members all live in France’s Chamonix valley. His mother and father are in their seventies and remain active. His mother gardens and his father builds furniture and has other woodworking projects. Marco’s sister Valerie is a schoolteacher and lives with her family at the campground chalet where Marco lived with his girlfriend, Stephanie, in 2002. The campground was demolished in 2019 and replaced with several chalets the family rents as vacation properties. As of this writing, Marco’s sister Shooty worked as a bartender in Argentiere, the village where Brice resided when Marco contacted him with his dream of snowboarding Everest. Marco’s girlfriend in 2002, Stephanie, has a child of her own from another relationship and manages a clothing store in Chamonix. Hervé Cocco is married with children and lives in Chamonix. Marco’s friend Bertrand Delapierre is married with children and has become a world-renowned adventure photographer and cinematographer. He lives down the valley near where Philippe and Michele Siffredi met. René Robert is single and resides near the Siffredi family home. His photography work is also world renowned. Philippe, fighting back tears at times when interviewed in July of 2019, said the effect Marco’s death has caused his family is profound, but he remains proud of his son and never judges him. “The mother is dead (inside). Not dead, but close,” Philippe said. “I think it is too much for the mother than the father because the mother carries the son inside of her. It is different. Marco was my son, my relationship with him. The evolution of him was marvelous, and now there is 195

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a spirit of Marco. The mountain has always been dangerous. The mountain is the truth. You are either capable or not capable. The mountain is not just or, on the contrary, unjust.” During my final conversation with Philippe Siffredi in August 2019, it was clear that he hadn’t abandoned his goal of finding his son’s body. Philippe admitted he had recently entertained a company’s offer to fly him in a helicopter to Everest and to the top of the Hornbein Couloir. The opportunity to fly close enough to where he believes his son is resting was appealing to Philippe, but ultimately his family convinced him it was not a good idea, thus proper closure remains elusive. As for Marco, he would have turned forty-two years old the year this book was published. He was a young, talented, and confident snowboarder when he disappeared in 2002. As an adolescent, he was inspired by his hero, Jean-Marc Boivin, and grew up in a community with an outlook on death that is profoundly different from places where self-preservation is more important than self-fulfillment. Marco was not cavalier about the risk of death associated with climbing and snowboarding. His brother, his best friend, and his childhood hero all died in the mountains. Marco prepared for his objectives and displayed the courage to turn around if things weren’t safe, and the courage to push on if they were. That boundary is different for each person, and his boundary in no way is a justification or license for someone else to pursue similar objectives. While Marco never had the opportunity to love a wife or children of his own, or celebrate his fiftieth birthday, not everybody is meant to grow old and die on the same vine as everyone else. Dying doing something one loves does not justify one’s death, since all deaths are tragic to someone. He may have been by himself on September 8, 2002, but he did not die alone. He left behind two grief-stricken parents, a girlfriend that loved him, two siblings that loved him, and friends that loved him, and they all lost something the day he disappeared. Yet, none of them wanted Marco to betray himself and protect himself from death by not living and pursuing his passion. And there’s nothing to suggest Marco didn’t stay true to himself until his last breath. Finding his life’s purpose so young was Marco’s greatest gift, and his greatest curse. “Marco’s tracks disappeared in mid-curve at 8,500 meters, like the final note of Mozart’s unfinished requiem,” wrote French journalist Manu Rivaud, according to website PisteHors.com. 196

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There are worse ways to be remembered. When the sun sets on everybody’s life, reflection occurs. Would Marco have done anything differently on September 8, 2002? Sure. But when facing one’s mortality, all humans would change at least one thing that happened in their lives if given the opportunity. What Marco never had is the one thing many carry to their graves: regret. Note: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of Marco’s favorite book The Little Prince and a French aviator, disappeared mid-flight over the Mediterranean Sea during World War II. Several unsuccessful searches were conducted for the pilot’s missing plane that vanished on July 31, 1944. But in 2004, scuba divers found parts of a plane that were confirmed to be Saint-Exupéry’s. It was widely accepted the plane crashed, but the cause remains shrouded in mystery. His body has never been found, and the mystery remains unsolved.

Eulogy

Note: Text was written and read in French by Valerie Yout, Marco’s older sister, during the religious ceremony in honor of Marco at the Chamonix church in November of 2002. This text was translated into English by Adriana Mairey. We miss Marco’s laugh. It resembled a shooting star surfing in powder with his blond hair. Like a little prince, Marco laughed. He was always laughing. Marco laughed at everything. Little one, I always watched him, I pampered him, I loved him strongly, I taught him to ski, to swim, to ride a bike . . . I helped him grow . . . We all gave him twice the love. Pierre, our big brother, was already done when Marco was two years old, we miss him terribly. 197

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Marco, through his zest for life, his breath of oxygen, helped us to heal that first heartbreak. The child that he was grew up. Little brother without problems, only passionate about his fish. How many aquariums did he set up in the house? Already very young, nothing stopped him, and, at eleven, he dug his pond alone in the garden. He put all of his energy into his projects. Then, during his teenage years when he was somewhat tormented. And around fifteen-sixteen years old, he discovered snowboarding with Philippe Forte, Bertrand Delapierre, and PIF (Pierre-Francois Brun)— it’s the shock, the click, the passion for sliding. He snowboards, he learns, he practices, he gets to know the mountain. He often said, “It’s not the climb that interests me, but the descent, the slide . . . I take pleasure in drawing curves in the slope, to slide in the powder.” Should it have been prevented? No one can hold back the passionate. This is how we loved him, how we love him today, and how we will always love him. Everyone who is passionate about extreme sports is aware of the risks that they entail, but above all they live their passion . . . Yet, his lucidity was his strength, aware that he might not come back . . . His lucidity disconcerted us . . . This new adventure was a new challenge for him, the logical continuation to his previous adventures. Marco was an adventurer, a thrill-seeker, an Amadeus of extreme snowboarding in high mountains. 198

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His total commitment to the mountain was very strong, almost visceral. He had to go there again and again . . . Always higher, always more difficult . . . To prevent it was to take away his reason for living. To love Marco was to accept his life choices. And his life was cheerful, bubbly like champagne! Marco lived with an overflowing energy, he distilled a little light happiness . . . Marco, we miss you. Your humor, your zest for life, your anger, your smile, everything . . . I have your laugh echoing in my head. But your voice, your look, your gap-toothed smile, your expressions, we miss them . . . Your passing has left us with an unbearable emptiness. What happened, at eighty-six hundred meters, Sunday September 8th? Why Everest, the sacred mountain, did she wrap you in her shroud? You played a nasty trick on us Marco, and today it’s not your laugh that I hear, but the pain, the grief, and the tears that invade me. I’m lost, no longer have a big brother, no longer have a little brother. I feel like a bird who has broken both wings. Seeing our parents, Michele and Philippe, their sadness hurts me even more. This immense grief that no one can relieve . . . Not knowing the cause of your death is unbearable to us . . . Not being able to physically mourn over your body greatly saddens us . . . Sometimes, I manage to console myself thinking that you are coming home, coming back from your expedition, and that all of this isn’t real . . .

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Or, I watch your life go by, a short life, admittedly, but oh so full and rich in emotions! You were loved by us all. You lived your life to the fullest. You felt wonderful sensations that many of us will never feel, even if we live a hundred years . . . What a full life! What confidence in life you had! You loved life so much! You were not afraid. You believed in it. You believed in yourself . . . When you came back from Everest the first time, in May 2001, you came back changed, transformed. You started to behave like a responsible adult. We had plans together. Now, our plans have failed . . . And it is at the dawn of your life as a man that you leave, leaving us with our sadness. Little brother, our separation is painful. Love does not know its true depth until the moment of separation. Twenty-three years, it is short. You did not have the time to live your life as a man, but maybe yours was quite full and you could already retire peacefully . . . Twenty-three years strong and intense. Twenty-three years to put all of your energy into what you chose to live very strongly . . . Rest in peace with God, little brother. Be happy Marco. I have your laugh echoing in my head.

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I first heard of Marco in 2001 at the newspaper in Carson City, Nevada, where I worked as a sportswriter. I sat at my desk one evening in May of that year and was scanning the sports category of the Associated Press news wire. I had started climbing mountains and snowboarding in the Sierra Nevada by then, so when a headline with “Mount Everest” came across the wire, I immediately clicked on the story. That’s when I learned of a French snowboarder and climber, a year or so younger than me, who combined two activities that were interests of mine. Climbing Mount Everest and then snowboarding off the summit? Marco seemed like just about the coolest, most daring, person imaginable, and was certainly more interesting than what I was writing about at a small daily newspaper. I didn’t hear much about Marco after that, partly because website journalism was in its infancy but mostly because snowboarding and climbing magazines in the United States hadn’t written much about him. More than a year later, another article came across the AP news wire. This one, sadly, informed me that Marco was missing on Everest and was presumed dead. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but a seed was planted that took about fifteen years to germinate. Maybe I needed a good excuse to escape the monotony of being married with two kids, but telling Marco’s story—especially once I learned not much had been written about him in English—became important to me. But this story could have never sprouted without my wife, Isabelle, who provided support and encouragement during the researching and writing of this book. She guided me both evaluatively and critically but did so in a way that would’ve never been possible before she became the

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amazing mother to our two beautiful daughters, Olivia and Carmen. I love you, Izzy, thank you. No matter my intentions, without the support and approval by Marco’s family and his extended circle of friends, this book wouldn’t have been possible. I am sure it was not easy for them to allow an American who speaks no French to resurrect a tapestry of happy, but difficult, moments, anecdotes, and facts. To Philippe and Michele Siffredi, sisters Valerie and Anne (Shooty), and his friends Hervé Cocco, Bertrand Delapierre, René Robert, Simon Favier, and Ludovic Collet, thank you for making yourselves available. Even when you didn’t want to respond to my random and numerous requests, you were compelled to respond, not because of me but because of your love for Marco. He was a good son, brother, and friend, and he was lucky to have you all in his life. So, to all of you and also to Marco’s then-girlfriend Stephanie, I wish you peace and harmony. There are countless people who undoubtedly helped me tell Marco’s story, and while it is impossible to list them all, these ones in particular offered their time and insight to help reveal a depth of Marco’s character that would never have emerged otherwise: Russell Brice, Phurba Tashi, Craig Calonica, Alan Arnette, Billi Bierling, Owen West, Chris Warner, Ellen Miller, Jean Troillet, Tom Hornbein, Sharon Wood, Jochen Hemmleb, David Autheman, Jordi Tosas, Jeremy Jones, Stephen Koch, Steve Klassen, Adrian Ballinger, thank you for helping me tell the story of such a special person. To Laurent Molitor and Trey Cook, I appreciate your candor and willingness to assist another journalist who was writing about somebody you knew so well and revered so much. I didn’t know it at the time, but one of the best parts of writing this book was connecting with all of you. Since many of my interviews were conducted in French, getting them accurately translated was no easy task. Thank you to Adriana Mairey for assuming this task, and also thanks to Cassidy Jackson who transcribed my early interviews at a time when I couldn’t keep up with all the information coming across my desk. To my agent Jennifer Chen Tran, we wanted to work together before this book was born and when I was mired in an idea-less author 202

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purgatory. Thank you for believing in me and that I would, eventually, produce something worthwhile for you to represent. You were an advocate when I needed one most. Lastly, thank you to editor David Legere for seeing the importance in Marco’s story and for his team’s commitment in improving the manuscript during the editing process.

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Bibliography

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About the Author

Jeremy Evans is an author (The Battle for Paradise and In Search of Powder), climber, snowboarder, and award-winning journalist. He earned his bachelor of arts in journalism from Marquette University and his master of arts in teaching from Sierra Nevada University. He’s taught composition and adventure writing courses at Sierra Nevada University and Lake Tahoe Community College, and taught English at South Tahoe High School. He currently is the head men’s and women’s soccer coach at Lake Tahoe Community College and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California, with his wife, Izzy, and his two daughters, Olivia and Carmen.

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