Hilaree Nelson

Nelson (49) of Telluride, Colorado, had summited the peak on Monday at 10:42 a.m. local time alongside her partner Jim Morrison ahead of a planned ski descent.

She gifted me these words when my daughter was only 1 years old and I was in search of chaperoning for my path as a mother: Nelson took part in — and at times led — over 40 expeditions across the globe. In 2015, she made the first female descent of Makalu La Couloir in Nepal. @hilareenelson is the most inspiring person in life and now her energy will guide our collective souls. 'She was swept off her feet and carried down a narrow snow slope down the south side (opposite from climbing route) of the mountain over 5000'. I'm in Kathmandu with her and her spirit.

The world-renowned climber had been descending from the 27000ft Manaslu mountain on skis on Monday.

A decade ago, she became the first woman to summit both the highest mountain in the world, Everest, and the adjacent Lhotse peak within the span of 24 hours. [Terms of use,](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/user-policies-a6184151.html) [Cookie policy](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/cookie-policy-a6184186.html) and [Privacy notice.](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/privacy-policy-a6184181.html) [Privacy policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en) and [Terms of service](https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en) apply. The outdoor recreation brand issued a statement on Monday confirming the mountaineer was missing. “The constant monsoon with its incessant rain and humidity has made me hopelessly homesick. After climbing the summit, they made their way down from the 8,163-metre (26,781-foot) peak. It was the best thing we could’ve done.” Also on Monday, an avalanche at a lower elevation on the same mountain killed a Nepalese man and injured several other climbers. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google By clicking ‘Register’ you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Registration is a free and easy way to support our truly independent journalism On Monday, Ms Nelson, 49, slipped and appeared to fall into a 2,000ft (600m) gap in the ice, known as a crevasse, only 15 minutes after reaching the summit of the 26,781ft peak.

Hilaree Nelson, 49, was skiing down the 26775ft (8163m) summit with her partner Jim Morrison on Monday when she disappeared.

"The constant monsoon with its incessant rain and humidity has made me hopelessly homesick. We made two helicopter rescue attempts, but we were unable to find her." The 49-year-old was skiing down the 26,775ft (8,163m) summit with her partner Jim Morrison on Monday

After going missing on Monday while descending from the summit, Nelson was found by a search and rescue team.

She had traveled to Nepal with Morrison to notch a ski descent from Manaslu’s true summit—in previous years, most mountaineers turned around at a point that was anywhere from 20 to 25 feet shy of the highest point. On Monday and Tuesday, helicopter transport flew multiple injured climbers down to Base Camp from the slide. Nelson was among the most accomplished ski mountaineers and alpinists on the planet. A group of climbers ascending from Camp Four at approximately 24,000 feet was hit by an avalanche, and the slide trapped 14 of them in snow and ice. She also was the first woman to ski the Makalu La Couloir on 27,825-foot Makalu. The expedition earned Nelson a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award. We quickly transitioned from climbing to skiing in cold and wind with a plan to ski around the corner and regroup with our Sherpa team. “Today with the help of [Captain Surendra Patel] an incredibly skilled pilot we were able to land at 22,000 feet and search for her,” Morrison wrote. I did everything I could to locate her but was unable to go down the face as I hoped to find her alive and live my life with her.” Morrison returned to the mountain on Monday with a helicopter crew, but rescue operations were hampered by bad weather. She was swept off her feet and carried down a narrow snow slope down the south side (opposite from climbing route) of the mountain over 5,000 feet. Nelson’s partner, Jim Morrison, was part of the rescue team that recovered her body.

Hilaree Nelson, 49, was skiing down from the summit of 26775-foot Mount Manaslu on Monday when she fell off the mountain.

Nelson, from Telluride, Colo., and Morrison, from Tahoe, Calif., are extreme skiers who reached the summit of Mount Lhotse, the world's fourth highest mountain, in 2018. Hundreds of climbers and their local guides were attempting to reach the summit during Nepal's autumn climbing season. KATHMANDU, Nepal — The body of a famed U.S.

The climbing community mourned the death of skier Hilaree Nelson after she fell from one of the world's highest mountains.

"She helped lead our family at The North Face, by being a teammate and team captain who changed our perspective of the outdoors by showing us exactly what it can mean. "She broke ground and shattered expectations with a unique combination of grace and grit only a true leader possesses." "She has been the beacon of light in my life day in and day out," he said while describing the events of the day she went missing and how he was with the search team who found her body. "For us, Hilaree transcended the idea of an athlete, a sport or a community," the post said. The climbing community mourned her passing as they remembered her as a friend, mentor and trailblazer. ... I did everything I could to locate her but was unable to go down the face as I hoped to find her alive and live my life with her. She was swept off her feet and carried down a narrow snow slope. "... extreme skier Hilaree Nelson died this week when she was skiing down Nepal's Mount Manaslu, the eighth-highest mountain in the world, and was swept away in an avalanche. ... I’m devastated by the loss of her." She fell Monday when she was skiing with her partner, Jim Morrison, and She was 49.

The adventurer, who set records and climbed Mount Everest, fell near the summit of Manaslu, a peak in the Nepalese Himalayas.

Climbers in the area regularly grapple with changing weather and avalanches. In 2012, she became the first woman to climb two of the world’s tallest mountains, Mount Everest and neighboring Mount Lhotse, in the same 24-hour period. “We went up high and tried hard but the mountain said no,” Morrison The tourism board did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “The constant monsoon with its incessant rain and humidity has made me hopelessly homesick.” A resident of Telluride, Colo., Nelson grew up in Seattle and spent weekends at Stevens Pass in Washington’s Cascades.

The first woman to lead a global team of adventurers, she made dozens of first descents from peaks around the world. Her body was found on Wednesday.

Nelson and Mr. “She was a mountaineer that didn’t push it just to push it — she was there to get it when it was perfect and get it done,” Mr. [she told National Geographic](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/hilaree-nelson-oneill-ski-mountaineer?loggedin=true), which awarded the team “explorer of the year” honors in 2018. Morrison returned from India and, on Denali in Alaska, climbed Cassin Ridge and skied down the [Messner Couloir](https://fatmap.com/routeid/318691/messner-couloir/@63.0438413,-151.0004518,17942.5294872,-20.8466451,59.4485426,3537.8353600,satellite). It was the culmination of a long-held obsession for Ms. The trip was riddled with problems and became the basis of a short documentary, “That was a huge part of learning how to be by myself, which is a surprisingly huge part of mountaineering.” Nelson said a few years ago](https://www.tetongravity.com/feature/ski/breaking-through-hilaree). [Hilaree Nelson](https://hilareenelson.com/about/) was born in Seattle on Dec. “She was equal to men,” Mr. [Conrad Anker](https://www.conradanker.com/), an occasional expedition partner, said in a phone interview on Wednesday that the Lhotse expedition was as consequential a mountaineering feat as any in the past decade. In 2012 she climbed to the top of both Mount Everest and neighboring Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak, within 24 hours — the first woman to do so.

The body of top American mountaineer Hilaree Nelson was found on Wednesday near a 26700-foot (8138-meter) mountain peak in Nepal where she went missing ...

"Today we lost our hero, mentor and our friend," The North Face wrote in a post Twitter. At the time of her death she was living in Telluride, Colorado, with her two sons. "My loss is indescribable and I am focused on her children and their steps forward."

The climber and ski mountaineer, who died on a peak in Nepal, was driven to seek challenges that stretched her endurance to the limit.

“Hilaree paved the way for women in the adventure sports space with her refusal to choose between motherhood and her athletic career. “A lot of things I’ve done are a first but only a female first,” Nelson reflected in a North Face video. “It was the beginning.” Indeed, friends noticed a new gleam in Nelson’s eye after she returned from Hkakabo Razi. “The media wrote it as a failure, but it was anything but for us,” Rees adds. In 2017, Nelson and Morrison embarked on another first, of sorts—their first mountain expedition together, as a couple. … She stuck with her vision, in that she wanted to do this expedition in a different way and see the entire country from bottom to top. Part of the genesis for the trip was Nelson’s desire to do an “old school adventure,” somewhere remote and off the map compared to the crowded routes up Mount Everest. “She’s seen as this athlete, trying to maximise her physical capabilities, but to me she was very soulful,” says Taylor Rees, a filmmaker who collaborated with Nelson on several projects. Soon after she graduated, Nelson booked a one way ticket to Europe and began to learn about big-mountain skiing, winning an extreme ski championship along the way. “Oftentimes in life, people want to play it safe, and we make everything around us—especially in the Western world—to be comfortable and safe,” ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson once mused. In 2018, Nelson was named captain of the North Face Athlete Team, a title only one other athlete has held. Soon after the 49-year-old Nelson began her descent on skis, she triggered a small avalanche and was swept away.

The famed extreme skier was blown off Manaslu, the world's eighth-highest mountain, by a small avalanche on Monday.

Hundreds of climbers and their local guides were attempting to reach the summit during Nepal’s autumn climbing season. Nelson and Morrison, from Tahoe, California, are extreme skiers who reached the summit of Mount Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain, in 2018. At the time of her death, she was living in Telluride, Colorado, with her two sons.

The body of top American mountaineer Hilaree Nelson was found on Wednesday near a 26700-foot (8138-meter) mountain peak in Nepal where she went missing ...

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Nelson, 49, and her partner, Jim Morrison, were skiing from the 26,775-foot summit of Mount Manaslu — the world's eighth-tallest mountain — in what Morrison ...

Nelson said she went on one expedition while six months pregnant and took pay cuts because, for an elite climber, “being pregnant was treated like an injury.” Harrington, who is pregnant with her first child, paid tribute to her decade of friendship and outdoor camaraderie with Nelson, praising her as a pioneer for women in the sport. Morrison wrote of his indescribable loss of “this woman, my life partner, my lover, my best friend, and my mountain partner” and turned his focus to her sons’ “steps forward. We got back to BC soaking wet, in the pouring rain, just in time for a hearty BC dinner. She became the first woman to climb two of the world’s tallest mountains, Mount Everest and neighboring Mount Lhotse, in a 24-hour period in 2014. “As soon as I made the first turn in the sticky hot pow, in a total white out, all the weight and seriousness that had been plaguing me this whole trip faded to the background. Over the past two decades, Nelson had been in about 40 expeditions and was regarded as the “most prolific ski mountaineer of her generation” by one of her sponsors, North Face. Ballinger called Nelson, the mother of two young sons, “an incredible force in life” who had mentored his wife, Emily Harrington, a climber and adventurer as well, “in all things life and mountains — from snow baths at 21,000 feet to finding her power and strength and confidence, to beating the boys at arm wrestling, and so often, up and down the mountain. @hilareenelson is the most inspiring person in life and now her energy will guide our collective souls. Four years later, she and Morrison became the first to ski down from the 27,940-foot summit of Lhotse. She was swept off her feet and carried down a narrow snow slope down the south side (opposite from climbing route) of the mountain over 5000 [feet],” Nelson and Morrison, who is from Tahoe, Calif., were among the hundreds of climbers who, with local guides, were attempting to reach the summit during Nepal’s autumn climbing season. “We quickly transitioned from climbing to skiing in cold and wind with a plan to ski around the corner and regroup with our Sherpa team.

Now it is a sad certainty: Hilaree Nelson died in a fatal accident while descending Manaslu in the Himalayas. The U.S. ski mountaineer made mountain sports ...

On the way to the summit of We were only 300 meters away from the summit when we sank into the snow up to our hips. Suddenly I knew I had to go to the When did you get together, as the avengers of ski mountaineering, so to speak? Jim: I find it particularly interesting that the Papsura is part of a twin formation. Jim: Yes, the mountains have apparently been of different heights over millions of years, depending on the movement of the earth's crust. But you have to know that I love extreme mountain air. I first saw it on a picture when I was 25. I am a good planner and can anticipate exactly what will be necessary to reach a summit. I jumped off rocks, I jumped off roofs, I jumped off trees. Up there, I imagined the clouds to be mountains. An icon and pioneer of ski mountaineering is gone.