The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975)

Directed by

Lawrence Schiller

Genre

documentary film

Country

Japan, Canada

Runtime

1h 26m

Rated

G

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 21 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary follows Japanese alpinist Yuichiro Miura and his expedition as they attempt to ski down Mount Everest. It shows the planning, preparation, and the dangerous high-speed descent that includes a fall and a parachute. The film also notes the tragic loss of several expedition members.

epictenseawe-inspiringsolemndaringmethodicalharrowingvisually stark

What happens

The Man Who Skied Down Everest is a Canadian documentary about Yuichiro Miura, a Japanese alpinist who skied down Mount Everest in 1970. It follows a Japanese expedition through the planning, preparation, and execution of a partial ascent and high-speed descent of Everest. The film was produced by Crawley Films' "Budge" Crawley and directed by Crawley and Bruce Nyznik. Miura skied 2,000 m (6,600 ft) in two minutes and 20 seconds and fell 400 m (1,320 ft) down the steep Lhotse face from the Yellow Band just below the South Col. He used a large parachute to slow his descent. He came to a full stop just 76 m (250 ft) from the edge of a bergschrund, a large, deep crevasse where the flow ice shears away from stable ice on the rock face and begins to move downwards as a glacier. The ski descent was the objective of The Japanese Everest Skiing Expedition 1970. Six Sherpa porters were killed in a single accident by a collapse of a section of the Khumbu Glacier along the main route to the base of the mountain, as well as a Japanese member who died of a heart attack. Crawley Films won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for this picture. The Academy Film Archive preserved The Man Who Skied Down Everest in 2010. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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