This much is certain, 2018 will go down in history as a very special year for ski mountaineers. After all, two of the “last” major ski problems on the world’s highest mountains have been solved. Last July, the Pole Andrzej Bargiel succeeded in the Karakoram in Pakistan – as reported – the first complete ski descent from the 8,611 meter high summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world. And now Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison cracked another hard nut. On the 8516-meter-high Lhotse, the fourth highest of all mountains, the two Americans skied down the so-called “Dream Line”: from the summit through the narrow, 45 to 50 degrees steep Lhotse Couloir down to Camp 2 in the Western Qwm at 6,400 meters. “We did it,” Jim writes about a photo of his ski tips that he posted on Instagram today: “Ski tips about to make the first turn ever off the summit of Lhotse. Almost 28,000’ the summit was sugar snow and extra steep. A few careful turns and a hop got me into the couloir to complete a dream I’ve been working towards for a lifetime.”

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“Death Zone Freeride” – so the two Russians Vitaly Lazo and Anton Pugovkin named their ambitious project. Their goal: to scale five of the 14 eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen and ski down from the summits. In fall 2017, the two climbers achieved their first success on the 8,163-meter-high Manaslu. This fall season, part two of the project is to follow on the 8,091-meter-high Annapurna. In addition, Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat are on the Russians’ to-do list.

After some back and forth on the material transport by helicopter, Vitaly and Anton finally seem to have flown today from the Nepalese town of Pokhara to Annapurna Base Camp. The so far only successful ski descent from the summit of Annapurna was made by the Slovenian brothers Davo and Andrej Karnicar via the north side of the mountain in spring 1995, during their climb they also did not use breathing masks.

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