Vail – By and large, the skiing community is now familiar with Kit DesLauriers, the North Face team athlete from Jackson, Wyo., who on Oct. 18, 2006, became the first woman to ski from the summit of Mount Everest and the only person in the world to ski from the highest point on each of the seven continents.
Joined on Everest by her husband, Rob, and good friend and photographer Jimmy Chin, DesLauriers, 37, accomplished the almost unfathomable feat during a 10-week expedition to the Himalayas in Nepal, saving the most difficult of the “Seven Summits” for last. Dropping in at 29,035 feet, the threesome faced the colossal challenge of negotiating the exposed 40-foot cliff face known as the Hillary Step at 28,800 feet on skis (a plan that subsequently was abandoned after Rob ran out of oxygen and blacked out while on belay) and the nearly 5,000-vertical-foot, 50-degree Lhotse Face on the second day of the descent.
It was on the two-hour descent of the treacherously icy Lhotse Face that DesLauriers developed the mantra “Like your life depends on it,” which she spoke to herself before every turn. Speaking later to a capacity crowd at the Vail Symposium’s Unlimited Adventure series, the former Telluride resident and two-time world freeskiing champion took the time to answer several more questions about the ski mountaineering epic.
Q: Which equipment did you use?
A: Alpine touring, which is the American term for “randonnee” skiing. Specifically, I use the Dynafit boots and Dynafit bindings and Volkl skis. A lot of people are pessimistic about trusting the Dynafit binding with just that little piece of metal holding the boot to the binding, but I really believe in them. They’ve never steered me wrong. I do go that extra little step of locking the toes in so I actually don’t even have a DIN setting on them, but you don’t really want your skis coming off on something like that or you’re in really big trouble.
Q: When you’re up there, how do you deal with the knowledge that this could kill you?
A: I try not to think about it. I think what it does is help me focus and get into that meditative state. I definitely just don’t leave any room in my mind for this word or concept of fear, because for me fear is paralyzing. What happens the first time you’re afraid? You have to get rid of your fear. Then you can go do something, right? But it’s OK to be scared, actually. Like on the Lhotse Face when my husband asked how I was doing, I said, “I’m scared and I don’t want to die.” And he said: “Good. Make a plan and let’s keep going.” And that’s exactly what we did.
Q: What was the most technically difficult part of the descent?
A: It was pretty difficult right off the top, but the biggest difficulty was the Lhotse Face. There was no safety net, no margin for error at all. We had one little skinny piece of accessory cord, about 100 feet, if something went wrong. But imagine what it would have taken to self-rescue. We all would have died, probably, of hypothermia in the 30 hours or whatever it would have taken to get somebody down from there if somebody lost their grip in their mind or physically lost it. The consequences were of the extreme nature. I’ve skied a lot of things where we had to rap in or rap out or whatever, huge consequences. But the Lhotse Face just blew us all away.
Q: Was this the most difficult skiing of the Seven Summits?
A: For me, Everest was the most difficult. I think that’s because it’s so hard to keep your head in the game for such an extended journey of 10 weeks. Most other expeditions are two, three or four weeks or so. Ten weeks is an extraordinarily long period of time to still be excited and in a good mood. I think that’s the most difficult thing about Everest. The skiing was definitely very technical, but that being said, I’d have to put it right up against the Rescue Gully on Denali (Alaska), which was really icy, and portions of Aconcagua (Argentina), with about four turns over 60 degrees. That was the most exciting skiing of my life. Not the most dangerous, but the most exciting.
Q: How do you train for something like that?
A: Before Denali, I had been on an expedition to Bolivia for three weeks and right before that to Kilimanjaro (in Tanzania) for the second time, so I actually only had like nine weeks at home in the summer last year. But I sat down and kind of mapped out my training during that time. Each week I picked some really large objective and goal in my local area in the Tetons that lasted like 15 hours. Instead of just climbing the technical Exum Ridge of the Grand Teton in a day, we’d go climb the Exum Ridge in a day, come down, climb the Middle Teton, come down, climb the South Teton, and them come down and try to make it out in time to go get dinner before the restaurants closed at 10 o’clock. So you do that kind of thing. You ramp up. You make your body and your mind used to moving for that long with little water and little food. The next week after that, we actually pulled off a way more intense alpine traverse in the Tetons in 14 hours, so it just shows how much more acclimatized you can get. By the time we left for Everest, we were really comfortable with long days like that.
Q: What did you eat?
A: As much as you can, of whatever. At Base Camp you eat the traditional food that they give you, a lot of rice and lentils, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to eat cauliflower or potatoes again. But they do a really good job of cooking for you at Base Camp, and then you have all your little treats on the side – your chocolate bars and gu stuff like that. Up on the mountain, that’s what you eat, chocolate bars and gu and things (phad Thai noodles) you brought with you from the States. I never knew this before, but I learned at Camp IV that there are 960 calories in a sleeve of Pringles.
Q: You call yoga your secret weapon?
A: I think it’s really important to cross-train. If you’re out there running all the time or climbing all the time, your muscles are going to get tight and stiff and short and you’re going to get old really soon. And when you’re carrying really heavy backpacks, it’s really hard on your back if your core isn’t strong enough. All these things I’ve found are really balanced out by yoga. Yoga has really introduced me to this concept of paying attention to your mind and breathing and being able to be quiet and enjoy it and so many other things. You know, the humility of it, and the practice of it. You practice yoga. It’s not like you’re ever really any good at it – or I don’t know if I ever will be.
Q: Have you figured out a new goal?
A: Being a member of the North Face team, I’m expected and encouraged to submit applications for future expeditions to be reviewed and hopefully accepted, and one of my ideas was accepted to go to Alaska in April to do a ski mountaineering trip in the Chugach that’s going to be featured in Powder magazine next November. But really the bigger answer is, yeah, my goal is to try to continue to live what I talk about, which is doing whatever makes your heart sing. And for me, it’s still ski mountaineering.
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
