How Jim Morrison Surmounted Tragedy and Skied Down Everest
Jim Morrison’s children finally appeared to him, seven years after their deaths, as he neared the summit of Mount Everest in the spring of 2018. He was climbing up the North Ridge, thirty minutes from the top, and he realized that they were alongside him, laughing and chattering in their familiar way. He began to laugh along with them, and then to cry.
Since losing his wife and kids, he’d been expecting that they would somehow reveal themselves. At the seaside, in the woods, up in the high alpine, he searched for a sign. Fishing a river, he waited for his kids to come out of the water. He imagined returning home from work to flowers on the table, or to a light mysteriously turned on. “This was a dream, a hope, and a desire, and because it never happened it caused me incredible grief,” he told me recently. “I concocted my own beliefs about life and death, and—energy. Their energy, who they really were, isn’t, or wasn’t, their body, their physical form.”
They had died when Jim’s wife, Katie Morrison, like him a pilot, was flying a single-engine turboprop Cessna, with the kids aboard—Wyatt, six, and Hannah, five—from Long Beach, California, to Henderson, Nevada, to visit a friend. A bad pocket of air over the desert caused the plane to plummet and crash.
Morrison, back home in Truckee, California, went to pieces. Each minute seemed impossible. The coroner strongly discouraged him from viewing the remains. His friends, most of them mountain people accustomed to untimely death, rallied around him. Sherry McConkey, whose husband, the freeskier Shane McConkey, had died a few years earlier, in a base-jumping accident, told me, “I was scared Jim would do something. I went to see him. He asked me, ‘What do I do?’ I said, ‘You’re fucked.’ ” She meant it as encouragement.
I first met Morrison in Puerto Rico, in the fall of 2018, when he buttonholed me at an athletes’ summit hosted by the North Face, the outdoor-gear company; the theme of the retreat, faddishly, was “storytelling.” I had been invited to tell stories about telling stories. “Do you want to hear my story?” Morrison asked. I wasn’t prepared for it. I was used to tales of avalanches and fatal falls, where the victims were inevitably people who had chosen to take the risks. The thrust of his telling, though, was of his recovery, amid a renewed, almost fanatical commitment to his lofty ambitions as a climber and a skier. He had discovered, during a hike soon after the tragedy, that the exertion went well with his tears. Endorphins altered the intensity of his grief, turning it into a twisted kind of exultation. The mountains became his balm.
On an expedition to Makalu, an eight-thousand-metre peak in the Himalayas, in 2015, he met the mountaineer Hilaree Nelson, who was freshly estranged from her husband, and they soon became inseparable, as lovers and as expedition partners—beasts of a similar nature and ability. Just before the Puerto Rico trip, Morrison and Nelson had successfully completed the first-ever ski descent of the Lhotse Couloir, the so-called Dream Line, a steep and unrelenting route from the peak just south of Everest. Now they were savoring their accomplishment with Nelson’s two preteen sons. On the second night of the summit, a few hours after Morrison told me his story, the team of athletes sponsored by the North Face held a ceremony to crown Nelson its new captain—an acknowledgment that, even in this assemblage of adventure all-stars, she was essentially the M.V.P.
Not long afterward, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, fresh off winning the best-documentary Oscar for “Free Solo,” about the climber Alex Honnold, began shooting footage for a film about Nelson and Morrison—their lives together; their commitment to their craft, in spite of the risks and losses; and their project of all projects, a first-ever descent on skis of the north face of Everest. It was, as skiers say, the ultimate line, and something that Morrison had been dreaming about since he was a teen-ager.
The standard route up Everest is from the South Col, on the Nepal side; this is the source of those photos featuring long lines of snowsuited climbers gridlocked in the death zone. The north face is in Tibet, and the Chinese are strict about access. The route Morrison and Nelson had in mind, the Super Direct, via the Hornbein and Japanese Couloirs, has proved almost unclimbable, much less skiable. Only five people had ever reached the summit by that route. In such extreme terrain, a skier ideally wants to climb the line he is going to descend, to assess the snow. In 2002, a snowboarder named Marco Siffredi, who had ascended via another route, tried to descend the Hornbein. He dropped in and disappeared. His body was never found. No one had attempted it since.
The route is steep (up to sixty degrees), exposed (most of it in the “you fall, you die” category), punishingly long (nine thousand vertical feet), and prone to hellish conditions. During the usual climbing season, in the spring, there isn’t enough snow to ski on. The Hornbein is a flute of stone, with a thin ribbon of ice and snow. In the fall, after the monsoon, there is too much snow; constant avalanches make it suicidal to attempt. But Morrison and Nelson deduced that there might be a slim window, before the arrival of winter, when the avalanches have abated, leaving a firmer surface—skiable, if you have the chops and the guts.
Morrison and Nelson had both. Each of them had previously been to the summit of Everest—Morrison in 2018 (he’d skied part of the way down), Nelson in 2012 (she also reached the summit of Lhotse in the same twenty-four hours, setting a record). The pandemic interfered, but they picked other peaks, rehearsing for Everest, with the filmmakers along for the ride. On a 2022 trip to Manaslu, in Nepal, the cameras were there, recording the moment when Nelson, two turns into her run, got swept up in an avalanche and went over a mountainside. They were also there in the ensuing hours and days, as Morrison and his Sherpa companions searched the enormous debris field for her corpse. The recovery mission, involving remote, unexplored terrain, a helicopter at extremely high altitude, and the constant threat of more avalanches from above, was as dangerous, perhaps, as anything these men had ever attempted. But they shared the conviction, unusual for mountaineers in such a hostile place, that they couldn’t leave without her.
“It was a profound, transformational moment for me to know that when I found Hilaree, she wasn’t in her body,” Morrison told me. “I dug her out of the snow. I held her in my arms. I screamed, and I cried, but it was just her dead body. She was no longer there, and it was as clear as anything has been in my entire lifetime. I had been haunted so much by my wife and my children, and what state they were in when the plane crashed, and how they were recovered. I had been haunted by these visions of their half-burned corpses. Then contrast that with what I went through with Hilaree. There was so much more finality to it.” Morrison had her body cremated in Kathmandu, at a Buddhist temple.
The film project—and the Everest project—had changed. Cameras still rolling, Morrison, now doubly cursed, continued the quest without Nelson, while her boys, the ones I’d met in Puerto Rico, became motherless young men. It took three attempts, in the three years after Nelson’s death, to get it done. This is the heart of Chin and Vasarhelyi’s new film, “Everest: The Other Side,” which comes out this week.
Perhaps a spoiler alert is in order, but the news did travel far and wide last fall. On October 15th, Morrison’s team put a dozen climbers, including Chin and several of his film crew, on the summit, more than tripling the historical total of Super Direct summiteers in a single push. This time, it was Hilaree, rather than Wyatt and Hannah, whose presence came to Morrison on top, amid the summiteers’ celebration. He scattered some of her ashes, clicked into his skis, then set off toward the Hornbein, on the least hospitable snow he’d ever encountered. He took four hours to descend. A World Cup downhill race is two minutes. It’s hard to contemplate the burn, or the concentration, or the work and time and luck and loss that went into the effort. Here was four hours alone with the task, and with the sense that, if he fell, he’d consider his life to have been well lived. At the bottom of the face, he wept and shouted, in the conviction that he’d done right by Nelson, and by himself. But it would be a while before Morrison could get his own head around the accomplishment. “It dawned on me at a rate of about one per cent per day, for a hundred days,” he said. “But it was pretty damn satisfying, and it still is.”
Morrison has a house on Lake Tahoe, a trim three-bedroom that he renovated, stripping the drywall to expose stone walls and massive cedar beams. His friends call it the smallest house on the lake. Maybe so, but it’s good living. Glass doors open onto a patio, overstrung with prayer flags, a hot tub, a thin strip of lawn, and a dock. It was hard—looking out past the pier at the lake, with a full moon rising over Nevada—not to think of Michael Corleone, glowering in his parlor. While on Everest, freezing in his tent, Morrison watched “The Offer,” the TV series based on the making of “The Godfather.”
When I stayed with him one weekend last month, he also had as visitors Rob DesLauriers and his girlfriend, Merrill Joy. DesLauriers was one of the most prominent extreme skiers of my generation, a film star who also skied Everest via the South Pillar route, in a campaign, with his then wife Kit, to ski each continent’s highest peak, the so-called Seven Summits. (Jimmy Chin skied Everest with them.) DesLauriers, now a real-estate developer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, officiated at the wedding of Chin and Vasarhelyi, in 2013. He was in town for a weekend of golf with his brothers.
“For a guy who doesn’t drink, that’s a pretty great bar,” DesLauriers said, pointing to a table stocked with fine liquor. Morrison, who is fifty-one, generally avoids alcohol, but he likes house guests, and host gifts. He’s tall and muscular, like an N.F.L. tight end, ruddy, rarely without a ball cap on a mostly hairless dome. He’d got a partial knee replacement four months before he went to Everest. During my visit, he had a deep cough that I mistook for a high-altitude croup, but it was just a whatever-phlegm, from weeks of glad-handing and travel for the film. He’d recently been the maid of honor at the wedding of the pro freeskier Michelle Parker. Friends say that in his younger years he was intimidatingly aloof, but now he has a serene, almost saintly air of self- possession—the product, one surmises, of calamity and achievement.
Large-format mountain photos hung on the walls around the house, but there were no photos of Morrison except for a small one by the kitchen sink of him and Chin, on the back of which Chin had written, “The Rest is Gravy. Everest ’25.” It was taken at the Rongbuk Monastery, in Tibet, the highest in the world. They stopped there, briefly, thirty-six hours after the descent. They had a flight to catch, and their Chinese minders were upset that Morrison wanted to linger at the monastery and light candles. “But I just skied the north face of Everest, so I can do what I want,” he told me. The monk inside, serving tea, seemed to recognize him and led him into the main monastery, a rare privilege, to meet the head lama, who, seeing Morrison, said, “Summit!” and mimicked with his arms the act of skiing.
“The Sherpa telephone,” DesLauriers said. “They always know everything.”
“We’d been focussed on this goal for six years,” Morrison said. “ ‘The rest is gravy,’ we kept saying. Then we came home, and I realized I wish I was at eight thousand metres again, trying to light the stove, just wondering if I could get this lighter lit.” Gravy, apparently, consisted of travelling, repeating himself in Q. & A.s, and meeting celebrities, to promote the film and the feat.
All he really wanted to do was go rock climbing. On Saturday morning, we met up with a bunch of his local friends at a gas station and headed up to a lesser-known crag. “It’s my favorite place here,” he said. The trailhead was twenty minutes up a rutted jeep track, through a creek and a pine forest. Forty-five minutes of hiking later, we were up on a ballroom floor of glacially smoothed granite which met a near-vertical wall some five stories tall. Jim Zellers, a pioneer of big-mountain snowboarding and a friend of Morrison’s for almost four decades, had for several years been bolting new routes on this face, refining and naming and grading. These days, Zellers stages events for the North Face; a few weeks before, he’d had the climbing team here for its annual meeting, but made the climbers promise not to identify the wall in their social-media posts. The others with us that morning were Sherry McConkey; Morrison’s frequent climbing partner Emi Kawakita, a Japanese Swedish woman from Stockholm; Shelton Gregory, a local contractor; Zellers; and Nick Russell, a professional snowboarder, who was leaving in two days for an expedition in Nepal. I trundled along, making excuses about not having climbing shoes, or any vestige of an abdominal core.
They paired up and warmed up on some less challenging pitches and then got to work trying to climb a route that had occupied their attention for months, called Jazz Hands, a 5.12b. “It’s the hardest I’ve ever done,” Morrison said. “It’s got it all.”
“It’s fifty-seven moves,” Gregory said.
“I lie awake at night thinking about it.”
“Me, too!” Gregory said. Picture Tahoe City’s middle-aged men, wide-eyed in the should-I-pee hour, shadow-climbing the same fifty-seven moves on the same granite face.
Gregory cued up some music on a speaker: a playlist (psychedelic cumbia) that he’d been spinning all summer, to the mounting annoyance of the others. It gave the proceedings a comic timbre. These hale adventurers lounging around an amphitheatre of granite: one could imagine they had it all figured out. They had modest but beautiful homes, gainful employment, health, free time, outdoor escapades. Then again, a quarter of their cohort was dead.
Soon it was Morrison’s turn on Jazz Hands, with Gregory belaying from the ground. He put on his shoes and chalked up.
“Today’s four years,” he said, half to the others, half to himself. His friends knew without his saying more that he meant it was the fourth anniversary of Hilaree Nelson’s death. “It’s Hil Day,” he said.
“Shane died on a twenty-sixth, too,” McConkey said. “So did Kip and Allison.”
“Sketchy day,” Morrison said. He put his hands on the rock. “Let’s see if I can manage not to fall.” He reddened with effort.
“When you do something really hard, it clears the brain,” McConkey said to me. “That’s why Jim is climbing mountains. We hold him. They held me. Everyone here is part of that death clan, which is pretty cool to have around you.”
The crag was in the shade. A crisp wind brought an autumnal chill. Everyone wore down puffers, which they took off when it was time to climb. Morrison had lent me one, and after a while I put my hands in the pockets. In the left one I felt a vial. Drugs? No. It was Hilaree—the last of her ashes, the rest having been scattered at the summit of Everest, a year before. I gave the vial to Morrison, and he walked over to a patch of brown grass at the base of Jazz Hands and, without any fuss or pomp, scattered the remainder of the ashes.
When Chin and Vasarhelyi’s film screened at the Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado, last month, The Hollywood Reporter published a withering review, calling it “a portrait of two reckless, ruthlessly self-involved people.” It referred to the climbers’ rationales as “selfish pablum” and to their “stunts” as “callous and cruel,” in light of Nelson’s leaving behind two children. (Chin was risking doing so, too.) Certainly, it is gutting, knowing what we know, to see Nelson onscreen addressing the possibility of death, and insisting on her right to pursue her ambitions. In the film, Vasarhelyi expresses dismay that her husband—the father of their two kids—is signing on for the Everest expedition, especially after so many of their friends have died.
“Let’s look at what the loss actually looks like,” she told me, regarding her intentions as a filmmaker. “I think about agency a lot. I have agency. Jimmy has agency. But the kids don’t.” (She and Chin are now getting divorced.)
Still, maybe these people aren’t reckless, any more than, say, astronauts might be, nor are they necessarily more callous toward their offspring than the law partner who works eighty-hour weeks or the celebrated artist who cycles through five wives. They’re adventurers, pioneers, limit testers, outliers, freaks. They are attempting to do the dangerous thing safely, as well as elegantly and uniquely, both for a living and for the nourishment of their souls. Their nutrients may not be yours. “To die is bad style,” a climber once told me. It is also inevitable. “There’s a cost to not taking risks, too,” Chin told me. “You can sit on your couch and eat chips until you have a coronary.”
Morrison has two professional careers and has thrived in both. He’s a skier and a home builder. These have more in common than you’d think, insofar as the culture of skiing has become the pretext for (and pretense behind) the kinds of houses he builds, and the kinds of clients he builds them for. As rugged mountain villages became, in the second half of the twentieth century, hubs of adventure sport—skiing, climbing, biking—they began to attract ever greater wealth. The dirtbags kicked off the cycle that eventually brought the new mega-West of log mansions, heated parking lots, and ersatz Frederic Remington oil paintings. The Rockies and the Pacific ranges are now latticed with ultra-fancy resort towns, with colossal lodge-like houses and high-end restaurants and shops. In the Lake Tahoe area, spread out as it is, the displays of extreme wealth may seem more diffuse than in the valley confines of Telluride, Aspen, and Jackson Hole. Still, they are abundant. The tech billions flow uphill from the Bay Area. The hills are alive with the sound of nail guns.
Many ski bums who stuck around became local grandees. The life style they personified served as advertising, in the way that artists and gay people colonize derelict urban neighborhoods and make them alluring to gentrifiers. The outdoor-apparel companies, by sponsoring athletes and films and catalogue shoots, converted derring-do into marketing fodder for developers and Realtors. Morrison has been on the front end and the back end, working the golden goose from tip to tail. He reckons that he has built about a hundred luxury homes in the area.
Morrison was born in Pittsburgh but reared in Walnut Creek, California, a suburb in the East Bay. His father was an electrical engineer at Westinghouse. Morrison caught the mountain bug when he was twelve, at the local gear store, Sunrise Mountaineering; his mother, a manager at a law firm, was buying him a water bottle and some hiking boots for a Boy Scout backpacking trip. He was transfixed by the climbing tools hanging from the walls, and by the photographs of the store’s owners scaling snowy peaks in Alaska. He did a little research and learned that people climbed on Mount Diablo, nearby. “I went to the store and talked to the employees there and read books and learned about it,” Morrison said. “And eventually I got to Mount Diablo, and I set up my own top rope, with my own equipment, with nobody else. And I did my own rappels.” He practiced out of his bathroom window, on the second floor of the family tract house. “I made an anchor on my toilet. Now I’m a contractor—you realize that a toilet is fastened by two little bolts. It’s basically just sitting there.”
On weekends, he skied at Lake Tahoe, first at Alpine Meadows, then on the mogul team at Squaw Valley (which was renamed Palisades Tahoe six years ago). Like many groms of his generation, he had a V.H.S. copy of the Greg Stump ski film “The Blizzard of Aahhh’s,” and watched it every day for a year. The summer after his junior year of high school, he arranged to go to New Zealand for a mogul camp. To raise the necessary funds—he wasn’t earning enough in his job, as a stock boy in the women’s-shoe department at Nordstrom—he biked around Walnut Creek with a stencil kit and offered to repaint residents’ sun-faded addresses on the curbs in front of their houses, at ten bucks a pop. After a showdown with the president of a homeowners’ association, he finagled a contract to do the whole subdivision, which got him the sum he needed for the trip. “My parents, while I was gone, read my yearbook and saw all these notes from friends that were, like, ‘We should do bongs this summer,’ ” Morrison said. “And they were, like, ‘What the heck is happening? Who are you? What is wrong with you?’ ”
What was really wrong with him, though, was that he had begun to cultivate the idea of climbing and then skiing down the world’s biggest mountains. He already had eyes for the north face of Everest and the Hornbein Couloir. He dropped out of college, moved to Chamonix, France, the epicenter of alpinism, and began to level up, knocking off semi-obscure first descents in order to make a name for himself. He was competing on the international extreme-skiing tour and was sponsored by some of the top gear companies. Then, his second winter there, he blew out a knee.
He flew back to Tahoe and moved in with his parents, who had a house share there. On his first night without crutches, he went to a party because his older brother, John, who was also a skier, had told him that the marketing director of the North Face would be there. She was not, but, as he sat alone, rubbing his knee, a woman—Katie—approached him and started razzing him about nursing his injury. They began to flirt. Two years later, they were married. Morrison, in her thrall, put aside his skiing career and his inchoate dreams of Everest, and instead, with his characteristic intensity, tried his hand at home construction.
The first project was putting on a deck, which earned him three thousand dollars. “So now I had a net worth of three thousand and forty bucks,” he said. He knew a local real-estate agent who was marketing a new development, with thirty-five buildable lots. Morrison found a partner who would pay for one of them. Morrison would build the house and get twenty per cent of the equity. The catch was that he didn’t actually know how to build a house. Zellers poured the foundation, and Morrison hired fellow ski bums to do the framing, masonry, and tiling. For a while, he was operating under the contractor’s license of his former mogul-team coach. Across the street, Ernst Hager, a national-ski-team coach and an operations guy at Squaw Valley, was building a house at the behest of the same real-estate agent. Morrison visited the site regularly and studied Hager’s work. “I was learning how to do it the day before I did it,” Morrison said. “Like, ‘Why is there glue in all these joists?’ ‘Well, you put glue in the hangers so they don’t squeak.’ The next morning, I told my crew, ‘We need glue for the joists.’ ‘Glue? Why?’ ‘So the hangers don’t squeak.’ ”
Morrison was twenty-four years old. He met his parents for dinner to tell them about his new career. “All they did was try to talk me out of it,” he said. “My father always used to talk about hard work, how nothing comes for free. ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’ But when I saw this lot, in that development, I thought, This is money growing on trees.”
Ten years later, Morrison had two kids and a thriving construction business that was building several houses at a time. The family was living in Lahontan, a high-end gated community on a golf course, in Truckee. “I was the youngest member there, by a long shot,” he said. “I’d made a lot of money at this point. And I was leveraging all of it into the houses. Build a house, make it work, sell it, do it again.” The family moved in and out of his builds. “My daughter lived in five houses by the time she was five years old.”
One night, when Katie had flown down to Los Angeles, he called her and said, “Honey, this business is cranking, our kids are in a great place, we’re really going to do this.” They had a plan to spend part of the year in Chamonix, enroll the kids in school there. “I had the world by a string,” he told me. “I thought we had it all.” And then, the next day, they were gone.
After a second day of climbing, Morrison, in his Chevy pickup, took me on a tour of some of his building projects. He brought me to a newer gated community, called Martis Camp. “It’s Lahontan on steroids,” he said. Two thousand acres, almost seven hundred lots, snug against the Northstar ski area, with views of the Martis Valley and the Sierra Crest. The golf course, glimpsed through the pines, was unexpectedly lush. “I’ve built, like, seventy-five houses in here,” Morrison said.
During the 2008 financial crisis, most of the construction at Martis Camp came to a virtual halt. But Morrison kept going, despite being leveraged to the hilt. Now, as he navigated the winding blacktop roads, past monstrosities both ultra-modern and outré-Montana, he told the story of his financial survival—the cunning, the bravado, the near-disasters—and it was as harrowing, in its way, as any expedition in the Himalayas. Still, one wouldn’t expect it to become a Chin and Vasarhelyi IMAX spectacular anytime soon.
He pulled up at a house he’d finished in the spring for two Bay Area investors, brothers. It was ten thousand square feet, three years in the making, and, although he wouldn’t tell me how much he got paid for the job, it was obvious to me, after years of hate-reading the Mansions section of the Wall Street Journal, that this house had to be worth tens of millions of dollars. It was what you might call deep Vail-core: heavy stone, big wood, big glass. An immaculate garage had a fleet of bicycles and golf carts and kids’ scooters. We removed our shoes and went from room to room. Muscular floorboards of stained oak, with wooden pegs; massive steel posts and beams clad in a veneer of reclaimed wood; florid paintings of cowboys and bears; excellent whiskeys and patios and books; a stone fireplace the size of a lighthouse. Say what you will about the taste, but the work was very fine. “There are ninety-six pieces of wood in this column,” Morrison said. “Seven hundred or so pieces of wood in this room.” Here and there was custom metalwork fashioned by the burly homeschooled guy from Vermont who earlier that day on the crag I’d seen climb a 5.12d+, and whose shoes I’d borrowed to get a taste of a 5-point-much-less. Side-by-side desks stood in the brothers’ office. One held the business book “Margin of Safety,” and the other held “Brave New World.”
Driving back to his house, we were talking about marriage, or, really, about some of our friends’ marriages. There had been a run of divorces in his mountain set. He recalled visiting Katie’s family in northern Michigan, when he and Katie first started dating, and seeing her parents in the back of a boat, cuddled up under a blanket, giggling. “They were so in love with each other,” he said. “That’s what I want.” He’d had it and lost it twice. “I’m either doing that, or I’m not doing it at all.”
Recently, Morrison had found himself in another kind of relationship, one that was as nourishing to him as it was baffling. Of all the crazy things that had befallen him since skiing Everest—Prince Harry buying him rounds, Meghan Markle texting him on the crag, dining with John Malkovich—one stood out. Speaking in Los Angeles at a conference organized by Jeffrey Katzenberg, he was invited on a podcast with Oprah Winfrey. She had followed the Everest triumph but had had no idea about the tragedies he’d endured. Morrison was taken by her energy, her presence. “It was just a tremendous amount of similarities in our passion, in our lives, and in how we have manifested our own outcomes through hardship,” he told me. “I was just, like, I love this woman.”
They exchanged numbers and made plans to meet in Telluride, at the première of the Everest film. She had a house there, and he had one, too, which he’d originally built to live in with Nelson and her sons. (He sold it over the summer. Telluride got a little weird for him: Hilaree’s town, without Hilaree. “Every time I went to get groceries, it was, ‘Are you O.K.? Are you really O.K.?’ ” He got a house in Aspen, instead, but still sees and keeps in touch with the boys.) He and Winfrey went for dinner in town. She began planning a party for him and the film. “I’ve never had a party at my house before,” she told him.
Tent, band, flowers: everything just so. “It was essentially a wedding for me,” Morrison said.
“A part of my soul was stirred by him,” Winfrey told me. “It makes me tear up to think about him. He’s one of the most extraordinary people on the planet. Here’s a guy who can have joy and grief existing in the same heart.” For the party, she had him write something that she could print on a four-by-six-inch card and leave at each place setting; she also read it aloud to the guests.
When Morrison told me about all this, we were sitting at his kitchen table, still in our clothes from the crag. Night had fallen on the lake. The conversation would go on deeper into the night—“I’m an endurance athlete,” he’d say—but at this moment he stood and fetched a tawny box, made of paper from Nepal, tied up in twine, and began gingerly unwrapping it. Inside was one of the cards, which bore twenty-two lines, center-formatted on fine grainy stock, his signature at the bottom.
I read it to myself, as one does, in my inner Oprah voice: “The mountains have given me so much. They’ve also taken a great deal from me. I don’t climb or ski for the risk. I do it for the presence it demands.” Then I handed it back, and he put it aside to wrap it up again. “I was going to give this to my mom,” he said.
It was tempting to think of this as another node in the grief-industrial complex, the gyre of thrills and kills, sentiment and content, but the force of Morrison’s belief, his tenacity and quietude, and the way it seemed to reflect what little I knew about those characteristics in Winfrey, made me feel suddenly and resolutely happy for him. This was when he began to tell me about encountering the spirits of his children on the North Ridge. ♦