Beyond Skiing Everest: Mike Marolt on skiing the world's highest peaks

Beyond Skiing Everest: The Mike Marolt Story

Mike Marolt interview: “They thought we were going to go out there and get ourselves killed.”

Ski Hall of Famer, film director and author Mike Marolt talks to us about the very unique perils associated with skiing at extreme altitiudes – and the steps he has taken to minimise them.

“They were actually taking bets on our death.”

By Matt, July 4 2020

Before we get up to the extreme altitudes scaled in Mike Marolt’s brand of AT (Alpine Touring) skiing, we should take a moment to acclimatise ourselves.

Consider the highest altitude you’ve skied from: if you’re a European like me, chances are most of your mountain experience is in the Alps, where the highest pistes lie at around 3500m, rearing up to the lofty 3899m in Zermatt, Austria. Above 3000m, conditions start to become a bit more serious – as serious as you can get within the travel-brochure confines of a marked tourist resort. The temperature drops and the flimsy layers you were sweating in down at 1500m are beginning to feel scant. When the weather rolls in, it hits faster, and the wind, billowing curtains of snow off the peaks that aren’t quite so high above you any more, has grown teeth. And as you cruise the pistes or trudge to the nearest restaurant for lunch, you’ll notice your exertions become a little more arduous.

That’s because at high altitude, as barometric pressure falls, so too does the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s what people mean when they say the air is thinner. Your body can’t transport enough oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your cells. At extreme altitudes, muscles are starved, cognitive ability is impaired, vision fades, and all manner of alarm bells go off as your body starts screaming out for oxygen.

The rate at which oxygen is transported from the lungs to the cells around the body is known as VO2, and a person’s VO2 max is the maximum capacity of the body to transport oxygen during exercise. In layman’s terms: aerobic fitness. So from the perspective of our acclimatization, as we progress up from 1600m, our VO2 max decreases by 8-11% every 1000m. At the top of our friendly ski resort, we could be transporting oxygen at a rate 20% lower than we were on the slopes down near the resort centre.

Before we get up to the extreme altitudes scaled in Mike Marolt’s brand of AT (Alpine Touring) skiing, we should take a moment to acclimatise ourselves.

And as you cruise the pistes or trudge to the nearest restaurant for lunch, you’ll notice your exertions become a little more arduous.

But that’s just a fun challenge. Things get a little more dramatic on the world’s higher resorts. Gulmarg in India reaches 3980m, and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in southern China’s Yunnan province soars to a vertiginous 4700m. At the top of the highest lift your VO2 max could be down by more than 30%.

According to the British Medical Journal, altitude levels and the associated effects on the body are defined as follows:

“Intermediate altitude (1500-2500 metres)
Physiological changes detectable. Arterial oxygen saturation >90%. Altitude illness possible but rare.

High altitude (2500-3500 metres)
Altitude illness common with rapid ascent.

Very high altitude (3500-5800 metres)
Altitude illness common. Arterial oxygen saturation <90%. Marked hypoxaemia during exercise.

Extreme altitude (>5800 metres)
Marked hypoxaemia at rest. Progressive deterioration, despite maximal acclimatisation. Permanent survival cannot be maintained.”

Time then, now that we’ve adjusted ourselves to the arena of extreme altitude (wasn’t that easy?) to ditch the science and get some perspective: Mike Marolt has climbed and skied on no less than six occasions from a dizzying 7000m, and twice from 8000m. Next time you’re lugging your skis from the foot of the piste to the lockers, spare a thought for Mike and his brother Steve, who’ve hefted them up Mount Everest, Shishapangma and Cho Oyu. And yes, they made those ascents like all the others: without porters, without supplemental oxygen, without altitude drugs. They’ve been doing crazy rides like that for 30 years. Their achievements have landed them in the Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, and if you’re wondering how they made their way from ground level up to some of the tallest peaks in the world: well, both literally and figuratively, they didn’t really start at the bottom.

According to the British Medical Journal, altitude levels and the associated effects on the body are defined as follows:

“Intermediate altitude (1500-2500 metres):
Physiological changes detectable. Arterial oxygen saturation >90%. Altitude illness possible but rare.

High altitude (2500-3500 metres):
Altitude illness common with rapid ascent.

Very high altitude (3500-5800 metres):
Altitude illness common. Arterial oxygen saturation <90%. Marked hypoxaemia during exercise.

Extreme altitude (>5800 metres):
Marked hypoxaemia at rest. Progressive deterioration, despite maximal acclimatisation. Permanent survival cannot be maintained.”

“Max Marolt was my Dad,” Mike says when I ask how it all began. “He was the first native Aspenite to ski in the Olympics and then his younger brother followed him in 1964. So Dad was in the Squaw Valley Olympics and then Billy was in the Innsbruck Olympics. And then even before them, their older brother Bud was on the ski team for the Olympics before 1960 and for whatever reason he decided not to [compete at the 1952 Olympics], so it was really a kind of ski industry, ski dynasty family. We – Steve and I are identical twins – grew up ski racing. Dad at that time, when he was a youngster, it was really tough, even through the US ski team, to get to the training places in South America or the glaciers in Europe, and so what dad did was he took the jeep and drove up into the high cirques in the Colorado Rockies, and he found a permanent snow field, a small glacier, between 12000 and 14000 feet. He would go up there and he would train and then after his ski career in the 60s he had a ski racing camp up there. Then he had kids and when we got old enough he started to take us with him up to these old places that he used to ski. And this was long after his days of competition, but after ski racing he got into coaching and he thought you know what: if I could go up there and put a rope tow on those snow fields I could run ski racing camps.

“So he had it all set up and then the Forest Service got in the way and made him take the lifts out, but he still acquired the surface rights and the mining rights of where that snowfield lay in the cirque of that 14000 foot peak, and it didn’t have any value outside of the fact that you could drive a jeep a long ways up the road and then you could go and you could climb and you could ski. He skied with us obviously in Aspen and so vicariously we learned to ski, and then in the summer when the lifts were closed we’d head up there. And in summer it was always earn your turns, you know it was always hiking to get your skiing. When we got older we fixed up these old Willys Jeeps and as soon as we had driving licenses there was no stopping us. We were up at Montezuma Basin glacier every opportunity we had from May to when the snow started to fly in the fall. So we developed this long before the term earn your turn even existed. But we became very accustomed to climbing and skiing and that led to: ‘I wonder what it’s like on top of that peak’. We found ourselves climbing fourteeners and then we’d look at the next ridge and say wow look at that, let’s next time go over there and ski that line, so it was really him just passing the torch. We never developed into the level of ski racer that he was, but in the process we developed a big set of lungs, and you know, genetics helped us.”

Genetics? Alright, let’s not be too hasty ditching the science.

“We were the fourth generation and that’s a whole other story, about the genetics of it – but it’s interesting. In the physiology of human beings the thing that adjusts quickest and adapts the quickest in evolution is ability to adapt to altitude, and that’s the reason why the Sherpa are as strong as they are. But really the strongest people, contrary to what a lot of people would tell you, are the Peruvians, who are just on a different planet, and the reason they’re on a different planet is that for generations they’ve lived above 14000 feet and even above 16000 feet. So I started to look into it and it takes five generations to fully adapt to altitude. We were the fourth generation. Heart disease runs in the family and my dad actually died form a heart attack. When I got tested they put me in the X-Ray machine or whatever, and the first thing the doctor said was, ‘Oh my God you have an enlarged heart.’ And I was like you know, I’m doing hundred mile bike races and I’m climbing and skiing: you’re crazy. And then he said, ‘Oh wait a minute, your lungs are bigger than normal.’ And then he said ‘Jesus look at your veins.’ And so through that evolution process we kind of have an unfair advantage, being fourth generation at 8000 feet and climbing and skiing and stuff, but it translated: what we lacked in ability to go fast, we found that we just had this ability to climb and ski at 12 to 14 thousand feet. You know literally from age twelve, and that’s where our passions grew. You know I talk about the first trip in the book, I mean I remember that we drove to 12000 feet in another area called Independence Pass. It’s July 4th and I get out of the car and it’s still dark out and it’s like, oh my God this is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. The whole entire Colorado Rocky range seemed to be below me and from that day I was hooked. And the same with Steve and Roger – who hasn’t continued to climb with us but he was a part of the beginning of the progression – and we’ve never looked back.”

“Dad at that time, when he was a youngster, it was really tough, even through the US ski team, to get to the training places in South America or the glaciers in Europe, and so what dad did was he took the jeep and drove up into the high cirques in the Colorado Rockies, and he found a permanent snow field, a small glacier, between 12000 and 14000 feet. He would go up there and he would train and then after his ski career in the 60s he had a ski racing camp up there. Then he had kids and when we got old enough he started to take us with him up to these old places that he used to ski. And this was long after his days of competition, but after ski racing he got into coaching and he thought you know what: if I could go up there and put a rope tow on those snow fields I could run ski racing camps.

“When we got older we fixed up these old Willys Jeeps and as soon as we had driving licenses there was no stopping us. We were up at Montezuma Basin glacier every opportunity we had from May to when the snow started to fly in the fall. So we developed this long before the term earn your turn even existed. But we became very accustomed to climbing and skiing and that led to: ‘I wonder what it’s like on top of that peak’. We found ourselves climbing fourteeners and then we’d look at the next ridge and say wow look at that, let’s next time go over there and ski that line, so it was really him just passing the torch. We never developed into the level of ski racer that he was, but in the process we developed a big set of lungs, and you know, genetics helped us.”

Genetics? Alright, let’s not be too hasty ditching the science.

“We were the fourth generation. Heart disease runs in the family and my dad actually died form a heart attack. When I got tested they put me in the X-Ray machine or whatever, and the first thing the doctor said was, ‘Oh my God you have an enlarged heart.’ And I was like you know, I’m doing hundred mile bike races and I’m climbing and skiing: you’re crazy. And then he said, ‘Oh wait a minute, your lungs are bigger than normal.’ And then he said ‘Jesus look at your veins.’ And so through that evolution process we kind of have an unfair advantage, being fourth generation at 8000 feet and climbing and skiing and stuff, but it translated: what we lacked in ability to go fast, we found that we just had this ability to climb and ski at 12 to 14 thousand feet. You know literally from age twelve, and that’s where our passions grew.

“You know I talk about the first trip in the book, I mean I remember that we drove to 12000 feet in another area called Independence Pass. It’s July 4th and I get out of the car and it’s still dark out and it’s like, oh my God this is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. The whole entire Colorado Rocky range seemed to be below me and from that day I was hooked. And the same with Steve and Roger – who hasn’t continued to climb with us but he was a part of the beginning of the progression – and we’ve never looked back.”

Never looked back nor stood still. Climbing the highest mountains in the world and skiing from peaks that caress the stratosphere is one thing. Recording it all is another.

Skiing Everest, released back in 2009, charts the story of Mike, Steve, and their friends as they make their attempt on the tallest mountain in the world, but it’s an attempt that began long before the group set foot in the Himalayas. Filmed over ten years, Skiing Everest takes in the story of high altitude skiing, and introduces us to Mike Marolt’s extreme skiing partners and their stellar achievements on snow, including becoming the first American’s to ski from above 8000m.

Now we have a sequel, Beyond Skiing Everest. Because if there was a lot leading up to that famous peak, there was just as much following it. Everest was a highlight of the Marolt brothers’ career, but as the film, available to watch now, will testify, while Everest might be the highest peak in the world, it is not the only peak in the world.

“As we were getting into our careers we started out in Alaska up on Denali and then we went into the Wrangell-Saint Elias Range. We could afford those trips that were a little bit closer but we knew we had the ability to go to altitude. The next logical step was South America and that involved plane tickets and you know, just a lot more expense, and ultimately Asia which is super expensive. I funded a lot of my initial Himalayan expeditions with still photography, it didn’t pay for them but I could sell the pictures. Then in 2000 we were on an expedition to try and become the first Americans to ski from an 8000m peak and we happened to get that trip sponsored with a film crew, primarily because the fall before we planned to go, some super famous alpinists were trying to do the same thing on the same peak – a totally different route – and they got swept away in an avalanche. That was Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker, and so there was a bit of a media buzz about Shishapangma, about skiing from 8000m. Of course we were on the standard side which was not nearly as dangerous as where they were but nonetheless a film company in our home town Aspen picked up on it and said we’d like to send a film crew. We weren’t too excited about that, but we said well, if it gets the trip paid for – and we were about 15000 dollars short – we said yeah whatever, we’ll take em. So they went, and the high altitude photographer, a guy named Pat Morrow got sick. I knew the ins and outs of still photography and they shoved a movie camera in my hand and I thought, how the hell am I gonna carry skis and carry all these batteries and this equipment up this peak? But they gave me a crash course. The beauty of it is that I haven’t taken still photos since then. That was the catalyst that allowed us to go to sponsors and to go to people and say we’re going to do a film on this expedition or whatever. So the film aspect became the catalyst for how we funded all the expeditions after. It was just really fortunate that I got the opportunity – unfortunate for Pat because he got sick – and that was the start of the film career. And that kind of launched our ski careers as well. It gave us a little bit of fame because we did get the first and it was notable. I just started practising shooting, and at that point the only high altitude footage was from the academy award winning film The Man Who Skied Everest, but it was always from a tripod well below the skiing and I thought: Jesus, nobody’s ever taken footage of people skiing from above 7000m. So that became almost as big a draw for me – to get the shot – as the climbing and skiing.”

It wasn’t an instant success though. Like everything with the Marolts and AT skiing, perfection came step by step.

“On Shishapangma I have 30 minutes of beautiful footage of the inside of my pocket, because the camera turned on and I was so tired and so smoked that I just didn’t notice the camera – I literally forgot about the camera. And I got to the bottom and I thought I will never make that mistake again. So it’s part of the natural progression of making films, getting the shot, doing the climbing and doing the skiing and you know, we got terribly lucky when it all fell into place.”

That continuous development and knowledge-building is a theme that runs through Mike and Steve Marolt’s careers. Their achievements have all come at a steady pace, and the long journey to their current status as perhaps the greatest AT skiers of all time is a progression Mike has embraced. As evidenced by the title of his book, released in a few days.

“Yeah the book will be out this week. The book is called Natural Progression: A lifetime of skiing in the world’s highest mountain ranges.”

Never looked back nor stood still. Climbing the highest mountains in the world and skiing from peaks that caress the stratosphere is one thing. Recording it all is another.

“Then in 2000 we were on an expedition to try and become the first Americans to ski from an 8000m peak and we happened to get that trip sponsored with a film crew, primarily because the fall before we planned to go, some super famous alpinists were trying to do the same thing on the same peak – a totally different route – and they got swept away in an avalanche. That was Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker, and so there was a bit of a media buzz about Shishapangma, about skiing from 8000m. Of course we were on the standard side which was not nearly as dangerous as where they were but nonetheless a film company in our home town Aspen picked up on it and said we’d like to send a film crew. We weren’t too excited about that, but we said well, if it gets the trip paid for – and we were about 15000 dollars short – we said yeah whatever, we’ll take em. So they went, and the high altitude photographer, a guy named Pat Morrow got sick. I knew the ins and outs of still photography and they shoved a movie camera in my hand and I thought, how the hell am I gonna carry skis and carry all these batteries and this equipment up this peak? But they gave me a crash course.

“The beauty of it is that I haven’t taken still photos since then. That was the catalyst that allowed us to go to sponsors and to go to people and say we’re going to do a film on this expedition or whatever. So the film aspect became the catalyst for how we funded all the expeditions after. It was just really fortunate that I got the opportunity – unfortunate for Pat because he got sick – and that was the start of the film career. And that kind of launched our ski careers as well. It gave us a little bit of fame because we did get the first and it was notable.

“I just started practising shooting, and at that point the only high altitude footage was from the academy award winning film The Man Who Skied Everest, but it was always from a tripod well below the skiing and I thought: Jesus, nobody’s ever taken footage of people skiing from above 7000m. So that became almost as big a draw for me – to get the shot – as the climbing and skiing.”

It wasn’t an instant success though. Like everything with the Marolts and AT skiing, perfection came step by step.

“Yeah the book will be out this week. The book is called Natural Progression: A lifetime of skiing in the world’s highest mountain ranges.”

Mike Marolt climbs, Mike Marolt skis, Mike Marolt films and yes – Mike Marolt writes.

“Well I’m just kind of driven by objectives and it’s no different to the climbing and the skiing. I always wanted to make a film and so I made some films and had success and then I got a job as an op-ed writer. and I’m not a writer I’m a CPA accountant, so I’m kind of a square peg in a round hole. I got the job and the guy said, this is kind of a unique magazine called the Ascent Backcountry. It’s about backcountry skiing by backcountry skiers so we’re not going to heavily edit it, we want it in your words. If there are mistakes in grammar and stuff like that that’s okay, we want it in your words, we want it to be organic. So I practised my writing and each month during the winter I had to write stories. And I said well what do you want me to write about? And they said just start at the beginning and we’ll just keep publishing them until we get to the end. And after several years of doing that I ended up with this huge pile of stories and I shipped it off to a mountain culture writer and critic. I was a little scared about sending it to him.

“His name is Cameron M Burns. He’s primarily a rock climber and he’s written guide books and he’s written and had published books on mountain culture and stuff. He’s climbed more of the desert spires in the southwest of the United States than anybody, and his critiques of these writers is just horrifying. He’s super, super critical. And I knew of him – he lived in the valley – and I found his email and I said, I’m just going to send it to him and see what he thinks. And within an hour he called me back and he said, I’m editing this into a book. I said, I don’t have any money, I can’t pay. He said, I don’t care, this is a story. And you know through our career we missed the internet, we missed the self-promotion stuff, and nobody knew who the hell we were and yet we had been out and had over 50 expeditions in the 5000 to 8000m arena but we were just horrible at marketing ourselves – nobody knew who we were. We had articles written in the ski magazines, you know, with titles like ‘The most accomplished ski mountaineers you’ve never heard of’ and stuff like that, so when he saw it, being in that demographic, he literally had to google us and was like, this is so crazy that these guys have flown under the wire. So he got excited about it and he took all the stories and he said we need to bridge the gaps. You know this is a chronology of your entire career and it’s a book. And so he spent a year with me working on it, rounding off the corners. The character development was almost non-existent so I had to learn how to tell the reader who these people were, and it was the most fun adventure I’ve ever been on. At the end of the day he said, well here’s the book. And then we couldn’t find a publisher!

“We got really close with a big one in new York but they said the character development is just not there. So I kept working on it and I said, well here’s my buddy John Callaghan: who is he? What is he? And I would supplement it in and I would send it to Cam and he would say this is great, we’re getting there we’re getting there. But I still couldn’t find a publisher. I spoke to another person who’d had success with this company called Lulu, which is kind of a hybrid publisher/self publisher group and you know, huge. And I sent it to them and went through the process with their editor to make it something that was readable and here I am, with a book. So am I writer? Not by any stretch, but I’ve written that book and I’m about half way through the next one, and the beautiful thing about going through that process is that it’s kind of like getting a masters degree in literature and the second book, which is purely on the first American ski descent from 8000m, is the process of taking a vertical learning curve and flattening it through the edit process, and I’ve incorporated it into that and so it’s a labour of love. I mean I’m not giving up my day job for films or writing but every day, first 45 minutes of every day, before I get into my accounting job, I just write, and I just love it. It’s just been a lot of work. I mean it’s funny you write a book and you think you’re done but that’s about a tenth of the way through the process.”

Mike Marolt climbs, Mike Marolt skis, Mike Marolt films and yes – Mike Marolt writes.

“And you know through our career we missed the internet, we missed the self-promotion stuff, and nobody knew who the hell we were and yet we had been out and had over 50 expeditions in the 5000 to 8000m arena but we were just horrible at marketing ourselves – nobody knew who we were. We had articles written in the ski magazines, you know, with titles like ‘The most accomplished ski mountaineers you’ve never heard of’ and stuff like that, so when he saw it, being in that demographic, he literally had to google us and was like, this is so crazy that these guys have flown under the wire.

“So he got excited about it and he took all the stories and he said we need to bridge the gaps. You know this is a chronology of your entire career and it’s a book. And so he spent a year with me working on it, rounding off the corners. The character development was almost non-existent so I had to learn how to tell the reader who these people were, and it was the most fun adventure I’ve ever been on. At the end of the day he said, well here’s the book. And then we couldn’t find a publisher!

“So am I writer? Not by any stretch, but I’ve written that book and I’m about half way through the next one, and the beautiful thing about going through that process is that it’s kind of like getting a masters degree in literature and the second book, which is purely on the first American ski descent from 8000m, is the process of taking a vertical learning curve and flattening it through the edit process, and I’ve incorporated it into that and so it’s a labour of love. I mean I’m not giving up my day job for films or writing but every day, first 45 minutes of every day, before I get into my accounting job, I just write, and I just love it. It’s just been a lot of work. I mean it’s funny you write a book and you think you’re done but that’s about a tenth of the way through the process.”

Listening to Mike Marolt I begin to understand that his greatest achievement is not this peak or that, but the whole package: the journey from those first earn-your-turn runs up in the high cirques of the Colorado Rockies to the marquee peaks of Asia and South America – that’s what counts. His development as a skier and as a person. When pressed, Mike will pick a standout moment or two, but it’s clear that they form part of a much bigger picture.

“Well I think that becoming the first Americans North or South to ski from 8000m – it was something so outlandish that we didn’t think we could do it. I mean we literally thought well, we’re gonna take our skis and we’re just going to go and we’re going to ski in the Himalayas, that was the goal. Yeah we want to climb the peak but it was a stretch. And it was such a stretch that the local climbing community, I mean word got back, they were actually taking bets on our death. They thought that we were just arrogant and we were going to go out there and get ourselves killed. And we just took it literally a step at a time. We thought well, we’re here: let’s take the next step.

“And we pulled it off and that was hugely satisfying. Satisfying because it literally catapulted us into having the ability to continue. But along the way, I think one of the most satisfying climbs for me was on a peak called Illimani in Bolivia. It’s a 21,150 foot peak, and it sits above the city of La Paz – it’s not a mountaineering jewel by any stretch: it’s got a tourist route on it, it’s super exposed. But it’s got a steep headwall that’s iced and generally not skiable and we’d tried it a couple of times and didn’t make it because of illness one year, weather the next year, so over a 16 year period we’d climbed all the peaks in that area, in that range, and that one had eluded us. And so we thought, literally, I called Jim and Steve two weeks before we left and said, let’s just go do it. Let’s just take 10, 12 days and go do it. And so we showed up and you know it’s 9000 vertical feet to 21000 so we hauled the skis up and we couldn’t leave a camp – most people climb it with a midway camp because it’s a long way – and we couldn’t leave a camp, it was just the three of us and our stuff would get ripped off by the locals hiding in the rocks who could sell that gear for an annual salary in La Paz. So we buried the skis, got to the bottom and just said, you know what let’s just give it hell and go as far as we can. Let’s get up to the skis, get the skis and you know, we didn’t think we could climb 9000 feet unacclimated to that altitude. We picked up the skis and we just kept going and we got to the top and 16 years later we got the ski descent from the main peak, which had only been skied once before. And we did it in a single push, you know, base camp to base camp. And it was just a testament to the fact that it doesn’t have to be Everest, doesn’t have to be K2, doesn’t have to be something extraordinary to be one of the single biggest days that we’ve had in our careers. And that’s a really hard thing to communicate to super hardcore mountaineers. I was talking to one guy after the fact and he said, yeah but it’s just Illimani, and I was like: Yeah? Go try it.

“And it taxed us. It was a 17 hour round trip deal. And when we got to the bottom, the fact that it had taken us two trips to try and get it done – when you go and you pull something like that off, it just opens up the entire world to unlimited possibilities of how you can push yourself. And that was one of the highlights for me. A lot of people would think that it’s Everest or Broad Peak or Cho Oyo Jung but no, it’s this 21,000 foot peak in Bolivia that 10,000 people have climbed. But nobody had climbed it in a single push and nobody had skied it in a single push and that just opened our eyes to the reality that there’s a lot you can do in this world as a human being to push yourself to the limit. That was just a great day in the mountains as Jim said.”

Altitude skiing, then, is something anyone can do. Not necessarily at the thin-air levels practiced by climber/skiers like Mike Marolt, but not everyone needs to go to 8000m. Again, it’s about the journey and enjoying the steps along the way. The destination comes second.

“I think the reason why Cam liked the book and the two movies – and none of this was by design, I just got lucky – is that it really is a dashboard of natural progression. You know, we don’t climb with Sherpa, we don’t climb with oxygen, we’ve really kept it pure. A lot of the reason for that was just practicality – I mean we couldn’t afford all the bells and whistles so we just went and did the best we could. But in the process of figuring out how to get to an 8000m peak or Everest, let alone to do it without Sherpa and without oxygen and without drugs and all that stuff, you really have to go through the process to learn what you’re capable of doing. And the beauty of that is that that translates into anything. And the book starts off – I mean my dad was just my hero – I remember we were sitting around one night and we were talking, and he said the key is to find passion. And it could be running rivers, it could be building your CPA practice, it could be anything. But the key is to find that passion, and then to accept the fact that that passion is a process. And once you understand that passion is a process, you might not be headed to Mount Everest, you might be headed to Castle Peak in the Colorado Rockies, but that’s your adventure. Don’t try and shortcut it, don’t try and eliminate it. You have to take the zillion little steps in order to progress, and the beautiful thing about understanding that passion is a process not a goal, is that you get on one ridge, you see the next ridge and you want to go and get on that. And then the next ridge becomes Alaska and the next ridge becomes South America and the next ridge becomes the Himalaya, and in that process you’re having just as much fun as you can possibly have at any given moment. And if you tap into that process of how fun and how satisfying it is, you’re gonna find success. You’re gonna find success through the process and part of the theme is the fact that Steve and I did get inducted into that Hall of Fame. And you know, I grew up with world class Olympic athletes I knew who was in that Hall of Fame – and that registered. Getting into something like that, with ski mountaineering – I never compared myself to the elite ski racers that I was surrounded by. We never considered ourselves to be world class at any of this. And yet when I walked up to that podium to accept that award, being inducted into the Hall of fame, it was like, holy shit how did this happen? Why me? I mean I didn’t even think that I was accomplishing anything, I was just having too much fun to worry about it. So the short version of the long is, if you’re enjoying what you’re doing no matter what, and you’re really concentrating on being the best that you can be at that time, and you string all those points together, you’re going to find yourself in places that you never imagined that you could get to. So start out, enjoy the process, don’t get too far ahead of yourself, don’t think that you’ve got to go out there and do the gnarliest route on this that or the other peak. Just enjoy the moment. Enjoy who you are and what you’re capable of doing, and then just push it a little bit further the next time. And before you know it you’re going to be doing things on skis that you never thought were possible.”

“And so we thought, literally, I called Jim and Steve two weeks before we left and said, let’s just go do it. Let’s just take 10, 12 days and go do it. And so we showed up and you know it’s 9000 vertical feet to 21000 so we hauled the skis up and we couldn’t leave a camp – most people climb it with a midway camp because it’s a long way – and we couldn’t leave a camp, it was just the three of us and our stuff would get ripped off by the locals hiding in the rocks who could sell that gear for an annual salary in La Paz. So we buried the skis, got to the bottom and just said, you know what let’s just give it hell and go as far as we can. Let’s get up to the skis, get the skis and you know, we didn’t think we could climb 9000 feet unacclimated to that altitude. We picked up the skis and we just kept going and we got to the top and 16 years later we got the ski descent from the main peak, which had only been skied once before. And we did it in a single push, you know, base camp to base camp.

“And it was just a testament to the fact that it doesn’t have to be Everest, doesn’t have to be K2, doesn’t have to be something extraordinary to be one of the single biggest days that we’ve had in our careers. And that’s a really hard thing to communicate to super hardcore mountaineers. I was talking to one guy after the fact and he said, yeah but it’s just Illimani, and I was like: Yeah? Go try it.

“A lot of the reason for that was just practicality – I mean we couldn’t afford all the bells and whistles so we just went and did the best we could. But in the process of figuring out how to get to an 8000m peak or Everest, let alone to do it without Sherpa and without oxygen and without drugs and all that stuff, you really have to go through the process to learn what you’re capable of doing. And the beauty of that is that that translates into anything. And the book starts off – I mean my dad was just my hero – I remember we were sitting around one night and we were talking, and he said the key is to find passion. And it could be running rivers, it could be building your CPA practice, it could be anything. But the key is to find that passion, and then to accept the fact that that passion is a process. And once you understand that passion is a process, you might not be headed to Mount Everest, you might be headed to Castle Peak in the Colorado Rockies, but that’s your adventure. Don’t try and shortcut it, don’t try and eliminate it. You have to take the zillion little steps in order to progress, and the beautiful thing about understanding that passion is a process not a goal, is that you get on one ridge, you see the next ridge and you want to go and get on that. And then the next ridge becomes Alaska and the next ridge becomes South America and the next ridge becomes the Himalaya, and in that process you’re having just as much fun as you can possibly have at any given moment.

“And if you tap into that process of how fun and how satisfying it is, you’re gonna find success. You’re gonna find success through the process and part of the theme is the fact that Steve and I did get inducted into that Hall of Fame. And you know, I grew up with world class Olympic athletes I knew who was in that Hall of Fame – and that registered. Getting into something like that, with ski mountaineering – I never compared myself to the elite ski racers that I was surrounded by. We never considered ourselves to be world class at any of this. And yet when I walked up to that podium to accept that award, being inducted into the Hall of fame, it was like, holy shit how did this happen? Why me? I mean I didn’t even think that I was accomplishing anything, I was just having too much fun to worry about it.

“So the short version of the long is, if you’re enjoying what you’re doing no matter what, and you’re really concentrating on being the best that you can be at that time, and you string all those points together, you’re going to find yourself in places that you never imagined that you could get to. So start out, enjoy the process, don’t get too far ahead of yourself, don’t think that you’ve got to go out there and do the gnarliest route on this that or the other peak. Just enjoy the moment. Enjoy who you are and what you’re capable of doing, and then just push it a little bit further the next time. And before you know it you’re going to be doing things on skis that you never thought were possible.”

Which is something that will ring true with every extreme skier, because like the Marolts and their team of friends/fellow climbers, back country types know what the mountain is truly about. It’s about one great day, one great ride, one chance encounter where the slopes and the snow and the weather align in a manifestation of exquisite transcendence.

But of course, we’re not all extreme skiers. Some of us are spectators. We must be entertained. So it’s lucky that while Mike doesn’t focus on box-ticking, there is a bucket list of sorts.

“Well I’m 55 and Jim is 56. We’re still going strong. We’re not as strong as we once were, but the cool thing is we started out with AT gear that was about as horrible as it gets. The first generation. And as we’ve aged the gear has gotten better and the technology has actually beat our ability to age. So if you’d asked me 20 years ago if we’d still be skiing in the 5000 to 8000m range I would’ve laughed, but here we are. We were supposed to be in Peru for the month of May in this range that nobody’s ever heard of called the Vilcanota. It’s a small 40 mile range, and it’s got four 6000m peaks, and we were supposed to be there training. The book ends with our attempts at climbing and skiing in the Himlaya in the winter, which has never been done, at least at the higher altitudes. And we got done with Everest, and our goal was always still to climb Everest, unsupported without oxygen and to ski it. And we made two attempts, never got to the top, got up to above 28000 feet, and what happened is that Everest is so crowded now that there were a couple of logjams on the steps on the north side. And we knew that climbing without oxygen, you just cannot stop, not for even 15 to 20 minutes, or you’d freeze. And so the dream of doing that kind of fell apart and we thought, well what in the hell can we do? How can we take this natural progression to something that is as ominous as trying to climb and ski Everest without oxygen? And I just threw it out there and said, we should go to the Himalaya in the winter. And Steve and Jim just kind of laughed – it’s that outlandish.

“And so we started to go on expeditions and it was a completely different sport. The first peak we chose was a peak we’d climbed and skied in the regular season called Muztagata and it has weather stations that the Chinese have put on it. The temperatures were minus 100 and so we went and we messed around on that, and didn’t get to the top. It’s never been climbed in the winter. Then we went to another peak called Himlung and got pretty close and then ice slopes prevented any kind of skiing. So we still have a desire to go to try and pull off a 7000 – or possibly an 8000 – metre ski in the winter. We’re tentatively hoping – you know this Coronavirus thing has put a damper on things – but there’s a peak called Dhaulagiri 3, which is a 7000m peak next to Dhaulagiri, and if everything falls into place and we’ve got the funding and the desire and the fitness to carry us into mid winter this year, hopefully we’ll be able to get in there and finally take all the experience from the 4 or 5 winter trips that we’ve done, and pull that off. And after that, if we pull that off, I might just be in a position to take up golf!

“But we’re still having fun, and we’ll continue to climb, especially the 6000m peaks in South America. You know, they’re easy and they’re cheap. You don’t need sponsorships you just get on the airplane and go down there and in 10 days you can pull off a couple of really good ski descents so, the winter thing – winter has become our Everest. A 7000m ski in winter would really be a great way to cap off a fun career.”

It’s an interesting study, to try and establish what drives Mike Marolt in his quest for the next big thing, but one truth resurfaces throughout the narrative of Mike’s story: it’s not so much where you go, but how you get there.

“It’s all about learning what you’re capable of doing – and doing it safely. You ask what’s the highlight of our career. The highlight of our career is that, you know, in over 50 of these expeditions the worst injury we’ve had – and it was horrific – my buddy lost the tip of his finger. But you live and you learn and that was almost 30 years ago, and we haven’t had so much as a hangnail since. And it shows – I mean we’ve lost a lot of summits, I don’t make any bones about it in the book. I mean we’ve turned around on a lot of those peaks when a lot of people would’ve pushed it, but you know Steve, Jim and I have all our digits and we’ve never been hurt. We all have families and kids and we have responsibility, and that’s changed the dynamic a little bit but we’re still following our passion and we still love the 5000-8000m range. And we’ll do it until we’re tired of it.”

But of course, we’re not all extreme skiers. Some of us are spectators. We must be entertained. So it’s lucky that while Mike doesn’t focus on box-ticking, there is a bucket list of sorts.

“The book ends with our attempts at climbing and skiing in the Himlaya in the winter, which has never been done, at least at the higher altitudes. And we got done with Everest, and our goal was always still to climb Everest, unsupported without oxygen and to ski it. And we made two attempts, never got to the top, got up to above 28000 feet, and what happened is that Everest is so crowded now that there were a couple of logjams on the steps on the north side. And we knew that climbing without oxygen, you just cannot stop, not for even 15 to 20 minutes, or you’d freeze. And so the dream of doing that kind of fell apart and we thought, well what in the hell can we do? How can we take this natural progression to something that is as ominous as trying to climb and ski Everest without oxygen? And I just threw it out there and said, we should go to the Himalaya in the winter. And Steve and Jim just kind of laughed – it’s that outlandish.

My thanks to Mike Marolt for his time and the insight into his very unique environment. Thanks also to Matt Meyerson at RPRT for his help in arranging this interview.

Beyond Skiing Everest is out now and you can order it here: https://geni.us/BeyondSkiingEverest

Mike Marolt Instagram: @mikemarolt

Mike Marolt’s website: https://skiingeverest.net/