Several years ago, Jim Morrison lay curled on his laundry room floor, crying and screaming in the throes of the lowest point of his life, feeling completely broken. The prolific American ski mountaineer had been reading Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual self-help book, The Power of Now. In that moment, as he gazed at pine trees just beyond the window, Morrison found himself drawn to taking a step toward finally facing his grief. He started by walking three doors away from his house and back, which he considered meaningful progress.
“I learned with each step forward, almost literally, that that’s all that I had to do,” Morrison said. “Just take one step at a time.”
Morrison’s relationship with grief began more than a decade ago. In the spring of 2011, his wife, Katie, a licensed private pilot, was flying a single-engine Cessna with their two children aboard when the aircraft crashed into a hillside near the Barstow-Daggett Airport in Daggett, California. Katie and the children were killed.
In the years that followed, Morrison kept returning to the mountains as a way to honor his family and continue living the adventurous life he’d always known. His pursuit of increasingly difficult climbs eventually brought him together with Hilaree Nelson, a renowned professional climber and mountaineer who captained The North Face Athlete Team.
Their shared adventures grew from climbing partners and friends and eventually into a romantic partnership that would take them on extreme expeditions to some of the highest and most demanding peaks in the world. Morrison and Nelson became the first Americans to ski Papsura, a 21,165-foot peak in India, and also Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest mountain, on the Nepal-Tibet border. In 2022, they summited Mount Manaslu in Nepal. But as Nelson began her descent on skis, she suffered a fatal fall as she was swept away by an avalanche. She was 49.
Everest: The Other Side, directed and produced by Oscar-winning filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the duo behind “Free Solo,” follows Morrison as he confronts his grief once again, this time as he attempts to fulfill a dream he and Nelson shared of climbing and skiing the direct North Face of Mount Everest, an exploit so notoriously ambitious and dangerous that no one had ever conquered it.
After years of planning, and two failed attempts, in October 2025, at the age of 50, Morrison returned to Everest. Upon climbing then spreading Nelson’s ashes 29,000 feet above sea level, the tallest point on earth, he became the first person to descend on skis the Hornbein Couloir, referred to by Chin as “the ultimate ski line on the ultimate mountain.” Morrison navigated 9,000 vertical feet of no-fall zone on a 50-degree slope in just over four hours.
“I’ve been training for this most of my life in a lot of ways,” said Morrison, who prepared upwards of 30 hours a week, in part, with long weighted hikes while carrying a pack loaded with 50 pounds, winter ski touring, cycling, and rock climbing.
Jimmy Chin
Reflecting on his historic feat, he says, “I had this newfound appreciation for the mountain itself.” Rather than viewing it as this huge, intimidating challenge to chip away at, he gained an entirely new perspective.
“I stripped away all the difficult parts and just appreciated it for what it was—this warm aura of Hilaree and this beautiful landscape,” Morrison says.
The experience also reflected a lesson he’s come to learn about living alongside grief. “You don’t get to the top of Mount Everest by visualizing the hardest part and stressing out about it incessantly. You do it by packing your bags, getting to basecamp, getting up to the start of the face, and stepping over the first difficulty. Then it just becomes a slow, methodical path forward,” Morrison says. “I think that’s how I handled my grief journey.”
It’s a lesson that Morrison hopes others can apply to their own experiences with loss and adversity. The process of moving on begins not by tackling it all at once, rather by “getting up and moving forward,” Morrison says. “Go outside and take a walk. Maybe that walk leads you to a park. Maybe that park leads you to a hill, and maybe you go a little farther than you went last time. You’ll be better off because of it.”
