Above the Ether

Fifty years on, The Man Who Skied Down Everest offers absolute terror - and a chance at life.

Humanity distinguishes itself from most other lifeforms in its ostensible ability to observe, measure, and weigh risk. All creatures make this calculus - hmm that cheese is rather convenient isn’t it? - but as far as we know there are none other which reason with it. And reason we do, assessing, reducing, and legislating around notions of risk with the neurosis of a million years spent weighing possible calories against probable predation.

Poster for the 1975 release, credit Crawley Films

The Man Who Skied Down Everest is both a film and and a person; the former an Academy Award-winning documentary released in 1975, and the latter a Japanese alpinist by the name of Yuichiro Miura. I cannot tell you by which path Miura’s ancient forebears made their eastward migration from the savannahs, but I can tell you that he conquered every instinct for self preservation which they so carefully evolved on their odyssey. 

That is to say, I assume Miura is alike to the rest of humanity in his ability to observe risk. But if you’ve 90 minutes and a dark room in which to sit and soak in the spectacle that is The Man Who Skied Down Everest you’ll be confronted by how totally insensate he is to it. Yes, at each turn his diarised voice over reminds you of the oxygen levels, of this crevasse or that crushing icefall; but at no point does he risk leaving you with the impression that his decision to attempt this descent is at all informed by such. 

No, risk management is not Miura’s preoccupation. Instead, his innermost thoughts - complemented by painstaking cinematography of their Himalayan pilgrimage - obsess over the meaning and value of life and death itself. While their caravan of 800 Sherpas and porters winds through mountain passes and remote villages, Miura’s restless eyes note the implacable peoples they pass, as much as the utterly dominating presence of the mountains they call home. He doesn’t romanticise their poverty, nor lavish them in pity; instead he is reminded with each handshake and shortening breath of the inevitability of life’s trajectory, and ultimately the meaninglessness of even the ‘historic’ attempt before him. 

“I have traveled the world to ski, to soar with the winds, to laugh with the gods.”

- Yuichiro Miura

Yet his is not a nihilistic pursuit; in disrobing himself of our fearful attachments, Miura finds love for life itself. “Greater than the satisfaction of winning in competition is the joy of forgetting yourself and becoming one with the mountains” his diary reads. “I have traveled the world to ski, to soar with the winds, to laugh with the gods.”

In our aversion to risk, it is like those Gods we imagine ourselves to be; omniscient, infallible, immortal. With only the technologies of 1970 available to him, Miura chose to contend with nature’s most unforgiving challenge dressed in the splendour of his mortality and the love for life which springs forth from it

You can find The Man Who Skied Down Everest in it’s entirety on YouTube in 1080p. You can find the beauty in terror at your nearest skate park. This article first appeared in the May edition of the Postcard Club zine, which will be included as a trial run with any postcards shipped over the next few months.