Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Skiing Everest - In Theaters Now

NEMO friends Mike and Steve Marolt have completed their latest movie, Skiing Everest, and are currently showing it in select cities around the US. Filmed over 10 years by the twins, Skiing Everest follows a group of close friends who grew up in Aspen skiing some of the surrounding 14,000-ft. peaks with their father, 1960 Olympic skier Max Marolt. They would go on to ski slopes in Alaska and the world’s highest volcanoes in South America before becoming the first Americans to ski above 8,000 meters (26,247 ft.), tackling the summit of Shishapangma in Tibet in 2000. This led them to Mt. Everest, skiing without supplemental oxygen, without employing Sherpas to carry their gear or hiring guides to help them up the peaks.


Skiing Everest follows the Marolts and their childhood friends, Jim Gile and Olympic cross-country skier John Calhoun as they climb and ski Everest under horrible weather conditions and thin air, dodging hidden crevasses and 10,000-ft. sheer faces that drop into Nepal and Tibet far below. And after all this, the snow doesn’t look any good.

“It is hard to do anything at such altitudes, where death lurks at every turn, let alone ski and survive to tell the tale,” wrote Forbes adventure columnist Jim Clash.

The film also touches on the history of high-altitude skiing, dating back to the 1930s, with interviews of Hans Kammerlander, the first to ski from the summit of Everest; Laura Bakos, the first woman to ski from the summit of an 8,000-meter peak, and Chris Davenport, the two-time world extreme skiing champion and avid ski mountaineer.



Check it out in a theater near you.

~Kate

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