He Snowboarded Off the Summit of Everest. The Tracks Stop 250 Metres Later.

On 8 September 2002, Marco Siffredi, 23, from Chamonix, reached the summit of Everest after more than twelve hours in chest-deep snow and, just after three in the afternoon, strapped into a snowboard to ride the Hornbein Couloir, the steepest line on the north face. Sixteen months earlier he had made the first complete snowboard descent of the mountain, down the Norton Couloir. This time his track was visible to about 8,600 metres, 250 metres below the summit and above the top of the couloir. Beyond that, nothing. No board, no track, no body. The search lasted six days. This film reconstructs what the Sherpas who were with him say happened, what Elizabeth Hawley's contemporary report says, where the two disagree, and what the later magazine reconstruction added, including the figure the Sherpas said they saw near the North Col. It ends in October 2025, when Jim Morrison became the first person to ski the Hornbein into the Japanese Couloir, top to bottom. Chapters: 0:00 The figure 1:04 Chamonix 2:53 23 May 2001 4:34 The line 6:24 8 September 2002 9:56 What the mountain keeps Sources include the American Alpine Journal 2003 (reports by Elizabeth Hawley and Stefan Gatt), TransWorld Snowboarding (Trey Cook, 2006), ExplorersWeb, Tahoe Quarterly, National Geographic (2002 and 2025), AFP wire reports of September 2002, and Jeremy Evans, See You Tomorrow (2021). Where sources disagree, the film says so on screen. No footage of Marco Siffredi or of the 2002 descent exists in the public record and none is implied here. Footage: licensed stock; photographs: Luca Galuzzi (CC BY-SA 2.5, route lines added), NASA, Oregon State University (CC BY-SA 2.0), Marcin Sochacki (CC BY-SA 4.0).