The Man Who Skied Down Everest

The Man Who Skied Down Everest is a documentary about Yuichiro Miura, a Japanese alpinist who skied down Mt. Everest in 1970. The film was produced by Canadian film maker Budge Crawley. Miura skied 6,600 feet (2000 m) in 2 minutes and 20 seconds and fell 1320 feet down the steep Lhotse face from the Yellow Band just below the South Col. He used a large parachute to slow his descent. He came to a full stop just 250 ft. from the edge of a bergschrund, a large, deep crevasse where the ice shears away from the stagnant ice on the rock face and begins to move downwards as a glacier.

The ski descent was the objective of The Japanese Everest Skiing Expedition 1970. Six members of this expedition died. At the same time, another independent Japanese expedition (called The Japanese Mount Everest Expedition 1970) undertook a combined ascent of (a) the normal route (including Naomi Uemura who made the summit) and (b) the first attempt at the South-West Face (this is the tall black face on the movie poster with the Y-shaped snowy gully). Two members of this second expedition died.

Crawley won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for this picture. The Academy Film Archive preserved The Man Who Skied Down Everest in 2010.