Jim Morrison Waited a Month to Climb One of the World’s Tallest Vertical Cliffs—Then Skied 20,000 Feet Down Its Untouched Face

At over 20,000 feet, the West Face of Great Trango Tower rises straight out of the glacier, a sweep of rock and snow that had never been skied. In May 2024, Jim Morrison, alongside Christina Lustenberger and Chantel Astorga, stood on top of the 20,623-foot peak and skied down, completing the first descent of the face. The year before, Morrison became the first person to ski the Hornbein Couloir on the north face of Mount Everest, a 9,000-foot line long regarded as the holy grail of ski mountaineering.

Projects like these don’t unfold in a single push. In the documentaryTrango, presented by The North Face on February 4, viewers saw how much of the expedition was spent waiting at base camp while storms moved through and avalanche risk remained high. The team was there for around a month, much of it defined by patience, by watching forecasts, and by deciding whether conditions were moving in the right direction or not.

“It’s just important to have everybody be on the same page and be confident that it’s going to be safe and that they’re doing what they feel like is making the right decisions,” Morrison says. “On Trango, we had a lot of bad weather and a lot of potential avalanche risk, and a lot of days where certain team members just didn’t feel comfortable leaving camp, and we had to kind of wait for better conditions and wait for people to get comfortable with what was ahead, and some of that was rational concerns and some of it was just a big scary mountain.”

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From the outside, it can look like these descents are driven by boldness alone, but most of Morrison’s effort happens well before he clicks into his skis. During the planning phase, he studies the route, tracks objective hazards, and pays attention to what makes him uneasy rather than trying to ignore it.

“Throughout the whole planning and organizing of the expedition, I’m studying the route and looking for the risks and trying to understand what I might be afraid of, visualizing, you know, best-case scenario situations and worst-case scenario situations.”

By the time he’s actually on the mountain, that mental work has already shaped how he moves. Trango was their second expedition to the peak. In 2023, Morrison and Lustenberger turned back roughly 500 meters below the summit when an impassable crevasse blocked their path, a reminder that progress isn’t always linear and that walking away can be the right call.

“When I’m actually in the mountains, and I have a sense of fear, I think I generally take the part of fear that just seems like, wow, this is big and scary and irrational. And I quickly use rational thoughts to say, well, that’s not, it’s fine. I’m confident in this terrain. I’m confident with the conditions. And I push those thoughts aside.”

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That shift happens in real time. Standing above thousands of feet of exposure, he doesn’t try to eliminate the risk or pretend it isn’t there; he narrows his attention.

“If I were to mess up a turn here, I could fall to my death. I use that fear to get hyper-focused. I actually sort of lean into it. As opposed to the typical thought of fear being paralyzing, I think I turn it around and use it to my advantage to try to heighten my awareness, slow things down, and get more focused on the moment to be calculated and safe.”

The descents are historic, but nothing about the way Morrison describes them feels reckless. Every decision is filtered through conditions, terrain, and how the team is feeling in that moment. Even fear becomes information rather than something to suppress.