What Happened To Marco Siffredi? The First Person To Snowboard All The Way Down Mount Everest

Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, summiting at an air-thinning 8,848 meters (29,029 feet). It’s a place few of us will ever stand upon, and even fewer still attempt to get down any other way than scrambling on your feet. French snowboarder and mountaineer Marco Siffredi had a different idea.

In 2001, Siffredi summited Everest on foot, before beginning a non-stop descent on a snowboard. The world-first got off to a rocky start when it was decided his preferred route down Hornbein Couloir didn’t have enough snow, so instead he rerouted down the Norton Couloir to base camp.

An incredible feat, and one that’s only challenged by Stefan Gatt who was actually the first person to reach the summit with a snowboard. However, Gatt’s descent was interrupted by unfavorable conditions that forced him to complete part of the descent on foot.

Siffredi held the record for the first uninterrupted snowboard descent from Mount Everest, but the allure of boarding the Hornbein Couloir brought him back to Nepal in 2002. Of all the descent routes to take on Everest, it’s the steepest, with slopes between 45 to 55 degrees.

Conditions were considerably different the second time around, as the attempt was being made late in the season. It took Siffredi and a team of sherpas three times longer than his first ascent, and by the time he was ready to begin his descent down Hornbein Couloir, it was already late in the day, and the weather was turning.

The sherpas reportedly warned Siffredi not to begin the descent, but he set off with one oxygen tank strapped to his back at around 3pm. It was the last time he was ever seen.

According to National Geographic, the descent should only have taken him a few hours, but other than reports of a strange apparition (not likely the case in this instance, but ghostly figures are said to haunt mountainous regions), the sherpas never saw him. The region was, at that time (as it often is), experiencing a high number of avalanches that could have swept the experienced snowboarder away. There are also sheer drops around the area where he was snowboarding, but to date, his body hasn’t been found, and nobody knows exactly what happened.

Describing Hornbein Couloir as “the greatest line never skied,” Outside Online reports that the only other attempts to slide down it were made by Jean Troillet and Dominique Perret in 1996, that time on skis, but the dangerous descent was abandoned each time.  

Over 310 people are known to have died while attempting to climb Mount Everest since the 1920s. While that’s the highest absolute death count of any mountain on Earth, it’s worth considering that Everest attracts significantly more mountaineers than other notorious peaks. If you take a look at the fatality rate of expeditions instead, the world’s deadliest mountain goes to another treacherous peak.