Hilaree Nelson O’Neill’s body has been recovered on the south side of Manaslu. I assume Jim Morrison, her partner in life and ski mountaineering, will now arrange to bring her body home to Colorado, home to her two kids, home to a community reeling in grief from yet another loss of one of our all-time greats.
Hilaree Nelson was 49, and she was an extraordinary person. I wrote a mini profile of her back in 2018 for National Geographic, when the magazine named her an Adventurer of the Year. She received this honor following her season in 2017 when she really pushed the limits and achieved some impressive ski descents. I can still hear her profound if measured demeanor on the other side of the phone during our interviews. You can just sense when you’re in the presence of true wisdom, and Hilaree exuded that from her being.
Earlier this week, Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison had reached the true summit of Manaslu, one of the tallest mountains in the world, which is itself an amazing accomplishment. They clicked into their skis and started skiing down the mountain in tough conditions when Hilaree set off a small avalanche that carried her away.
They say life is a game of skill and luck, and in sports like climbing and ski mountaineering, these two concepts sit in an uneasy tension with each other. There’s a tendency to conflate the two in our minds, and when someone’s luck in the mountains runs out it can be seen as an implicit knock against their skill.
Another common fallacy views luck as being finite, as the price of gaining experience. One metaphor asks us to envision two jars of marbles—one jar represents luck, the other experience. Each time you “get away” with a risky climb, you’ve taken one marble out of the luck jar and placed into the experience / skill jar. Eventually, the luck jar runs out.
In so many areas of life, we like to believe that we can “create our own luck,” as if the right amount of determination, hard work, perseverance, and optimism necessarily brings our preferred outcomes. And yet time and time again, that idea that we’re in control of our fates crashes headlong into reality.
This becomes all the more maddening when you see people who aren’t skilled, or at least who aren’t as skilled as others who get less lucky, escape one near miss after another. Meanwhile, those whose skill is unmatched, people like Hilaree, find that the cost of playing in the mountains is that in one moment, one cruel and unlucky moment, all that skill isn’t enough.
Adrian Ballinger called Hillaree Nelson not just the best female ski mountaineer, but the best ski mountaineer in the world. Her loss is profound.
Climbing and mountaineering can feel cruel and meaningless during these weeks, but perhaps there is a valuable insight that such tragedies reveal. Perhaps, the crucial insight is that luck and skill are independent phenomena. We don’t create our own luck because we can’t. All we can do is live bravely and fully accept the responsibility for the potential consequences to the risks we take.
These are somewhat chilling things to realize, because they imply that we aren’t really in control of how long our lives last, or how they end. But if you sit with this insight for a moment, and let that wave of anxiety pass, a very profound sense of humility and gratitude begins to emerge. It’s the humility of accepting that we don’t own or control anything in this universe. It’s not ours to keep, only a beautiful miracle to witness. From that point of view, only gratitude can remain, at being able to have this one brief and bright experience of living at all.
Thank you Andrew for memorializing an awe inspiring, talented, beautiful woman. Hillarie was a miracle for us (!) to witness & I know she lived her life like you say ‘experiencing it all.” Not many humans can say that, RIP Hillarie. ❤️