94 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
tions. They make do, skiing and climbing locally.
Professionally, they know their window is
narrowing. Morrison is 45; Nelson is 47. In the
meantime, they want to do as much as possible,
Morrison’s business continues to thrive. Nelson
spends 40 days a year making appearances and
speeches for The North Face. She thought she’d
hate it, but she likes that she can model achieve-
ment to young girls, women and moms.
But the idea of settling down still freaks them
out. “I’m so much more terrified of getting in some
routine where every day is the same, where every-
thing’s just comfortable and easy,” Nelson says.
“And I don’t know how to really explain why that
terrifies me so much, but even just saying it makes
me want to start crying.”
She doesn’t know why she’s like this. When she
came back from the failed mission in Burma, she
couldn’t bring herself to shower or sleep in a bed.
All she wanted to eat was rice. Says Nelson, “My
one really close friend in Telluride—she doesn’t get
necessarily what I do, but she gets me. She’s just
like, ‘You’re fine. You’ll be fine. Just deal with it.
You got this.’ But I’m like, ‘I haven’t had a shower
in months. I don’t know how—I haven’t looked at
myself.’ There’s no reflective surfaces when you’re
climbing. You’re just who you are. And to come
home and have a closet full of jeans and be like,
Oh my God, I don’t know what to wear....”
Maybe, she wonders, she’s just different. Does
this make her a bad mother? A good one? “I don’t
know. I tell myself a lot that the risks I take and
the places I go are eventually good for my kids,
and that they’re learning about their mom as an
individual, too, as a person seeing that I have a
passion and I’m in tune with that in living a life.”
For years she wanted to impress her father. On
some level, she still does. After years of question-
ing her career choice, Stan is now a huge fan. He
drives to Seattle to hear her speak and calls Jim
all geeked up about her exploits.
As for Jim, Hilaree knows their relationship will
never be normal: “Sometimes I get more emotional
about it than he does because it’s sad. I mean, I
would give anything to meet his kids. I can’t even
imagine what his daughter would be like. I’d bet
she’d just be a frickin’ hellion. We all have s--- in
our life that makes us who we are. I wish that
wasn’t his background, but it is.”
AT ONE POINT
after the crash, Morrison read a book called
StrengthsFinder 2.0. The idea is to determine your
personality type. His wasn’t much of a mystery:
the Achiever. As author Tom Rath describes it,
“You feel as if every day starts at zero. By the end
of the day you must achieve something tangible
to feel good about yourself.”
Morrison knows he’s using achievement as
therapy. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. “To a large
degree, the mountains saved my life,” he says.
“They created a space for me to thrive and find
happiness and feel alive and feel like I have some-
thing I can accomplish.” The urge is constant.
Just the night before, he says, when they returned
home in his camper van, he felt the pull. “As I was
getting out, I was like, I kind of want to spend the
night in the van. I was cognizant of my thought, of
wanting to do it, even though I hadn’t been home.”
He continues. “What does that say about me?”
Morrison knows life will be complicated. It will
never get easier telling people what happened to
his family, and he can never replicate what he had
with them. He tries to stay in the now but regrets
linger. He wishes that, just once, “I’d taken Wyatt
to school and picked him up the same day.”
There is no return to normal, whatever that
is. He may spend the rest of his life trying to fill
some void, trying to create permanence in an im-
permanent world. Or at least keep the past and
future at bay. “I’m not sure if I’m back where I
started,” he says, “or somewhere else, just going
around and around.”
So far, the best way forward he’s found is to strip
it all down—to, as he says, “find calm in the suf-
fering.” Or, as Nelson says, “I think the mountains
are the only place for him.”
He knows this might not be your choice. But
ask him why he does it—why he seeks risk and
scales peaks—and Morrison will tell you it’s not
a choice, exactly. That you go where you find your
peace. And that’s where he finds his. ±
ON THE GO
The slopes
around Tahoe
aren’t nearly as
exhilarating as
on Lhotse, but
Jim and Hilaree
relish them.
DO
NALD M
IRALLE
L O V E A ND
LHOTSE
