Jim Morrison

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Synthesizing mountaineering and free skiing, Jim Morrison is headed for the stratosphere. The Squaw-based skier’s recording studio sits above 8,000m and straddles the highest mountains in the world. His recent big release was a climb to the top of the fourth-highest mountain in the world and a ski down the staggering 7,000-vertical-foot Lhotse Couloir. Able to execute lines that few have even climbed high enough to envisage, Jim is in a different dimension. 

After losing his wife and kids to a plane crash in 2011, the mountains became his salvation — an arena that reverberates their presence but sets him free to perform. As he’s evolved as a ski mountaineer, Morrison’s climbs and descents have transitioned from recognizable rhythms and beats in the Sierra Nevada to a counter-culture movement in the Alaska and Himalayan Ranges. In 2018 he summited Mount Everest and Cho Oyo in ski boots and skied a combined 11,000 vertical feet on both mountains. Unwilling to compromise and sideslip a section he knows he can ski, his hard-fought turns revel a desire to go further into a new dimension of the decent.  

Still the cacophony of what is required to produce an expedition of this sort is part of the pleasure for him. The urge is constant—“there is something about setting up to ski a line in the perfect conditions, that keeps me going.” As he joins Black Crows, Morrison is conceptualizing and collaborating on a new project high in the Himalayas that transcends even his own version of curiosity and calculation. Black Crows has given him an all access pass to join them on the main stage.