How Snowboarder Marco Siffredi Suffered One Of The Most Devastating Deaths On Mount Everest
Marco SiffrediMarco Siffredi’s story remains one on the most haunting Mt. Everest deaths to this day. He took this self-portrait just before he snowboarded down the mountain the first time, which actually succeeded.
Marco Siffredi was just 23 years old with an ebullient lust for life when he died on Everest. The French snowboarder had previously climbed to the top of Everest in May 2001 because he’d wanted to find the “Holy Grail” of snowboarding routes. Though he’d found it at the time, there wasn’t enough snow for him to take the ride. So he repeated the trip in September 2002.
Siffredi had his sights on Everest’s treacherous Hornbein Couloir route, and all seemed to be going well at first. With clear and sunny weather, Siffredi and the three sherpas guiding him made it to the route’s summit after a nearly 13-hour climb on the morning of September 8, 2002.
While virtually every single mountaineer who makes the attempt to climb Everest has only one goal in mind — reaching its peak — Siffredi was also here to snowboard. Thus, he was naturally overjoyed to find the path covered in thick, fresh snow.
It took hours for Siffredi to rest and get himself organized, as ominous clouds starting to gather below the roughly 29,000-foot altitude. Sensing the impending doom, the sherpas urged him to reconsider and camp for the night, with a safe descent scheduled for the next morning at dawn. But to their terror and dismay, Siffredi put on his gear and forged ahead.
Siffredi was last seen gliding down the mountain and vanishing in the clouds below. The sherpas rushed back to base camp to beat the storm and spotted a lone figure once they broke through the cloud cover 4,000 below. That’s when things began to get truly chilling.
When they reached the location where they allegedly saw the figure, there wasn’t a single track in the snow, and the figure was nowhere to be found. The sherpas feared they had experienced an apparition — which they took as an omen that Siffredi was dead. When the sherpas got to base camp and there was no sign of Siffredi, their worst fears were confirmed.
The Siffredi CollectionMarco Siffredi prepares to makes the fateful descent that led to his tragic death on Mount Everest.
Nobody knows what exactly happened to Siffredi, though most experts agree that he most likely collapsed of exhaustion and was swallowed up by one of Everest’s countless ravines. He had climbed for nearly 13 hours before attempting the stunt, after all — and has never been seen since.
What’s more, the impending storm could have easily triggered an avalanche on the northern face. Everest’s peaks are so vast that this could have happened without the sherpas even realizing it.
But what’s perhaps most interesting of all is that Siffredi’s sister believes her brother made it down the mountain — and chose to live with local yak herders in Tibet instead of returning to the predictable pitfalls of the Western world.
