Wintersports
Snowboarding
Discovering the mythical Mount St. Elias
Snowboarder Nick Russell joins an all-star crew to attempt to climb and ride one of the most elusive peaks in North America.
There’s a reason 18,008-foot Mount St. Elias isn’t summitted very often. The second highest peak in both Canada and the U.S., it straddles the border of Alaska and the Yukon and is known for its dramatic relief, dropping 18,000 feet from the summit to sea level, where it meets the ocean at the head of the Taan Fjord. With minimal beta and information on the peak and a near constant storm cycle blowing in from the sea, aspiring climbers and skiers are essentially left to solve the puzzle of the mountain as they go.
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Wide
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None of that was a deterrent for a well-equipped group of athletes who set out to attempt to climb and ski the peak in May 2021. Pro skier Cody Townsend, who’s in the midst of a multi-year project to climb and ski all the peaks in the book, 50 Classic Ski Descents of North America, had Mount St. Elias on his list, one of just 14 lines he has left to ski. He knew from the beginning that St. Elias would be one of the three most challenging peaks on his to-do list.
“On St. Elias, everyone told me to be prepared to get your butt kicked by weather for weeks, while sleeping in a snow cave because your tents have collapsed,” Townsend said when he first started The Fifty project. “They said to bring an extra five-pound bag of rice because you’ll be stuck out there for 21 days. Then everyone’s like, ‘When it finally goes blue, instead of calling for the airplane, go up.’”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Hero Shot
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Townsend has called St. Elias the mental crux on his list of 50 ski lines. “You have to be prepared mentally,” he says. “You have to be so strong to sit there and get punched in the face and keep going. But that’s why I want to do it. Because I don’t know if I can. But I want to try.”
When putting together his team for a St. Elias attempt, splitboarder and Red Bull athlete Nick Russell, who has joined Townsend for a number of the lines in The Fifty project, was an obvious choice. “The main reason Nick is such a good partner for expeditions like St. Elias is his adaptability,” Townsend says. “No matter the situation we encounter, he stays positive, optimistic, and driven to continue. Nick isn’t trying to impart his will on the mountains, he’s trying to listen, adapt, and move with them. His attitude remains positive no matter how dire or difficult things get.”
Russell had asked Townsend about joining on this peak in particular early on in the project. “I knew Cody would have to go up St. Elias, so I planted the seed about three years ago,” Russell says. “It’s such a proud mountain with so much history behind it and yet such minimal information. It’s very seldom visited, with a very low success rate. It’s fun to have a big challenge where the odds are stacked against you. It’s those things in life that are hard to accomplish that are the most rewarding. You never know until you try. The appeal of the unknown is very strong for me.”
Also joining the crew were Swedish filmmaker Bjarne Salén, filmer for The Fifty, and mountain guide and friend Dan Corn, who ran safety for the expedition.
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Climb
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“Before you go out there, you’re thinking about the end goal: the line from the summit,” Russell says. “But once you get on the mountain, your view becomes a lot more microscopic. Rather than thinking about the summit, you’re thinking about how you’re going to get around that next ridge. That’s your goal for the day. You get to embrace those small wins along the way and you’re learning more about the mountain as you go. But obviously on any big trip in the mountains, coming home is always a success.”
Mount St. Elias was first climbed in 1897 by an expedition group led by Italian explorer and mountaineer Luigi Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta, known as the Duke of Abruzzi. It wasn’t climbed again until 1922. It was first skied in 2000, a notable first ski descent by Lorne Glick, Andy Ward, and James Bracken. In 2007, Axel Naglich, Peter Ressmann, and Jon Johnston skied off St. Elias as part of a Red Bull feature film called “Mount St. Elias,” which premiered in 2009. The peak has been skied just a handful of times since. American mountain guide Jediah Porter, who skied off the peak in 2016 with Janelle and Mark Smiley, has started a record of the ski attempts on St. Elias.
On the mountain last May, Russell, Townsend, Salén, and Corn weathered some intense storms and eventually made it to 13,000 feet before deciding not to summit due to less-than-ideal snow conditions and a dwindling weather window. “It was the most rugged mountain landscape I’d ever seen, with seracs, ice, and avalanches coming down at all hours,” Russell says. “Weather just comes out of nowhere from the ocean and completely socks you in, with storms for days on end. It was as extreme of elements as you could imagine, while at the same time, the mountain is basically throwing everything at you to try to get you to back down.”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Snow Camp
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Making the choice to push ahead or turn around is never easy, Russell says, but in hindsight, they absolutely made the right decision at the right time. “By the time we were leaving, it became evident that we’d made the right decision to bail when we did,” he says. “The mountain was telling us to go home. Before that, you’re assessing on the go, trying to calculate all these moving parts. You’re essentially making an estimated guess of what the right thing to do is. Between the weather, the conditions, and dealing with the plane being our lifeline in and out of the mountain, all of those factors led to our decision to turn around.”
Ski and snowboard movies don’t always show this part—the moment the athletes don’t succeed at what they set out to do, but in The Fifty episode of this line, a 30-minute short film called “Summit Fever,” that decision not to summit is a huge part of the storyline. “More often than not we get shut down. You just don’t always see it,” Russell says. “The broader message is that turning around is part of it. Sometimes you get lucky and score on the first go, and other times, certain objectives take more work and more time.”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Mountain Backdrop
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Nick Russell Mt St Elias Drone Shot
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Nick Russell Mt St Elias Snowboard
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Nick Russell Mt St Elias Ski
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Filming while on the mountain offered a rare chance to talk everything through. “More so than you would normally, with those guys filming every step of the process, it helps you talk out those decisions a little more clearly and gives everyone a chance to speak up and give their input on what they’re feeling,” Russell says.
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Sunset
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The crew decided to descend to the ocean, a massive drop to sea level with around 10 miles in travel and challenging terrain that they had to on-sight as they went. Once they made it to the beach, a plane was scheduled to pick them up, but a storm was closing in. The plane wouldn’t be able to land in the clouds and rain.
“I had blind faith that we were going to get to the beach and get picked up right away—that’s why I didn’t bring any shoes with me,” jokes Russell, who only had his snowboard boots and a pair of very wet down booties. “I kind of lost hope around day three or four. At that point, I accepted that we were going to be there a long time.”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Camping
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In the end, it took seven days of waiting on that beach for the plane to land. They had three days of food left that got stretched out for a week’s wait. Boredom and hunger are your biggest challenges at that moment. Russell had ditched his book to drop weight and since there was cloud coverage, he couldn’t use his solar device to charge his phone, which had run out of power days earlier. He and Townsend were trapped in a tiny tent together, as the rain poured down. “I didn’t do anything. I literally counted the stitches in the tent,” Russell says. “Since it was June by then, I was dreaming about watermelon and corn on the cob, thinking about summertime barbecues.”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Beach Plane
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Looking back on the expedition now, Russell says it’s a mountain that exceeded his expectations, one that has drawn him into its mystical aura. “When you go on these trips, and you put in all this energy and time, you want to do everything you can to succeed. You’re trying hard, you’re looking for openings. You’re looking for the weaknesses in the weather to keep moving up. You have to hold optimism in those situations,” he says. “If you don’t have a positive outlook for things working out, it’s not going to work out. My approach to the mountains is low expectations, high hopes.”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Team
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So, will the crew be back on St. Elias to try again? All signs point to yes. “We walked away from St. Elias without a summit but with a ton of amazing memories and as a tight group of friends,” Townsend says. “It’s almost reinforced to me that the memories and friends you walk away with are the most important part of an expedition and without a summit, we all have a great excuse to get together and have another adventure again.”
As for Russell? “Someday, if it works out, I’d like to go back,” Russell says. “I definitely haven’t written it off.”
Nick Russell Mt St Elias Wide
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Nick Russell Mt St Elias Climb
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Nick Russell Mt St Elias Hero Shot
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Nick Russell Mt St Elias Snow Camp
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