Yūichirō Miura becomes the first person to ski down Mt. Everest - May 6th, 1970

On this day in 1970, professional skier Yūichirō Miura became the first person to ski down Mount Everest.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class as a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that shushes down the slopes of history one
day at a time. I'm Gay Bluesier, and today we're
looking at the story of You Eat huro Mira, a

(00:22):
daring Japanese mountaineer who rode down the world's tallest mountain
on a pair of skis. The day was May six,
nineteen seventy. Professional skier You Eat Yuro Mira became the
first person to ski down Mount Everest. It wasn't as

(00:45):
smooth a ride as he had hoped for. He wound
up falling approximately feet, but he did survive the run,
and that was something that many people assumed wouldn't happen,
including the skier himself. You Eat Yuro Mira was born
on October twelfth, nineteen thirty two, and Aomori City, Japan.

(01:08):
His father, in acclaimed skiing pioneer named Kaizo Mia, introduced
him to the sport as a child. He took to
it right away and later became a professional skier, competing
in both downhill skiing and speed skiing. It was in
the latter sport that he first made a name for himself.
In nineteen sixty four, he set a world record when

(01:30):
he reached the blistering speed of a hundred and seventy
two kilometers or about a hundred and seven miles per hour.
You Eat Yuro was pleased with the record, but he
knew it wouldn't last. It was just a matter of
time until someone managed to go faster than he did. Still,
he probably thought his record would stand for longer than

(01:51):
one day, but it didn't. The following afternoon, someone broke
the world speed record again, and it was at that
moment that you Eat Yuro decided chasing speed records wasn't
his thing. Instead, he decided to focus on skiing the
most magnificent summits in the world. He started in his

(02:12):
own backyard with Mount Fuji in April of nineteen sixty six.
No one had ever skied the mountain before, and You
Eat Yerro knew that if he was to be the first,
he would need to take some precautions. Going a hundred
miles an hour down a dedicated ski slope is one thing,
but going that fast down a steep, rocky mountain side

(02:33):
was a much more dangerous prospect. To help control his speed,
You Eat Yourrow decided to wear a parachute that he
could deploy when he reached his top speed. His idea
was untested at the time, but thankfully it worked, and
You Eat Your Ow was able to slow down after
reaching a speed of about ninety three miles per hour.

(02:55):
His landmark run on Mount Fuji was just as fulfilling
an experience as a skier had hoped. He later reflected
on that turn in his career, writing quote, it seems
to me that greater than the satisfaction of winning and
competition is the joy of forgetting yourself and becoming one
with the mountains. Of course, there was also likely some

(03:18):
satisfaction in knowing that this other kind of record couldn't
be broken, no matter how many people took on the
same challenge later, You Eat Yerro would always be the
first person to ski down Mount Fuji, and eventually down
the highest mountain in the world too. It was after
conquering Fuji that You Eat Yerro was invited to New

(03:40):
Zealand to ski the famous Tasman Glacier. The country's tourism
bureau thought the feat would make for great publicity. You
Eat Yuro accepted the invitation, and while he was there
he was introduced to Sir Edmund Hillary, the climber who
had made history in nine by becoming the first person
a long with his partner to ever reach the summit

(04:02):
of Mount Everest. You Eat yer Ow was inspired by
the meeting and determined to make Everest the goal of
his career as well. Hillary reportedly thought the skier was
out of his mind when he first heard his plan,
but the Nepalese government was much more receptive to the
idea of someone skiing down Everest. There was one condition, though,

(04:24):
You Eat yer Ow wouldn't be permitted to ski down
the summit of Mount Everest. Instead, he could only ski
the South Call, the somewhat lower mountain pass that connects
the world's tallest mountain to the world's fourth tallest. This
would put the skiers starting point at about three thousand
vertical feet short of Everest Peak, but with a slope

(04:46):
of roughly forty degrees, the South Call was still a
more than formidable challenge, So formidable in fact, that as
You Eat yer O scouted the area and conducted test runs.
In the fall of nineteen sixty nine, it dawned on
him that there was a high chance he wouldn't survive
the run. The skier determined that accepting death is a

(05:08):
likely possibility was a requirement for what he was attempting,
so he made peace with his own mortality and began
making his way up the mountain in February of nineteen seventy.
His expedition was a massive undertaking, consisting of mountaineers, scientists,
and a ski team. The mission was made even more

(05:28):
complicated by the inclusion of a film crew, photographers, and
members of the media. In fact, it took eight hundred
porters just to haul the group's twenty seven tons of
equipment to the Everest base camp. After they arrived in
late March, the team spent several weeks at base camp,
acclimatizing to the thin air and planning the last leg

(05:51):
of their journey. Sadly, even with all that preparation, the
expeditions still had casualties. At higher than seventeen thousand feet,
the oxygen content in the air was about half the
amount found at sea level. Two members of the team
died from heart attacks in that thin air, and six
sherpas were buried in a cave in on the Kumbu

(06:13):
ice fall. After their bodies were recovered, You eat Yero declared, quote,
there can be no happy ending now, no matter what
I do. The skier had accepted the likelihood of his
own death, but not that of so many of his supporters.
He later said that he had considered calling off the
expedition then and there, but ultimately changed his mind because quote,

(06:38):
to pay back the respect to them, I felt it
was my responsibility to face the challenge and complete it.
At around nine am on May six, that's just what
you eat yer Ow did when he became the first
person to ski at an altitude higher than twenty six
thousand feet. Technically, he set that record just by making

(07:00):
a few practice turns on the slopes of South Call,
but of course, after coming all that way, he had
a much longer run in mind. By eleven am, he
had hiked up to his starting point, but the run
had to be delayed two hours due to high winds. Finally,
at one oh seven pm, the thirty seven year old

(07:20):
skier got the green light and away he went, knowing
his life was on the line. You Eat. Huro had
donned a crash helmet, an oxygen mask, an air cushioned
life jacket and his trusty parachute. By the end of
his two minutes and twenty second run, he would be
thankful for each and every item. The plan had been

(07:41):
to ski in a straight line, but once his shoot
was deployed, that became impossible. Erratic cross winds sent him
careening in all directions, and he quickly lost his balance.
In an instant, he was flipping and turning wildly down
the mountain, and was eventually launched thirty feet into the
air after flying off the edge of a large rock. Luckily,

(08:04):
he happened to land on a patch of snow, and
although he blacked out on impact, he slowly slid to
a stop, just a couple hundred feet short of falling
into the largest crevasse in the world. It had taken you,
each year old, just over two minutes to descend approximately
forty vertical feet, but as you might expect, the ordeal

(08:26):
felt much longer in the skier's head. In he recounted
his surprisingly zen like thoughts to Smithsonian Magazine, saying quote,
I was sure I would not survive. Death was not
a particular feeling, but rather I was thinking about what
I would be after three thousand thirty thousand or three

(08:49):
million years in the future, my reincarnation. He also recalled
thinking quote, am I live or dead? Which world am
I in? After about a minute, I realized that I'm alive.
I felt that I returned to this world in the
form of a human as You eat Yero Miura, like

(09:10):
the soul returning to the body. That particular journey was
something only he got to experience, but because the camera
crew had filmed the entire trip up and down the mountain,
people around the world got to witness the adventure themselves.
The footage was released as a nineteen seventy five documentary
called The Man Who Skied Down Everest. It won the

(09:33):
Academy Award for Best Documentary that year, becoming the first
sports film in history to do so. By that point,
You Eat Yuro had built quite a legacy for himself,
but he didn't stop at Everest. In nineteen eighty one,
he skied down Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, and in nineteen
eighty three he became the first person to ski Mount

(09:56):
Vincent in Antarctica. Two years later, he added to his
tally Mount Elbrists in Europe and Mount a Kangawa in
South America. Taken together with his earlier runs on Mount
Koziasco in Australia, Mount McKinley in North America, and of
course Mount Everest in Asia. You Eat your oh had

(10:17):
skied down the highest peaks of all seven continents for
a while. He considered that enough adventure for one lifetime,
but then in the late nineteen nineties he decided he
wasn't done with Mount Everest yet. He never got the
chance to ski the Mountains summit, but he did climb
up to it on May twenty second, two thousand three.

(10:40):
He was almost seventy one years old, making in the
oldest person to reach the summit at that time. Five
years later he made the track again, and then five
years after that he reached the summit a third time.
He may just be showing off at this point, but
You eat your own Mira actually lands to scale Everest

(11:01):
for a fourth time once he turns ninety years old
in October of two. You may be wondering why someone
would subject themselves to that kind of grueling challenge in
their golden years, but I think the challenge itself is
the whole point. As Sir Edmund Hillary famously said, it's

(11:21):
not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves. I'm Gabe Louisier
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you have a second
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(11:44):
you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to send
them my way at this Day at I heart media
dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again soon for another Day in History. Class of D