The following article was originally printed in the October 2024 Issue of Slush. To get more articles and subscribe click here.

Shralpinism is one of those rare pursuits where “peaks and valleys” are a constant, both literally and figuratively. When pushing the limits of what is not just rideable but also reachable by foot, success should ultimately be measured in survival, yet glory is rarely bestowed on those who make it back to basecamp without having achieved the intended goal.

Unlike other aspects of professional snowboarding, where there are podium placings and full parts to mark one’s merits, shralpinists struggle for support despite arguably being some of the most inspiring riders on the scene today. So without big-ticket sponsors, robust travel budgets, and novelty checks galore to subsidize a career, what is the motivation to take one’s riding to places that humans aren’t even designed to discover, let alone descend? If you’ve never breathed the thinnest of air, after a days-long ascent, atop legs screaming for relief, you can’t even begin to answer this question. Yet, there is no denying that the risk versus reward of doing something that few others, or even no one, has ever done before provides a personal satisfaction that can be intoxicating.

Nick Russell was born in Connecticut, a state where the average elevation is only 500 feet above sea level. An unlikely breeding ground indeed for a person who would become one of the preeminent adventurists strapping in today. Yet, before Nick began ascending peaks from the Andes to Antarctica, he was a typical East Coast up-and-comer attending Stratton Mountain School. Nick rode the parks and pipes of New England while finding inspiration in videos like Standard Films’ Totally Board 8: Infinity and Mack Dawg Productions’ Technical Difficulties. With peers like Luke Mitrani, Kevin Pearce, and Danny Davis making the US Open Halfpipe Finals and getting invited to the X Games, Nick was able to hang but had trouble excelling via the conventional contest path.

After graduating high school, Nick moved to Utah for college. It was there, among the side-country stashes of Brighton and Big Cottonwood Canyon, that freeriding provided a higher calling. Now, more than a decade later, Nick has become an icon of the high alpine, with support from esteemed brands like Patagonia, Anon, BCA, and most recently United Shapes. In 2024, Nick partook in two expeditions that would exemplify the aforementioned “peaks and valleys” predicament. While the first of these trips would be dissected and celebrated in the upcoming Patagonia film release The Peak of Evil, the second trek would prove much more consequential.

Slush connected with Nick to discuss his most recent exploits and take a deep dive into the success and struggle exemplified by his experiences last season on Mt. Papsura, India—aka the Peak of Evil—and Saint Elias, Alaska.

When did you realize that expedition-style snowboarding was your ultimate calling?
It was in Bolivia in 2018. That was 100% complete pure exploration. There were no guidebooks. There were very rudimentary maps. There was sparse satellite imagery. It was pure adventure, figure it out as you go. That trip worked out. We got the big first descent of Chaupi Orco, a 6,000-meter peak. It was my first time, all of our first times, being that high. It was almost 20,000 feet. It was me, Danny Davis, Gray Thompson, Nat Murphy, and Justin Kious, who was shooting photos. That descent was awesome. The best part about that expedition was this spine wall that we didn't even know existed until two weeks into the trip. We rode it at the 11th hour before we had to go down. It was powder conditions, and we could freeride it like you would in Alaska, but it was at 18,000 feet. So that was the "aha" moment, the universe telling me, "Okay, keep coming this way. You're onto something here. You're on the right path."

What gave you the confidence to think you could manage a high-alpine expedition of that nature?
It was like I had confident uncertainty. It was accepting that there's a good chance you might go there and sit in a tent for three weeks, and being okay with that. Maybe not even stepping on snow or strapping in. But I was well aware of the hazards because I had a pretty good amount of experience at moderately high altitudes. I had been up to 17,000 or 18,000 feet in Chile and in Mexico before. That season, I had ridden volcanoes, I think I went to Whitney twice, and I did a lot of riding in the High Sierra. A lot of camping, a lot of moving with heavy backpacks. You train for something like that by going snowboarding, splitboarding, and winter camping.

But there’s a difference between a day trip at altitude and spending an extended period of time there.
There's that whole other element. Being able to sustain long days on end with a heavy backpack is what it comes down to. I understood the process of expeditions in the sense that it takes time to shuttle all your gear to your highest camp. You move up incrementally and come back down and sleep at lower altitudes. After a handful of rotations, you're ready to stay at high camp for the rest of the trip. In Bolivia, we were well-prepared for the hazards involved in terms of glacial travel, avalanches, altitude sickness, waterborne illnesses. But interestingly enough, the danger—the hazard that almost took us out—was getting caught in a lightning storm at 19,000 feet. Gray Thompson got struck by lightning on that trip. He was fine, but he was shook up for sure. It's interesting because you watch the clip that's in our movie, Range of Mystery, his GoPro is on, and you can hear the buzz of lightning in the camera and hear him go, "Holy shit, I think I just got struck by lightning." We were on this ridge in a whiteout, and we were all covered in metal—all of our glacier gear, you're holding two axes, and everything is ringing. Your whole body to your core is just vibrating. It was scary.

It makes sense. When we fly in airplanes at 20,000 feet, we’re above the clouds.
We immediately descended lower onto the glacier and stripped ourselves of all of our metal. We kind of got into a lightning-prone position, basically crouched down, standing on a rope or a backpack to be grounded. We were counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning strikes, and it was instantaneous. That was just a classic example of a curveball in the mountains where anything can fucking happen.

Besides avoiding lightning, what else did you take away from that trip?
You're always picking up little tips on every trip for ways to improve your quality of life on the next one, whether it's gear or food. Certainly, bringing more food than you think you’ll need has now become a staple after going on food rations in Bolivia. Maybe what I was least prepared for back then was that it was only going to add fuel to this fire and addiction to these types of trips. You only get more obsessed with it after you have this wild, grand adventure, and you're quickly thinking, "What's the next thing that we're going to do because that was so much fun?"

What was that next thing?
Denali, which from a snowboarder's perspective is one of those things that you have to do if you want to progress into this realm of big mountain riding.

It’s like a rite of passage?
It’s such a rite of passage to stepping into the bigger mountains. There are some novelty peaks out there, but Denali truly is a freerider’s mountain. Once you're at the 14,000-foot camp, which was our advanced base camp, all of the proud lines feed right back to there. You're riding 3,000 to 6,000-foot lines right above camp. It's a direct fall line right down to your tent. There's no traversing or bullshit flats. It truly is a great place to post up for a couple of weeks and go shred. Looking back, that trip to Denali in 2019 is one of the greatest trips of my life, not just because we had amazing conditions and rode a ton of lines, but because of the crew that we had. There were nine of us, all close friends, all very talented riders, so the energy and vibes were exactly what we were looking for. I also think we were able to move the needle forward a little bit. In '89 or '90, Jim Zellers and Tom Burt made the first-ever descents of Denali. On our trip, we were able to ride nearly every major trophy line, which aside from a trip that a couple of skiers did in 2007, no one had ever done before. We were able to make some first descents on the North Summit as well, which is something that people have looked at for years. For whatever reason, the conditions lined up for us.

So many riders in your realm gravitate to Denali with varying degrees of success. What do you think are the primary pitfalls that hinder people when they attempt to ride it?
Weather and team dynamics. Ultimately, it always comes down to the conditions on the mountain. You can have the most perfect conditions imaginable, but if you're there with the wrong people, you're probably not going to reach your goal or have the experience that you're looking for.

Have you ever run into that dynamic where somebody is out for themselves instead of out for the crew and their goals usurp everyone else’s?
For sure, summit fever. I, too, can get hyper-focused on a goal. But obviously, there's a fine line when it affects the safety of others. I've definitely been on trips that have been very heavily focused on other people's agendas or their film project or whatever. You lose the plot a little bit when you start introducing cameras into the mountains.

Given the crazy amount of time and resources and human effort it takes to make these types of expeditions happen, I can see how a person's judgment can get skewed. Particularly if the odds of everything coming together that got you there in the first place are slim.
At least with the people I surround myself with, we try our best not to take unjustified risks. So if the line's not in condition, it's not in condition. Deep down, when you go out on a trip, you have a sense of if it's meant to be or not. Since that Denali trip, my biggest expeditions haven’t worked out. I had a few years where all of my big goals worked, and then from 2021 to 2023, they didn’t.

Which expeditions were those?
Saint Elias in Alaska, which I went back to this year, and Dhaulagiri in Nepal. Dhaulagiri is an 8,000-meter [26,000-foot] peak. I was really shooting for the stars there. We never got a proper window to give it a try due to weather. The monsoon season never really ended. Then we got word that Hilaree Nelson had passed away on a mountain nearby, so we pulled the plug after that. You kind of know deep down whether or not things are meant to be. That's the hardest part—listening to your gut. At a certain point, if you truly believe it, if you have all of your intentions set on it, the universe eventually rewards you. But if you scored every time you tried to go and do these grand things, they wouldn't be as special as they are. If you had good luck and always made it to the summit and always got the line, they wouldn't be these holy grail adventures.

And that's when you could also start getting complacent.
Totally. You need to be humbled every once in a while to be reminded that you're just a small speck of Gore-Tex in a sea of rock and ice. But at the same time, you have all these factors, and you're like, "God, I've worked so hard. So many people have dedicated time and their knowledge and their expertise, and we've got sponsors and the commodity of this season." How do you shut that down when you're tired, you’ve got adrenaline, you're excited?

It has to be a skill set in and of itself to be able to sit there and have a rational perspective and wipe all those other factors away.
Where I'm at now on these bigger trips is if I know deep down in my heart that we did everything possible to try to set ourselves up for success, but the mountain won't allow it, I can leave satisfied. Yet that’s also a constant process to figure out, too. Do you have this gut feeling out of fear for the inherent danger of being in that landscape, or do you have a justified fear because you're worried about avalanches or you're worried about something else? That's always the hardest thing to decipher—are these objective hazards versus unjustified fears? Because if you're really pushing it, you're going to get scared. That's a fact. It's learning how to deal with that fear and leaning into it and being able to take a step and ask yourself, "Why is this so scary right now?" Trying to just be as rational as you can be. As for sponsors and their expectation of success, thankfully, with support from Patagonia, there is never any pressure to do anything. They are well aware of the realities of the mountains. Kristo, our boss man, told me, "Hey, man. We just want to support your vision right here. If you go out and sit in the tent for three weeks, it's all good." Therefore, any pressures I feel are internal pressures. We operate in a gray area out there. At the end of the day, you're doing dangerous things. You're going into a dangerous environment. So the constant game is, how do you go into a dangerous place and do it safely? That's why these perceived successes are so rare and few and far between. Then, in turn, that's what makes them so memorable and life-changing.

You build your season around one or two big expeditions. That in and of itself brings inherent stress in that getting to that peak and making the descent can define your whole season. If it doesn’t happen, then you have a gap in your resume. I find it similar to a pipe or park rider training their whole life in hopes of getting an Olympic medal, and if it doesn’t work out, they have to wait another four years for another chance at achieving that goal.
I could see similarities with going for the Olympics because these grand goals do feel like they're on a similar level, but I would rather be at the mercy of the weather than at the mercy of four judges in a booth.

When you back away from something you’ve worked towards, do you get depressed?
The younger me probably got more bummed out than I do now. Even the difference from five years ago to now feels like a big gap in terms of mindset. The younger me would see it very singularly—as success is scoring the line and failure is not. Now, especially after this year, my perspective has shifted in the sense that I did everything I could do, and at the end of the day, it just wasn't meant to be, and I'm cool with that.

Do you think the tragedy of Hilaree passing has given you a bit more maturity in that realm as well?
I think so. Jeremy Jones has this great graph in his book The Art Of Shralpinism. It's a comparison between close calls in the mountains or serious accidents and your confidence. It's a bar graph. You're on the up and up in terms of confidence, and then there's a close call or accident of a close friend or loved one, and then your confidence dips down again. Then it slowly builds back up, and then it dips down again. I've seen that happen to myself firsthand this season alone—having the trip of all trips in India and then going straight into Saint Elias in Alaska and getting beat down again.

Let’s get into that. Tell me about how the trip to India to ride the Peak of Evil came together.
Beginning months before even catching the flight to India, I’d say by February we had locked in an outfitter to help with in-country logistics. That includes climbing permits, transit, and base camp support. You have to register with the Indian Mountaineering Foundation to receive a climbing permit. At base camp, we needed to have a cook and a liaison officer that the Indian government assigns to you when you're going to try to climb a peak higher than 6,000 meters [19,700 feet]. Our liaison officer, Sandeep, was a super cool guy. He just did yoga the whole time. He was good energy to have around. But it’s a crazy job and a total waste of money because, in India, satellite phones are illegal because they're so close to China and Pakistan, and radios are illegal too. So the liaison is supposed to be there to help coordinate a rescue, but they don't have any means of communicating with the outside world.

With everything dialed beforehand, let's talk about what happens when you get to India.
We land in Delhi. There’s me, Jerry Mark, my riding partner, photographer Blake Gordon, and our cameraman Morgan Shields. It's 100 degrees, hot and sticky. The mountains couldn't feel further away, and we have an insane amount of gear. We are bringing all of our food with us—all of our dehydrated meals, stoves, tents, sleeping bags. Obscene baggage fees. Like 900 or 1,000 pounds of gear.

Is there freeze-dried curry?
Yep. Then you load everything up into a bus. Depending on where you're going, your transit cross-country can be the scariest part of the expedition. Driving on those roads is completely lawless. You are at the mercy of your driver. It took us two days of driving from Delhi to get to our final town.

Did you sleep on the bus?
No, we spent the night in this town called Kullu and stopped in this village called Tosh, which is pretty much the hash capital of India. This entire valley—you look at the hillsides, and there's just weed growing everywhere naturally. It's all over. It was there that we met our team of porters to help us carry everything up to base camp. Without porter support, what is a three-day trek would take you two weeks to ferry all of that gear up. It's just not realistic to do it on your own.

At what altitude was base camp?
Around 12,500 feet, so nothing crazy. From base camp, you just start gradually bumping loads further and further up the valley. You go up with a backpack full of gear, drop it off, dig a hole, mark it with the probe, and come back down. Then the following day, you bring more gear and go back up. Eventually, you can spend the night up at camp one, which is around 14,000 feet.

So base camp was basically the altitude at the top of Mammoth?
Pretty much, yeah. Then once you get everything to camp one and spend the night, you start the process again of moving everything up to camp two, which was atop the pass at 16,000 feet. You're moving with 50 pounds minimum each climb. It’s not easy work. It's incredibly hot during the day when the sun is out. Your face is melting off. Then at night, it's freezing. So you have these crazy temperature fluctuations. It's not until camp two, 10 days after landing in Delhi, that we could actually see the line for the first time. This whole time we were working our asses off, and we didn’t even know if the line was in rideable condition. You're going off of blind faith. The first view of the line is just beyond jaw-droppingly beautiful. It is huge, in your face, scary, daunting, alluring—all of the feelings wrapped up into one. It's a very intimidating first view, for sure. Once we had all of our gear at 16,000 feet, we went back down to base camp to rest and recover at lower altitude. We spent one or two nights there resting, which was the first downtime we had of the entire trip. Then came that final rotation where you're going up, and you're not coming back until the end of the trip.

Next came the push to high camp?
Then we started that process of bumping all the gear again to high camp at 18,500 feet. At this point, we're getting some really fun riding in. Every time you go up to drop a load off, you get to snowboard back down. You develop an intuition on these trips—sometimes everything just feels right. It just feels meant to be. Everything on this trip went perfectly according to plan, and things usually never go according to plan. So we were encouraged because we made progress every day without any hurdles. The weather was favorable. The snow conditions were favorable. We had maybe two storms over three weeks.

And no lightning.
Thankfully, no lightning this time. The day before the summit is spent resting and chilling at high camp to get prepared for the attempt. You go through your gear and meticulously make sure you have everything—packing your backpack, lining all of your pockets with snacks. Really triple-checking everything, tightening screws on your bindings, sharpening your crampons, just being incredibly anal about everything. I slept like shit the entire expedition, I think, because of nerves and excitement and also the altitude. But the night before our summit day was the best night's rest I'd had yet, so I woke up feeling ready to go. We woke up in the dark. We rode down to the base of the line with headlamps. You're wearing all of your layers. It's just arctic cold out. Man, that feeling of starting to climb after putting in so much work is liberating and exciting. We're like, "We're doing this."

How were the conditions?
The snow down low was variable. It was like a punchy wind slab, definitely not ideal, but nothing dangerous enough to warrant turning around. We knew that the sun would soften that section throughout the day. Me, Jerry, and Blake would just take turns breaking trail. Eventually, you get into this moving meditation, into this flow where you're barely talking to each other. You're just going through the motions, and it's just second nature at that point. There's a saying where you keep going until it doesn't make sense anymore. On that day, everything just kept giving us green lights. Once you reach that 20,000-foot mark, your pace slows drastically, and we started really, really slowing down.

Your body starts fighting itself.
It feels like you're breathing out of a straw. It was very challenging, but you have to keep moving in order to make progress. The line does not let up. Once you get into the heart of it, it is 50 degrees steep and sustained the entire way. It does not ease up at all. The top 200 feet of the line is the most technical part of it, where there was some glacial ice showing, coming through the snow. So at 21,000 feet, we're free solo ice climbing at the roof of the world. It was insane. I’ve got to admit, I'm not an ice climber. I can confidently say this was in the realm of the most extreme thing I've ever done, that any of us had ever done. But it still felt right. It never felt like we were hanging it too far out there. It didn't feel like we were stepping over the line. Everything felt justifiable.

And then you reached the Peak of Evil.
It was an emotional summit for all of us, for sure. The only other time I had shed tears atop a line was on Denali. It hits you like a wave. You're not expecting it at all. Maybe it's the altitude and the build-up. It was really special to be up there with those guys. We enjoyed it for maybe five, 10 minutes, but there wasn't any room to relax because we knew that the most serious part of the day was still below us—it was a technical descent where you needed to be firing on all cylinders, for sure.

Describe the descent.
The snow for that style of line was perfect. It was supportable, ankle-deep, stable, minimal sloughing. It was a trip because you would dig down with your hand and there'd be about a foot of snow resting on this sheer ice face, but it was just spackled and set up. Knowing that there's blue ice, and it's 50 degrees, I was kind of shocked that it hadn't slid. It was so steep that you would be on your heel edge and you'd put your hand down behind you, and it's just resting on the snow. You don't even need to lean back or anything. By no means were we charging down this face. But for an exposed, steep line, it was the perfect conditions to make controlled turns from top to bottom. It should be noted, at the bottom of this thing was a 500-foot serac. [A serac is a big, jagged block of ice found on glaciers, often towering like a frozen cliff.] So it's exposed, it's hairy, and it feels hairy, too. So it’s, by all means, the definition of a no-fall zone.

Did you ride holding your axes?
Two axes, yep. Total Chamonix style. If anything, it's more of a mental comfort than actually using them. But if you were to lose an edge, it increases your odds of being able to self-arrest, especially if you're on your heels. As soon as we got out of the exposure and the slope eased up a bit, we were able to ride it together and party all the way down the glacial tongue. It was like the most tiring, demanding dream line of our lives, for sure.

Then two weeks later you once again set your sights on Saint Elias in Alaska.
I've had a four-year saga with Mount St. Elias. St. Elias is this 18,000-foot giant sitting right off the coast of southeast Alaska, which has the potential to hold the longest descent in the world. This was my third attempt, second time actually on the mountain. In 2023, we flew up to AK and sat in a motel for two weeks in the rain and never touched snow. So I had already had this expedition in my mind, and to be honest, it was a bit of unfinished business that we, as a team—myself, Cody Townsend, and Bjarne Salen—needed to follow through with. I knew it was going to be a lot, going from one expedition to another, but I did have two weeks to rest and recover as much as I could, and I had mentally prepared for it. I was tired going into it, not going to lie—mentally, more than anything. At this point, it's the first week of June, so all of my friends are going on beach trips, they're going to see the Dead at the Sphere in Vegas, and I'm packing my snowboard bag to go up to Alaska. The obsession with Saint Elias was so deeply rooted that it was something we had to go back to do. But I knew subconsciously that this was going to be my last attempt on that mountain, no matter what happened, so I wanted to get it done. I wanted to move on with my life. I went into it with the mindset of, this is the last dance. We decided to start from the ocean this year, sea level. In 2021, we were dropped off on the shoulder, which is halfway up the mountain at 9,000 feet. So this time, we were adding a lot more to the plate, but also doing it in a more pure way and setting ourselves up for a true Alaskan adventure. We ended up hiking for hours through muddy riverbanks, holding bear spray, with ridiculously heavy backpacks, toward the snow line. We made great progress in the beginning, but once we made it up to this ridge around 5,000 feet, we got stuck in a whiteout. It was really warm, the freezing levels were really high, so the snow was super isothermic and unsupportable. And also, we were in a ping pong ball, so you can't safely move in those conditions.

What do you mean, “in a ping pong ball”?
Like when you're on a glacier and it's a whiteout, you can't see anything. We got pinned in the tent for five days, which tested my mental strength, but I was still fired up and motivated to make it happen. The weather cleared and we started to make more progress. At around 10,000 feet, we came around this corner, and we got our first view of the last pitch up to the high camp at 13,000 feet, and it just had this nasty sheen of gray to it, which looked like complete ice for 2,000 feet. It wasn’t looking promising. Bjarne and I went to do some recon, to see if the ice was reasonable enough to climb and ride down. Literally, just a few steps out of camp, there were these crevasses with some snow bridges. We were probing every step to see where it would be supportable, and had identified the safest area to cross, because it was a necessary evil. It was an objective hazard that we had to deal with if we wanted to continue up the mountain. I crossed this snow bridge and stopped one step too soon, and turned around to Bjarne and said, “Oh, dude, it's solid.” As I'm saying that, a trap door releases at my feet so fast, intense, and quickly that, man, I can liken it to the terrible gut feeling of hearing a “whoomph” in the snowpack just before an avalanche. I instantly dropped, and I reflexively extended my arms out to catch myself from falling into the crevasse. My pack and snowboard caught me on the back wall, and my extended arms caught me in the front, but I fell in up to my neck. When I looked down, I saw where the snow had deposited about 15 feet below me, but out of my peripherals, it was just black and bottomless. Once I realized that I had braced the fall, I pulled myself out, and onto the other side, but I had this instant writhing pain in my shoulders and neck. That night, I decided to sleep on it and see how I felt in the morning. When I woke up, I couldn't turn my head. I felt like I had been hit by a train. I decided to pull the plug. But it would still be two days until we got off the mountain. It was really warm, freezing levels were 9,000 feet, and so, the whole lower mountain was just deteriorating—wet slides, rockfall. That was my worst snowboarding experience ever. With a 60-pound backpack, if you lose an edge, you're done—you’re falling over a cliff or into a crevasse. I would later find out that I had torn my labrum in my right shoulder, and labrum, AC joint, and rotator cuff in my left.

It’s hard to comprehend riding in those conditions with that 60-pound pack and those types of injuries.
I've never been on a trip before where the mountain provided such instant feedback. You go into this scenario with these aspirational goals of riding off of the summit, and you get humbled so quickly and are reminded who is really in control. It’s so in your face that it's impossible to ignore. After that trip, I was flying home out of Yakutat through the Wrangell Mountains—an insanely scenic flight over the heart of that range—and it was golden light, 8:00 PM. I looked at a sea of mountains as far as the eye could see and had this other light bulb moment of, “Why was I so obsessed with this one peak for so long when there are so many other mountains out there?” And what is the type of experience that I'm searching for out here, and what brings me the most joy?

Did you find an answer?
Ultimately, it's about not knowing what's around the next corner. Being surprised by the potential of a dream line. The idea of the unknown. I realized that’s what is most exciting to me. I think there's a place for proud trophy lines out there, but that’s what is really exciting, and maybe the essence of freeriding. But it's still something that I'm trying to comprehend all these months later. If any rider wants to get humbled really quickly, just go to Alaska. At the end of the day, what I was searching for with Mount St. Elias, in particular, was a reason to move on from it. And while it would've been nice to have ridden off the top of this thing, the fact that we did put everything we had into it and tried was enough for me to feel content. It's like being in love with someone that keeps rejecting you over and over and over, but for some reason, you still keep going back. Then, finally, there's that one thing that’s a breaking point, and you're able to move on. That was the feeling. I was obsessed with the idea of the peak more than the peak itself.

But there will be more lines to come. It’s no different than freestylers inventing new tricks or jibbers looking down the alley for a new spot to hit. It’s what you do.         We are lifers in this sport. It’s a never-ending cycle that we chase from year to year. That’s the beauty of snowboarding, and the goal is to do this until we can’t ride anymore.

Check out more Briefs right here. And don't forget to CLICK AND SUBSCRIBE TO SLUSH THE MAGAZINE TODAY!