Sylvain Saudan, ‘Skier of the Impossible,’ Is Dead at 87

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Sylvain Saudan, ‘Skier of the Impossible,’ Is Dead at 87

Sylvain Saudan, who was widely known as the “skier of the impossible” for his audacious and potentially life-ending descents down some of the steepest, most inaccessible slopes in the world, died on July 14 at his home in Les Houches, France. He was 87.

His longtime partner, Marie-José Valençot, said the cause was a heart attack.

That Mr. Saudan lived into his ninth decade puzzled many people — including Mr. Saudan himself.

Beginning in 1967, when he plunged down the Spencer Couloir on the Aiguille de Blaitière mountain in France — a 55-degree slope roughly equivalent, on skis, to a free fall — Mr. Saudan spent his life defying gravity, avalanches and obituary writers.

“One mistake, you die,” Mr. Saudan once said. “You fall, you become a prisoner of the mountain — forever.”

In careening down alarmingly steep, previously untraversed slopes in the Alps, the Himalayas and elsewhere, Mr. Saudan helped create an entirely new sport: extreme skiing, now known as steep skiing. Its enthusiasts travel to remote peaks, often by helicopter, and try to have positive thoughts when looking down.

“Death? It is there for everyone, but fortunately we forget about it,” Mr. Saudan told the Swiss newspaper 24 Heures in 2016. “If you only look at the negative side, you don’t move forward.”

Mr. Saudan’s adventures were chronicled in “Sylvain Saudan: Skieur de L’impossible,” a 1970 biography by the French journalist Paul Dreyfus; in several documentaries on extreme athletes, including “La Liste” (2016); and in sports publications around the world.

“Everybody agrees that Sylvain Saudan is a nice guy,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1971. “In European ski areas, where he is well known, they say Saudan is crazy. This doesn’t bother him much, although he prefers to call himself an adventurer.”

Most steep skiers today fling themselves down slopes that are dangerous but not totally virgin terrain. But Mr. Saudan wanted nothing to do with slopes that had been previously skied.

“Adventure for me is when you go to a remote place and do something challenging that no one has done before,” he told PowderGuide, a German online magazine, in 2016. “The first to dare something are the real adventurers, no matter how quickly or elegantly something is repeated by someone else. It’s the first that counts.”

After he skied down the Spencer Couloir, nobody in the nearby town of Chamonix believed it. An airplane that flew over the next day came back with photographs of his tracks. Mr. Saudan soon moved on to skiing even riskier slopes on Monte Rosa in Italy, on the Eiger in Switzerland, on Mount Hood in Oregon and from just below the summit of Denali (then known as Mount McKinley) in Alaska.

He arrived by helicopter for most of his expeditions. But in 1982, at age 45, he climbed for 25 days to the 26,500-foot summit of Gasherbrum I in Pakistan. His descent, most of which was at a 50-degree angle, took nine hours and was recognized as a Guinness World Record.

Despite the risks, he said he was never afraid.

“Apprehension exists — I felt it especially before the first turn,” he once said, according to his obituary in The Telegraph. “But fear has no place. If you are afraid, it’s over.”

Early in his career, Mr. Saudan renounced the use of safety equipment. “If you have a rope or a parachute, then everything becomes much easier,” he said. “Anyone can do it with these aids. You know that if you fall, you’re not risking anything.”

Instead, he relied on a maneuver he invented, which he named “the windshield-wiper turn,” in which he kept his weight on both skis and swiveled on his heels. “If I had tried jumping from outside ski to outside ski down the Couloir Spencer,” he told The Telegraph in 2016, “I do not think I would be talking to you now.”

The exact number of times Mr. Saudan’s life almost ended is impossible to quantify, but there were at least two memorable episodes.

In 1979, on Dhaulagiri in Nepal, heavy winds blew a block of snow on his tent. A doctor and a guide traveling with him were blown off the mountain and killed.

In 2007, after he had retired and begun working as a ski guide, he survived a helicopter crash in Kashmir.

“The helicopter,” he later said, “was completely smashed, but everybody climbed out unhurt — not even our skis were broken.”

Sylvain Saudan was born on Sept. 23, 1936, in Lausanne, Switzerland. His parents, Armand and Cécile (Besse) Saudan, ran a small farm on their property.

Growing up, he tended the cows and skied in the winters. There were few educational opportunities. When he was old enough to drive, he worked as a truck driver and took courses to earn certification as a ski instructor.

His first job on the slopes was at Glenshee, a resort in Scotland. He would later credit Scotland’s icy winters with preparing him to ski down potentially deadly terrain.

A few years later, he returned to Switzerland. One spring afternoon, he sneaked off to a steep, untraversed couloir on the north face of the Piz Corvatsch mountain in the Alps. Down he went.

The mountain’s ski director, Mr. Saudan told The Telegraph, “said I was a bad example to other skiers and took my lift ticket away.”

In addition to Ms. Valençot, Mr. Saudan is survived by his brother, Francis.

Mr. Saudan’s last major expedition was in 1986, on his 50th birthday, when he skied off the summit of Mount Fuji, Japan’s tallest mountain.

Being that it was September, there was no snow.

He skied down the rocks.

“If you can ski on stones, you can ski on anything,” he told The Telegraph. “On Fuji, I did not fall once — I remember the Japanese journalists checking my sweater for cuts.”

There were none.

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