Alpine daredevil became the first to ski Everest, from summit to base camp

Davo Karnicar, who has died aged 56, was a daredevil Slovenian alpinist who became the first person to ski successfully down Mt Everest, an enterprise so hazardous that even the hardened organisers of the Darwin Awards, which chronicle deaths from foolhardy risktaking, described it as ‘‘madness’’.

A veteran of some 1800 ascents and skiing treks, Karnicar was no stranger to danger in the mountains. Yet it was a falling tree that killed him, while he was felling timber on land he owned.

In 1997, his brother Luka and four other members of a rescue team were killed when a safety line attached to a helicopter broke during a training exercise. Two years earlier, another of

Karnicar’s brothers, Andrej, had lost eight toes to frostbite while the pair made the first ski descent of Annapurna.

In Nepal again, in 2009, Karnicar’s regular climbing partner Franc Oderlap was killed by falling ice on Manaslu as the two men tried out skiing equipment for a planned expedition to K2. And in 1996, Karnicar himself suffered frostbite in two fingers while 500m from the summit of Everest.

He had to abandon the attempt and spent seven hours descending through a blizzard. ‘‘You can’t hurry because you can’t risk falling, and you can’t stay still because you fall asleep and die,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I knew that one wrong decision would cost me my life.’’

None the less, he survived the storm recounted in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, which cost eight others their lives, including New Zealander Rob Hall.

The experience made him appreciate that, if he was to realise his ambition of skiing Everest, he needed specialist equipment and dedicated backup, and that he would have to descend on the southern side, not the northern where the terrain was even more alarming.

The wiry Karnicar, who stood 1.72 metres, or 5ft 8in, summited the mountain during the early morning of October 7, 2000. Autumn had been chosen because the fresh falls of snow offered the best skiing conditions, though the temperatures were so cold that he needed extra oxygen. He allowed himself only a few minutes to rest before starting his unique offpiste run at 7am.

Beginning with the Japanese Yuchiro Miura in 1970, there had been several attempts to ski down Everest. But no-one had successfully made a complete descent from the summit, at 29,029ft, to base camp some 11,500ft below.

Among the difficulties facing the Slovene were sharp ridges barely wide enough for his skis, with drops of 10,000ft either side.

Deep crevasses lurked beneath ice bridges that broke beneath his weight as he sped over them. But for the first 2000ft, he remembered, ‘‘there were no problems. I was having a great time’’.

Dense snow allowed him to pass the uneven surface of the Hillary Step and a zone prone to avalanches. He avoided the Ice Fall by keeping to a line directly below the South Face, although that exposed him to blocks of glacial ice, or serac, dropping from above.

Then at 27,000ft, he saw two legs exposed in the snow. It was one of the victims of the storm four years earlier. ‘‘I realised I had stopped directly on the chest,’’ he said. ‘‘That made me even more focused to get down safely.’’

After four hours and 40 minutes he arrived at base camp. ‘‘I was extremely tense and tired. I’d been on the go for 15 hours, I felt drained and couldn’t sleep . . . I couldn’t even manage to feel happy.’’

Karnicar had raised funds for the expedition – a permit for the ascent alone cost US$70,000 – through the then novel medium of the internet. He subsequently broadcast his descent live from a helmet camera, as well as via remote cameras, and during it the dedicated website gained more than 650,000 hits from people in 70 countries.

Some of this traffic was generated by the Darwin Awards’ tongue-in-cheek prediction that the audience would witness an award in real time.

Subsequently, between 2000 and 2006, he became the first person to make complete descents on skis from the ‘‘Seven Summits’’, the highest peaks on each continent. He was accompanied by his 15-year-old son down Kilimanjaro in 2001.

Karnicar also skied the northeast face of the Eiger, Mt Blanc and the Matterhorn. In 2014, using specially constructed folding skis, which took up less space, he made the highly challenging descent of Tocllaraju, in the Andes. But in 2017, aged 55, he had to abandon plans to ski K2 after suffering back strain at base camp.

He was an articulate defender of his need to test his limits. ‘‘Somebody who is content to think: ‘Why would he do these things? It is not normal’ – usually, these people do not venture very far from the safety of their couch. But they can be very, very critical of the things I am doing.’’

One of five children, Davorin Karnicar was born to parents who were keen climbers and skiers. As a boy, he would wake at 4am to train before going to school.

By the age of 13 he was in the Yugoslav national alpine skiing team. He later became champion of Slovenia and pioneered many challenging descents there, even down icefalls.

In adulthood he supported himself and his growing family by working for ski teams and equipment companies, living for many years in a small flat above the post office in the town where he grew up.

He also taught skiing – in 2001 he guided the first ski school for Nepalese children – and he and his second wife, Petra, had long had ambitions to open a lodge of their own devoted to alpine activities.

He had a son and two daughters from his first marriage, and three sons and a daughter from his second. They all survive him. – Telegraph Group