#210: Davo Karnicar

Kosciuszko · Completed 2006-11-28

Slovenia · Male

Born 26 Oct 1962 · Died 16 Sept 2019

Davo Karničar was born on 26 October 1962 in Zgornje Jezersko, Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, into a mountaineering family. He was a member of the Yugoslav national alpine ski team from 1975 to 1982, and took up alpinism in 1980.

Early mountaineering and ski descents

Karničar summited Nanga Parbat in 1989 and K2 in 1993. In 1995 he skied from the summit of Annapurna to the bottom together with his brother Andrej (Drejc) Karničar, one of the first ski descents of an 8,000-metre peak. In 1996 he made a ski descent of Shishapangma in Tibet.

The 7 summits

On 7 October 2000 Karničar reached the summit of Mount Everest with Franc Oderlap, Pasang Tenzing and Ang Dorje Chuldim Sherpa, and became the first person to ski nonstop from the summit to base camp, descending about 12,000 vertical feet in four hours and forty minutes without removing his skis. In February 2001 he opened a ski school for Nepalese children on the Khumbu Glacier. He went on to ski from the summits of Kilimanjaro in November 2001, Elbrus in May 2002, Aconcagua in January 2003, Kosciuszko in August 2003, Denali in 2004 and Vinson on 28 November 2006, completing ski descents of the highest point on every continent. His round was reported at the time as the second such complete set of descents, weeks after American Kit DesLauriers finished her own; see our leaderboards for current standings.

In the Alps he skied the northeast face of the Eiger and the east face of the Matterhorn, and made the first ski descent of the Sinji slap waterfall above Jezersko. He also skied the east column of Kamen in Kamchatka.

Later years and death

For years Karničar hoped to become the first to ski from the summit of K2. A storm swept his skis away during his 1993 climb, and a back injury stopped a further attempt in 2017. In October 2009 Oderlap was killed by falling ice on Manaslu, where the two were testing equipment for a planned K2 expedition. He supported his family, which grew to seven children, by working as a ski tuner between expeditions, and had made an estimated 1,700 climbing and ski descents since 1980.

Death

Davo Karničar died on 16 September 2019 at the age of 56 in Zgornje Jezersko, Slovenia. He was cutting down a tree on his property when it fell on him; relatives found his body beneath the fallen tree.