Simone Moro

Simone Moro is an Italian high-altitude mountaineer whose partnership with Anatoli Boukreev culminated in a winter expedition to Annapurna I in 1997. Moro survived the avalanche that swept Boukreev and cinematographer Dimitri Sobolev away, becoming the witness through whom the book records both the expedition’s final moments and the abruptness of its loss.

Climbing Partnership and Annapurna Plan

Moro, thirty and from Bergamo, was described as one of Italy’s most respected high-altitude mountaineers. He and Boukreev had already planned a Lhotse–Everest traverse together in 1997; that project was abandoned after they summited Lhotse with members of a Russian team. The same passage establishes Moro’s closeness to Boukreev’s circle: Vladimir Bashkirov, Boukreev’s close friend and adviser on the Indonesian National Everest Expedition, was among the climbers on Lhotse and died there after collapsing from altitude sickness. Moro thus appears in a narrative where partnership repeatedly intersects with the mortal risks of high-altitude climbing.

Later that year, Moro met Boukreev in Nepal to attempt Annapurna I by its South Face in winter. They were joined by Dimitri Sobolev, a Kazakh cinematographer documenting the expedition. Boukreev arrived in Kathmandu in good form and, in Moro’s account, happy to be back in the Himalaya. Their plan was tested early by heavy, unconsolidated snow, which forced them to change the planned assault route. They chose a longer, more arduous approach: establish Camp I at 5,200 meters, fix ropes to a ridge just above 6,000 meters, and traverse along it toward the summit. The route was selected in the hope of reducing exposure to avalanche danger by limiting time on Annapurna’s slopes, though the eventual disaster came from a cornice above the climbers’ line.

The Avalanche on Christmas Day

On December 25, 1997, Moro, Boukreev, and Sobolev woke at Camp I with the first light. Moro remembered Boukreev as relaxed, joking, and in high spirits. During the morning, the three climbers fixed ropes toward the ridgeline. At 12:27 p.m., Moro was at 5,950 meters, while Boukreev and Sobolev climbed below him through a gully, Boukreev carrying the coil of rope intended for the final fifty yards to the ridge.

Moro had bent toward his rucksack and was rising when he heard an explosive sound. Looking back, he saw a house-sized block of ice coming toward him: a cornice, hidden from the climbers below, had broken loose from the ridge. He had only seconds to react. In the three seconds before the leading edge of the avalanche hit, he looked down the couloir and shouted Boukreev’s name. Below, Boukreev and Sobolev turned toward the warning and saw the ice and snow cascading down. Moro saw Boukreev begin a quick, calm sidestep up the sloping wall of the gully; the account does not establish whether that maneuver saved him.

The avalanche swept Moro down the mountain and deposited him just above the expedition’s Camp I tent. He was knocked unconscious and left half-buried as the debris settled. When he regained consciousness several minutes later, he struggled to his feet and called into the debris field for about twenty minutes. Neither Boukreev nor Sobolev answered. The narrative’s last sight of Boukreev through Moro’s eyes is a brief, purposeful movement in the face of the oncoming avalanche; the silence afterward confirms that both of Moro’s companions were gone.

Survival and Aftermath

Moro’s hands had been shredded down to the tendons by friction from the fixed ropes. He went into the Camp I tent for a new pair of gloves, then began a painful six-hour trek to Annapurna Base Camp. A Sherpa who had been offered the option of abandoning the camp had stayed behind; a helicopter was summoned, and Moro was flown to Kathmandu for medical treatment. Before surgery, he made a phone call to the United States. His escape was therefore not a clean return from the mountain: he survived with severe hand injuries, made his way down on foot, and carried the news that the expedition had lost Boukreev and Sobolev.

Moro’s role in the account is both that of an accomplished partner and a survivor whose testimony fixes the expedition’s final hours in concrete detail: the rope coil, the hidden cornice, the shouted warning, and the unanswered calls. The earlier Lhotse partnership and the Annapurna climb place him within Boukreev’s continuing work among trusted high-altitude companions; the avalanche abruptly converts that shared undertaking into a story of survival and absence. His account does not resolve what happened to the two men after the avalanche struck, but it establishes the last actions he saw and the silence that followed.