When Breckenridge local Devon O'Neil accompanied some of the nation's top mountaineers to ski parts of the Himalayas never before carved, he quickly realized he was out of his league.

O'Neil joined global athlete Kris Erickson, who's sponsored by North Face; Jamie Laidlaw, who's on North Face's field team; and Kip Garre, who is Andrew McLean's ski partner and is sponsored by K2.

O'Neil's claim to fame: Well, he's one heck of a freelance writer, with credits ranging from Outside Magazine to ESPN.com. He and Laidlaw are college buddies who reconnected after several years. Laidlaw was looking for media coverage, and he knew O'Neil was his man. (Look for an account of the trip in the spring issue of “The Ski Journal.”)

Though O'Neil regularly skis the backcountry and has experience with what he calls “low-level mountaineering” on terrain such as knife ridges, he found himself “in a totally different league than I've ever been in or probably ever will be in again,” he said.

The remote Saipal Himal, one of the most difficult nooks of the Himalayas to access, even daunted Erickson, Laidlaw and Garre a bit.

“These guys have been on some of the highest peaks, and they said they've never seen mountains as complicated,” O'Neil said. “It's hard to describe how much uneven, really rugged terrain you deal with ... down steps taller than your knee for 1,500 feet with huge packs.”

The journey

From the beginning, the 42-day trip was muddled. For starters, O'Neil sprained his ankle two weeks prior to the expedition, which started Sept. 21. He couldn't put weight on the injured joint for five to six days.

Then, after spending 56 hours traveling to Nepal, airline employees misplaced the team's ski gear, so the men remained grounded in Katmandu for five days. Once their skis arrived, they hopped on a flight to Dangadhi, near the India and Nepal border. From there, they rode a truck through cobra-laden bushes in 93-degree weather.

“It was just the most lurching drive you'd ever imagine — huge drops on all sides,” O'Neil said.

The rough road took 30 years to build, and between approximately 1996 and 2006, the country's civil war and terrorist groups made it even more dangerous to travel.

When the truck took the team as far as it could go, the men began walking in monsoon-like downpours. What should have been a three- to four-day hike took five days, because local porters threatened to stop cooperating.

“They knew they were needed, so they dictated how much we walked,” O'Neil said.

A few of the mountaineers fell ill and needed antibiotics, which also delayed progress.

Finally, they hiked two additional days to reach the alpine valley, scouted via Google Earth, because no maps existed.

They had walked through villages, in which they were the first white people natives had seen; they scaled steep walls where one small misstep meant falling off a huge cliff; and they crossed bridges over deep river gorges — all while carrying 55- to 60-pound packs. They named one rickety wooden bridge near a 30-foot waterfall “death bridge,” because there was no question: If you fell, it was all over, O'Neil said. The team was five days from the nearest medical care and one day from the nearest human being.

“At times, we were on ‘you fall, you die stuff,'” O'Neil said. “There were very few days where that thought didn't go through my mind 10 times a day ... There were some really close calls at times.”

The goal

The team risked it all, for three days of skiing virgin peaks, untouched by metal-edged skis.

Originally, the North Face sponsored trip included 15-16 days of scheduled skiing, but illness, rain and lost gear pared the skiers' time on the snow down to three days. The silver lining: While it downpoured for four days below the peaks, up high, it snowed, allowing the team to sink their boards into soft powder. The saving grace:

“We arrived after a massive avalanche cycle,” O'Neil said. “If we had gotten there at any other point, we would have taken a huge risk (of getting caught in an avalanche) or been shut out.”

As it was, they hiked and skied through plenty of debris.

“We went into (this) thinking it was a ski expedition,” O'Neil said. “(But) you're at the mercy of the extremes of the elements. There's a lot you think you can control, and you get up there and realize you're in a completely foreign place. You don't dictate anything.”

When the team emerged from the high peaks, they discovered the rain had destroyed the only road out, with 11 major landslides. Locals in Nepal had been stranded for one month. The only way out: Hire a plane for $2,000, so as not to miss the flight out of Katmandu. And that's what they did.

O'Neil left the experience with a whole new perspective on life.

“You learn a lot about who you are and what you want out of life, and what you want out of the outdoors,” he said, adding:

“Darwinism (was) everywhere in this trip.”