I'm not sure how, but I accidentally executed a wrong warp OOB and managed to skip the mountain. Still, If a good player were to execute all of the skips I found (not all of them are used in this video), then sub 8 without the skip is theoretically possible.

Mod edit: Huh, didn’t know you could do that. Might try to replicate it/see if there’s a faster way later. GG though!