Cory pushed on through the night alone, reaching the summit not long after sunrise. Richards’ partner, mountain guide Adrian Ballinger, was also climbing without oxygen but became so cold he had to turn back. I just kept plodding away, checking in on the radio every half hour.” “Most people climbing without oxygen slow down a lot above 8,000m, but this didn’t really happen to me. Richards, 35, has been climbing since boyhood, and this time he was ready. Eventually he could do five hours on the treadmill, or two hours of box steps wearing a pack, or a whole day of hiking mountains without food, near his home in Boulder, Colorado. “I wasn’t physically or psychologically prepared for the climb in 2012.”īut this year, Richards trained with famous American alpinist Steve House. “Getting back down to advance basecamp was by far the hardest day of my life.”Ĭory Richards, a professional alpinist, had also dreamed of climbing Everest without oxygen from the beginning, but on his first trip to the mountain, in 2012, he got ill and had to return to basecamp. Perez and Arnot became only the sixth and seventh women to climb Everest without oxygen, a precedent set back in 1988 by New Zealander Lydia Bradey.Īrnot and her partner Tyler Reed (who used oxygen) were forced to bivouac for the night at 27,000ft in a wind-battered tent, so she ended up spending more than 30 hours in the death zone without oxygen. (American Francys Arsentiev climbed Everest without oxygen in 1998 but died on the descent.)Īmazingly, Arnot stood on the summit just after Ecuadorian climber Carla Perez, who also summited without oxygen. “I was destroyed,” she said, “plus when we got back to camp, we had no water, no sleeping bags, no stove.”Īrnot was the first American woman to reach the top of Everest and get back down alive without oxygen. On her oxygenless ascent this May, it took her 22 hours to go from the 27,000ft camp on the north side to the summit and back down to that camp. On her fastest ascent of Everest, in 2013, Arnot went from Camp IV, at 26,000ft on the South Col, to the summit and back down in five hours. I was ready to accept that I couldn’t do it without oxygen, but everything just came together.”Īlthough Arnot managed to remain cognitively sharp (relatively), the physical demands of climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen she described as “exponentially more difficult, non-quantifiably more difficult”. “This was my last attempt, no matter what. “I thought it was going to be dangerous, that I might slip into a fog, but I was very aware of everything the whole time.”Īrnot had wanted to climb Everest without oxygen from the beginning but had ended up summiting five times with Os, twice guiding the mountain. “For me it was incredibly liberating,” Arnot, 32, told me by phone. Several people summited Everest this year without using supplemental oxygen – including American mountain guide Melissa Arnot and National Geographic photographer Cory Richards, both of whom summited via the North Col route from Tibet. Today, among elite mountain climbers, climbing Everest sans Os has become the latest challenge. But this is to judge former accomplishments by today’s refined standards. Some purists maintain that it was not Hillary and Norgay that made the first “true” ascent of Everest, but rather Messner and Habeler. The use of supplemental oxygen on Everest has been an unspoken issue ever since. That same year Swiss climbers Jean Triollet and Erhard Loretan climbed the north face of Everest with no ropes and no oxygen in less than two days – a mountaineering achievement unmatched to this day. Messner went on to astound the world by climbing Everest solo without oxygen in 1980, and in 1986 became the first person to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000m peaks, never using oxygen. Back in 1924, during the third British expedition to Everest, expedition leader Col Edward Norton climbed to within 900ft of the summit without oxygen, in tweeds no less. They wildly opined the mountaineers were on a suicide mission – but the naysayers hadn’t done their homework. Decades later, in 1978, super-alpinists Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler accomplished the first oxygenless ascent of Everest.Īt the time, pundits and prognosticators insisted summiting Everest this way, at 29,029ft, was a physiological impossibility. In 1953, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepali Tenzing Norgay had to find their own way to the top – without lines or outside help.
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