Quote of the Day
It has been a long road...From a mountain coolie, a bearer of loads, to a wearer of a coat with rows of medals who is carried about in planes and worries about income tax.
— Tenzing Norgay, the great Nepalese mountain climber.
Figure 1: Line of Climbers Preparing to Summit Everest. (National Geographic)
I recently have seen pictures on the news of a line of people preparing to summit Mount Everest (Figure 1), which got me thinking about the difficulty of waiting in line under low-pressure conditions. The vast majority of the people who climb Everest use supplemental oxygen. The air pressure at the summit of Everest is about 0.3 atmosphere, which is not enough to support human life for an extended period of time. But a relatively small number of people have climbed Everest with No Supplemental Oxygen (NSO). In this post, I will look at this very select group of people.
Figure 2: Elizabeth Hawley. (Wikipedia)
There is a database of the Himalayan climbers that until recently was maintained by Elizabeth Hawley, a remarkable Chicago native who has documented the climbing efforts from the 1960s until shortly before her death in 2018. Her Microsoft Visual Foxpro 9 database is continuing to be updated. The database and code to access the data are online and can be downloaded here. I used the database, which contains climbing data for many mountains, and filtered it for Everest climbers. I then exported the data as a CSV so that I could import it into Rstudio (R_source). The database has not been updated yet for 2019 activity. The video shown in Figure 3 by Melissa Sue Arnot does a great job showing how climbers worked with Ms. Hawley to record their climbing efforts – Arnot's entire series of Youtube videos are worth your time. Arnot made her own NSO summit in 2016.
| Figure 3: Solid Video on Climbing Everest By a Real Pro. |
Once in Rstudio, I filtered the data for successful summits that used no oxygen. The database records if a person used oxygen on the climb, descent, sleeping, or for medical purposes. I am looking for those who did not use any oxygen. By this strict standard, the database lists 163 successful NSO summits.
The first Everest NSO summits occurred in 1978 (Table 1).
Table 2 shows the climbers with more than one NSO summit. The most NSO summits by far were made by Ang Rita, who has made the trip 9 times including once in the winter – winter summits of any sort are very rare. Note that the Wikipedia credits him as having ten NSO summits, but the database lists him as using O2 while sleeping on his 1983 climb.
Table 3 shows the number of NSO summits by country – Nepal really dominates this statistic.
Table 4 contains the entire list of NSO summiteers.
I dont' see Carlos Beuler listed. He has climbed Everest 5 times included one route that has never been replicated because of its difficulty. I believe some if not all the climbs were done without oxygen.
Missing:
2002 Hans van der Meulen (The Netherlands)
2004 Wilco van Rooijen (The Netherlands)