47 Fun Facts About Climbing

Who made the first documented ascent of Mount Everest in 1953?

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's success was sent to The Times in code, as 'Snow conditions bad', and the news broke on the morning of Elizabeth II's coronation.

A 2020 joint survey fixed Everest's height at 8,848.86 m, ending a dispute between Nepal and which country?

China had long counted only the rock, nearly four metres lower than Nepal's figure, which included the snow cap; the two announced 8,848.86 metres together in December 2020.

Which name does Nepal use for Everest, shared with the national park around the mountain?

Sagarmatha is the Nepali name and Chomolungma the Tibetan one; in the 1850s the British said they could find no local name for the peak, and named it after one of their own instead.

Mount Everest was named after Sir George Everest, who held what job?

Surveyor General of India until 1843, George Everest had retired to England before his old office measured Peak XV; it was named for him anyway, in 1865.

Which climber, who vanished on Everest in 1924, is credited with the reply 'Because it's there'?

George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last glimpsed by a teammate through a break in the mist, still climbing; nobody knows whether they reached the top before they died.

Which lost item might prove Everest was climbed in 1924?

A camera, a pocket Kodak lent by a teammate, went up with the two climbers lost that year; it was not with the body found in 1999, so its undeveloped film is still the prize of every search.

Who first climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen, in 1978?

Messner and Habeler did what many doctors and climbers had called impossible, and two years later Reinhold Messner went back and climbed Everest alone, again without bottled oxygen.

What do climbers call altitudes above about 8,000 metres?

The death zone begins where the air holds too little oxygen to sustain life for long: the body can no longer adapt, so every hour spent there leaves a climber weaker.

Who became the first woman to summit Everest, on 16 May 1975?

Junko Tabei was knocked unconscious when an avalanche buried her tent, and Sherpa guides had to dig her out; twelve days later the Japanese climber stood on the summit.

Which guide radioed a farewell to his pregnant wife from Everest in 1996?

Rob Hall, a New Zealander, told her 'Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much' and died soon after, one of eight climbers killed by the storm.

Which journalist on assignment for Outside magazine survived the 1996 Everest disaster and wrote Into Thin Air?

Jon Krakauer had joined a guided team to report on the commercialisation of Everest; the magazine story he filed afterwards grew into a number-one bestseller.

Where on Everest did one avalanche kill 16 Sherpas in 2014?

The Khumbu Icefall is so unstable that paying clients cross it as few times as they can, while Sherpas carrying tents, food and oxygen pass through again and again.

K2, the world's second-highest mountain, stands in which range?

The Karakoram is the K in K2: a British officer sketching the range from a distance in 1856 numbered its peaks K1, K2 and so on, and this one's label stuck.

After nearly dying on K2 in 1953, American climber George Bell gave the peak which lasting nickname?

The Savage Mountain 'tries to kill you', Bell said: on the retreat he slipped and dragged five teammates off with him, and one man's ice-axe belay held all six.

Climbers from which country made the first ascent of K2 in 1954?

Italy's Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli went up the Abruzzi Ridge, a route already named for the Italian duke whose expedition had pioneered it in 1909.

K2 became the last eight-thousander climbed in winter in January 2021, by a team from which country?

Nepal's ten climbers, drawn from three separate expeditions, stopped ten metres below the top so they could step onto the summit together, singing the national anthem.

Netflix's 14 Peaks follows which climber's 2019 bid to summit all 14 eight-thousanders in under seven months?

Nirmal Purja, a former Gurkha, finished in about six months when the record stood at almost eight years, and on Everest he took the photo of the summit queue that went around the world.

Which was the first 8,000-metre peak ever climbed, in 1950?

Annapurna I cost its summit pair dearly: Maurice Herzog lost his gloves near the top and, after a night in a crevasse, his fingers and toes to frostbite, while Louis Lachenal lost his toes.

The 1786 first ascent of which Alpine peak is traditionally seen as the start of modern mountaineering?

Mont Blanc had carried a prize since 1760, when a Geneva scientist offered money to whoever found a way up; a local doctor and his porter claimed it 26 years later.

Edward Whymper's party made the first ascent of which peak in 1865, losing four men on the way down?

The Matterhorn party was roped together when one man slipped and dragged three more off; the rope broke, which saved Whymper and two guides and left them accused of having cut it.

The Eiger's north face has earned what German nickname because of the number of deaths on it?

Mordwand, 'murder wall', is a one-letter twist on Nordwand, German for north wall; the name took hold in the 1930s, when the first serious attempts on the face ended in deaths.

Eiger north-face pioneer Heinrich Harrer later wrote which memoir?

Seven Years in Tibet tells how Harrer escaped a British prisoner-of-war camp in India, walked over the Himalayas to Lhasa and ended up tutoring the young Dalai Lama.

Which Texas businessman became the first person to climb the Seven Summits, finishing on Everest in 1985?

Richard Bass, an oil heir, climbed six of the seven with Frank Wells, a Hollywood executive who never got up Everest and went on to run Disney; Bass made it on his fourth try, aged 55.

The stricter Seven Summits list drops which Australian peak for New Guinea's Carstensz Pyramid?

Mount Kosciuszko is an easy hike, so the Canadian Pat Morrow chose the harder list, saying he was 'a climber first and a collector second'.

El Capitan's 3,000-foot face in Yosemite is a single wall of which rock?

Granite about 100 million years old makes up nearly all of El Capitan; glaciers later ground out the valley beside it and left the wall standing some 3,000 feet clear.

Whose team made the first ascent of El Capitan's Nose in 1958, a siege begun the year before?

Warren Harding's team worked up and down fixed ropes for more than a year; two years later his rival Royal Robbins repeated the route in a single seven-day push.

Who made the first free ascent of El Capitan's Nose in 1993, then repeated it in a day the next year?

Lynn Hill spent four days freeing a route whose upper pitches had blocked every earlier effort, then came back in 1994 and free climbed all of it in a single 23-hour push.

Alex Honnold and which partner made the first sub-two-hour ascent of El Capitan's Nose in 2018?

Tommy Caldwell and Honnold clocked 1:58:07 on about their tenth run up the route in a few weeks; Caldwell climbs with nine fingers, having sawn off most of an index finger in 2001.

Which El Capitan route did Alex Honnold climb without a rope on 3 June 2017?

Freerider runs some 2,900 feet up the wall; Honnold set off with no rope, climbed it in 3 hours 56 minutes and was on top in time for breakfast.

Free Solo won which award at the 91st Academy Awards?

Best Documentary Feature went to directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who had wrestled with whether to film at all, knowing Honnold could fall to his death while they were filming.

A 2016 scan showed which part of Alex Honnold's brain barely activates in response to disturbing images?

The amygdala, the brain's threat centre, stayed almost silent while Honnold looked at gruesome pictures in the scanner; his own verdict on them was 'I was like, whatever'.

Silence, the first route in the world proposed at grade 9c, is in a cave in which country?

Norway's Hanshelleren cave at Flatanger holds the route: 45 metres of overhanging roof that cost its first climber more than 40 days of attempts spread over seven trips.

Who made the first ascent of Silence, the world's first route graded 9c, in September 2017?

Adam Ondra is known for screaming his way up hard moves, but at the top of this one he 'could not even scream', and a few days later he renamed his Project Hard to match.

In the Yosemite Decimal System, class 1 is hiking and class 5 roped climbing; what do classes 2 and 3 describe?

Scrambling means using your hands on steep ground without needing a rope; the system's name misleads, since Sierra Club climbers devised its decimal grades in Southern California, not in Yosemite.

Which French town hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924, where gold medals for alpinism went to a British Everest expedition?

Chamonix staged the Games as an 'International Winter Sports Week', and at the close Pierre de Coubertin handed out the alpinism medals for a 1922 attempt that had not reached the top.

Who is called 'the father of modern bouldering' for combining gymnastics with climbing in the late 1950s?

John Gill, a gymnast who became a mathematics professor, brought the chalk from the gym to the rock in the 1950s, and climbers all over the world have carried it ever since.

Bouldering's V-grades are also known by which name, after the Texas park whose guidebook first printed them?

The Hueco scale is named for Hueco Tanks, whose 1991 guidebook introduced the grades; the V stands for 'Vermin', the nickname of the book's author, John Sherman.

Competition climbing made its Olympic debut at which Games?

Tokyo 2020, held a year late because of the pandemic, gave climbing just one medal event for each sex, so specialists had to compete outside their own discipline.

Who won the first women's Olympic gold medal in climbing?

Janja Garnbret was the only finalist to get to the top of any boulder problem, solving two of the three, and then climbed higher than anyone else on the lead wall to take the gold.

Climbing's first Olympic medal event combined lead, bouldering and which third discipline?

Speed climbing, a head-to-head sprint up an identical 15-metre wall, has its own specialists, so making them share one medal with the other two drew wide criticism, and the next Games split it off.

The Alpine Club, the world's first mountaineering club, was founded in 1857 in which city?

London was the natural home for it: Alpine climbing was then largely a British pursuit, and British climbers with their hired local guides dominated the first ascents of the Alps' golden age.

Which knot is the standard way for a climber to tie the rope to a harness?

The figure-eight is the standard tie-in because a partner can check it at a glance, two neat parallel strands all the way round, and unlike a bowline it does not tend to shake loose when the rope goes slack.

German geographer Hans Meyer reached the top of which African mountain in 1889, at his third attempt?

Kilimanjaro had beaten Meyer twice: in 1887 he lacked the gear to cross its ice cap, and a year later rebels took him hostage on the way there and freed him only for a ransom.

Parisian climbers were training on the sandstone boulders of which forest by the late 1800s, as practice for the Alps?

Fontainebleau was mainly a training ground until the 1930s, when Pierre Allain and his fellow 'Bleausards' began to prize its boulders for their own sake, an early step in bouldering becoming a pursuit of its own.

Which style of climbing did French stars like Patrick Edlinger popularise in the 1980s?

Sport climbing's bolts were controversial, but falling onto them was safe enough that climbers could attempt far harder moves, and standards of difficulty rose right across the sport.

Which two gear makers used their 1972 catalogue to urge climbers to give up pitons?

Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost were arguing against their own best-seller, since pitons were the mainstay of their business; within months piton sales had withered and their chocks were selling faster than they could be made.

What is the climbing technique of using shoe rubber for grip on a featureless face called?

Smearing relies on friction alone, with the climber's weight kept right over the feet; it was the arrival of sticky rubber-soled shoes that let climbers take it onto steeper, blanker slabs.