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100 free Mountaineering trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Mountaineering has no rulebook, no referees and no world championship, which is exactly why its history is so full of arguments, obsessions and legends. This quiz starts with the 1492 ascent of Mont Aiguille and the first climb of Mont Blanc in 1786, moves through the Golden Age of Alpinism, the founding of the Alpine Club and the Matterhorn tragedy of 1865, and then heads for the Himalaya: Mallory and Irvine, Annapurna in 1950, Hillary and Tenzing on Everest, Hermann Buhl alone on Nanga Parbat, and the Italians on K2. Modern climbing gets its share too: Reinhold Messner's fourteen eight-thousanders without oxygen, Junko Tabei, Wanda Rutkiewicz, the Seven Summits, the 1996 Everest disaster and Into Thin Air, Ueli Steck's speed records, Kami Rita's Everest count and Nirmal Purja's six-month sweep of the 8,000-metre peaks. There are also questions on technique and jargon: the death zone, crevasse rescue, crampons, the Piolet d'Or and the Bottleneck on K2. If you are looking for climbing walls and bouldering, try our rock climbing quiz instead. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has read a mountain book or two, a third are medium and the rest are for people who know their Hörnli from their Hillary Step. Every answer is verified against reference pages and every question carries its source.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who led the 1492 ascent of Mont Aiguille, seen as the birth of mountaineering?
Antoine de Ville
It was the first climb of any technical difficulty to be officially verified; Petrarch's 1336 ascent of Mont Ventoux was a mere walk by comparison.
Q 02The 1786 first ascent of Mont Blanc was made by Jacques Balmat and whom?
Michel-Gabriel Paccard
Saussure had offered a reward for the climb after his own failed attempts from 1757 onwards.
Q 03Who became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc, in 1808?
Marie Paradis
Henriette d'Angeville followed thirty years later, in 1838.
Q 04The world's first mountaineering club, the Alpine Club, was founded in London in which year?
1857
Its early members were once dismissed as doing very little climbing but a lot of walking steeply uphill.
Q 05Sir Alfred Wills' 1854 ascent of which peak started the Golden Age of Alpinism?
The Wetterhorn
Wills made mountaineering fashionable in Britain, and most of the great Alpine peaks fell over the next decade.
Q 06The first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 was led by which English illustrator?
Edward Whymper
Four of the seven-man party fell to their deaths on the descent, and the tragedy set off a rush on the peaks around Zermatt.
Q 07The Matterhorn straddles the border between Switzerland and which other country?
Italy
Three of its four faces are Swiss; the south face rises above the Italian resort of Breuil-Cervinia.
Q 08Which flower became the symbol of alpinists and mountaineers during the Golden Age?
Edelweiss
The Alpine Club's first president, John Ball, is regarded as the discoverer of the Dolomites.
Q 09Kilimanjaro was first climbed in 1889 by Hans Meyer and which Austrian mountaineer?
Ludwig Purtscheller
Halford Mackinder followed with Mount Kenya a decade later in 1899.
Q 10Which English occultist co-led the first attempt on K2 in 1902?
Aleister Crowley
The party reached about 6,700 metres; three years later Crowley led a lamentable first expedition to Kangchenjunga.
Q 11Oscar Eckenstein is credited with designing the modern version of which piece of climbing equipment?
Crampons
He also introduced shorter ice axes that could be used one-handed.
Q 12How many eight-thousanders, peaks over 8,000 metres, are recognised by the UIAA?
14
All of them are in the Himalaya and Karakoram, and every summit sits in the death zone.
Q 13Which was the first eight-thousander to be climbed, in 1950?
Annapurna
Maurice Herzog's French expedition went up the north face; the mountain remains statistically the deadliest of the fourteen.
Q 21The 12-metre rock wall just below Everest's summit on the southeast ridge is known as what?
The Hillary Step
It sits at about 8,790 metres and there has been continued discussion about changes to it since the 2015 earthquake.
Q 22What is the treacherous glacier section on Everest's Nepal side called?
The Khumbu Icefall
The 2014 avalanche there killed 16 Nepalese guides in a single morning.
Q 23Who made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1953, walking the final 1,300 metres alone?
Hermann Buhl
He kept himself going with the stimulant pervitin, a vasodilator and coca-leaf tea, and survived a standing bivouac near the summit.
Q 14Which was the last of the eight-thousanders to be climbed, in 1964?
Shishapangma
It is also the lowest of the fourteen at 8,013 metres, and lies entirely within Tibet.
Q 15Which 1920s climber purportedly said he wanted to climb Everest "Because it's there"?
George Mallory
The line has become the most famous quotation in mountaineering; he vanished near the summit with Andrew Irvine in June 1924.
Q 16On what date did Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reach the summit of Everest?
29 May 1953
The news reached London on the morning of Elizabeth II's coronation; the expedition was led by John Hunt.
Q 17Edmund Hillary was the first person to stand on the summit of Everest and reach both of what?
The North and South Poles
He drove to the South Pole overland in 1958 with the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition and later flew to the North Pole.
Q 18By what name do Tibetans and Sherpas know Mount Everest?
Chomolungma
It means Holy Mother in Tibetan; the Nepali name Sagarmatha was adopted in the 1960s.
Q 19Andrew Waugh named Peak XV after Sir George Everest, who had held what post?
Surveyor General of India
Waugh claimed he could not find a commonly used local name; Everest himself never saw the mountain.
Q 20The 2020 joint Nepalese-Chinese survey put Everest's height at what?
8,848.86 m
The 1856 survey figure was 8,840 m; the summit lies on the China-Nepal border.
Q 24Nanga Parbat has earned what grim nickname for its climber fatalities?
Killer Mountain
Its name means naked mountain in Sanskrit, and Guinness lists it as the fastest-growing mountain in the world at 7 mm a year.
Q 25K2, the world's second-highest mountain, lies in which range?
The Karakoram
It is also called Mount Godwin-Austen and sits on the border of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and China.
Q 26K2's nickname, the Savage Mountain, comes from a remark by which 1953 American expedition member?
George Bell
He said it was a savage mountain that tries to kill you; before 2021 roughly one climber died for every four who summited.
Q 27The narrow couloir near the top of K2, overhung by a wall of seracs, is known as what?
The Bottleneck
Icefalls there killed 11 climbers over 1 and 2 August 2008, one of the worst days in the mountain's history.
Q 28Who was the first woman to summit K2, on 23 June 1986?
Wanda Rutkiewicz
The Polish climber later disappeared on Kangchenjunga in 1992.
Q 29The first winter ascent of K2, in 2021, was completed by a team of ten climbers from which country?
Nepal
Nirmal Purja was among them; it was the last of the fourteen eight-thousanders to fall in winter.
Q 30Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler were the first men to climb Everest in what manner, in 1978?
Without supplemental oxygen
Two years later Messner went back and made the first solo ascent, and by 1986 he had climbed all fourteen eight-thousanders.