Mountain Trivia
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98 free Mountain trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
41 free Mountain trivia questions with answers. Mountain trivia is more than 'which is the highest'. This quiz covers Everest's names, first ascents, death toll and nearest sea; K2 and why it is called the Savage Mountain; the fourteen eight-thousanders and the people who collected them, from Messner to Nims Purja; the Seven Summits and the argument over Australia and Europe; and the famous individual peaks: Kilimanjaro, Denali, the Matterhorn tragedy of 1865, Fuji, Chimborazo, Mauna Kea, Mount Rushmore and Olympus Mons on Mars. Early questions suit anyone who has watched a climbing documentary (which country Aconcagua is in, which plate built the Himalayas). Later ones will test geography teachers and armchair mountaineers: which eight-thousander was climbed last and why, who said 'it's a savage mountain', and how far the Rushmore presidents were meant to go. Good for a geography classroom, a hiking-club social or a pub quiz picture round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the peaks and ranges, and each question shows its source.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mount Everest's namesake George Everest held which post in British India?
Surveyor General of India
Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843, George Everest objected to the honour, telling the Royal Geographical Society that his name could not be written in Hindi or pronounced by local people.
Q 02What is the Nepali name for Mount Everest?
Sagarmatha
Sagarmatha reached print in a 1938 essay by the historian Baburam Acharya, who argued that the peak already had a local name and glossed it as the 'head that reaches into the sky'.
Q 03By which route from the Nepalese side did Hillary and Tenzing make the first documented ascent of Everest in 1953?
The Southeast Ridge
The Southeast Ridge, reached from the South Col, had almost been climbed three days earlier: Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon turned back about 100 m below the top with a failing oxygen set.
Q 04Which climber, lost on Everest in 1924, is credited with the line 'because it's there'?
George Mallory
George Mallory is quoted giving the reply in a 1923 New York Times report, though some doubt the words were his; his body was found on the mountain in 1999, but nothing with it settled whether he and Andrew Irvine reached the top.
Q 05Which body of water is the nearest sea to the summit of Everest?
The Bay of Bengal
The Bay of Bengal is the closest coast, roughly 700 km away; in 1990 the Australian Tim Macartney-Snape set out from its shore on foot and became the first person to climb Everest's full height from sea level.
Q 06K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth, lies in which range?
The Karakoram
The Karakoram gave K2 its name: in 1856 the surveyor Thomas Montgomerie labelled the range's peaks K1, K2 and so on, and this one kept its label because no local name was found for so remote a mountain.
Q 07Which nickname did K2 earn from a remark by George Bell on the 1953 American expedition?
The Savage Mountain
The Savage Mountain echoes Bell's line that it 'tries to kill you'; on the retreat he had slipped on ice and pulled his roped teammates off with him, and one man's ice-axe belay held them all.
Q 08Which country's expedition made the first ascent of K2 in 1954?
Italy
Italy's summit pair, Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni, got their oxygen from Walter Bonatti and the porter Amir Mehdi, who were then left to spend the night in the open at about 8,100 m; Mehdi lost his toes.
Q 09A team from which country made the first winter ascent of K2 in January 2021?
Nepal
Nepal's ten climbers had arrived with three separate expeditions, then pooled their efforts to take the last eight-thousander that had never been climbed in winter.
Q 10Which peak, in the Ellsworth Mountains, is the highest in Antarctica?
Mount Vinson
Mount Vinson went unseen until January 1958, when US Navy aircraft spotted it; it was named for Carl Vinson, a Georgia congressman, in thanks for his support of Antarctic exploration.
Q 11Which peak was the first eight-thousander climbed, by Herzog and Lachenal in June 1950?
Annapurna
Annapurna was a second choice: the French team gave up on Dhaulagiri first. Frostbite on the descent then cost Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal all their toes, and Herzog most of his fingers.
Q 12Which eight-thousander, entirely in Tibet, was the last to be climbed, in 1964?
Shishapangma
Shishapangma is the lowest of the fourteen, yet it was climbed last because it lies wholly inside Tibet, which was closed to foreign climbers for decades; the first ascent came in May 1964.
Q 13Who became the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, in October 1986, without bottled oxygen?
Reinhold Messner
Q 21Kilimanjaro's summit, Uhuru Peak, sits on the crater rim of which of its three volcanic cones?
Kibo
Kibo's highest point was named Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze by Hans Meyer, who first climbed it in 1889; independent Tanzania renamed it Uhuru, the Swahili word for 'freedom'.
Q 22What does the Koyukon Athabaskan name Denali, used for a famous Alaskan peak, mean?
The high or tall one
Denali means the high or tall one in Koyukon; Alaska adopted the name in 1975, but Ohio's congressmen blocked the federal change for another forty years.
Q 23A gold prospector named North America's highest peak after which 1896 presidential candidate?
William McKinley
Reinhold Messner began the set on Nanga Parbat in 1970, where his brother Günther died on the descent and frostbite cost him seven toes; he still went on to climb the other thirteen over the next sixteen years.
Q 14Nirmal 'Nims' Purja set what record on the eight-thousanders in 2019?
All 14 in six months and six days
All 14 in six months and six days beat the old record by more than seven years; on Everest that May, Purja's photograph of climbers queuing along the summit ridge went viral.
Q 15In 1985 Dick Bass became the first person to complete which mountaineering challenge?
Seven Summits
The Seven Summits, the highest peak on each continent, were a quest the Texas businessman Bass shared with Frank Wells, later president of Disney; Bass finished on Everest at 55, but Wells never got up it.
Q 16For the highest peak in all of Oceania, many climbers swap Australia's Kosciuszko for which mountain on New Guinea?
Puncak Jaya
Puncak Jaya, also called Carstensz Pyramid, is a 4,884 m limestone peak in Indonesian Papua that demands real rock climbing, while Kosciuszko is a few hours' walk from a car park.
Q 17Depending on Europe's boundary, its highest peak is Mont Blanc or which Caucasus mountain?
Elbrus
Elbrus, a dormant volcano 5,642 m high, stands just north of the Caucasus watershed, so geographers who draw Europe's edge along that crest count it, and not Mont Blanc, as Europe's highest peak.
Q 18Which Hawaiian volcano is the world's tallest mountain when measured from its base on the ocean floor?
Mauna Kea
Mauna Kea rises more than 10,000 m from the Pacific floor, over a kilometre more than Everest stands above the sea, but some 6,000 m of that is under water, so it looks modest from the shore.
Q 19Olympus Mons, a vast volcano with very gentle slopes, is classed as which type?
Shield
A shield volcano is built from runny lava that spreads far before it sets; Olympus Mons grew so huge because its crust never slid off the hot spot beneath it, as the plate under Hawaii does.
Q 20Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak, holds what worldwide distinction?
Highest free-standing mountain above sea level
Highest free-standing mountain above sea level: Kilimanjaro is a lone volcano that rises more than four kilometres straight from the plains around it, with no range of neighbours to share the height.
William McKinley got the honour from prospector William Dickey, said to have picked the gold-standard man to needle the silver-backing miners he had met; the federal name became Denali in 2015 and went back in 2025.
Q 24What went wrong when four of Edward Whymper's party died descending the Matterhorn after its first ascent in 1865?
A rope broke
A rope broke between Lord Francis Douglas and the elder Taugwalder after one climber slipped and dragged three more with him; the break is what left Whymper and his two guides alive on the ledge.
Q 25Which Alpine peak's notorious north face was first climbed in July 1938?
Eiger
The Eiger's north face killed so many climbers that German speakers turned Nordwand, 'north wall', into Mordwand, 'murder wall'; a German-Austrian party of four finally climbed it in July 1938.
Q 26The summit of which Ecuadorian volcano is the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's centre?
Chimborazo
Chimborazo is far lower than Everest, but it stands one degree south of the equator, where Earth bulges most; Humboldt failed to climb it in 1802 and Edward Whymper made the first ascent in 1880.
Q 27Mount Fuji's last eruption, which began in 1707, dropped ash on which present-day city about 100 km away?
Tokyo
Tokyo, then called Edo, was left under centimetres of ash; the eruption began 49 days after a great offshore earthquake, and the mountain has stayed quiet ever since.
Q 28Until an 1872 government edict, which group was forbidden to climb sacred Mount Fuji?
Women
Women were kept off the sacred summit, though Tatsu Takayama defied the ban in 1832 to become the first woman on record at the top; Fuji is one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains, with Tate and Haku.
Q 29The Himalayas rose when the Eurasian plate collided with which other tectonic plate?
The Indian plate
The Indian plate began ramming into Eurasia 40 to 50 million years ago and has not stopped, so the range is still being pushed up today.
Q 30Which country holds the western end of the Himalayas, anchored by the peak Nanga Parbat?
Pakistan
Pakistan's Nanga Parbat was first climbed in 1953 by Hermann Buhl, who went on alone for the last 1,300 m after his partners turned back, then survived a night in the open at almost 8,000 m.