sixty fascinating everest facts

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Sixty fascinating Everest facts

It is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest. Here is a fact for every year since that

milestone.

The last year that no one climbed to the Everest summit was 1974.


Reinhold Messner was the first to climb the mountain without oxygen, along with Peter Habeler, in 1978. Two years later, Messner surpassed the achievement, reaching the summit solo, again without bottled oxygen.


In 1856, the mountain was named after George Everest, a retired survey or general who never even saw the peak.


Peter Hillary, Sir Edmund Hillary's son, climbed the mountain in 1990, making the pair the first father and son to do so.


The Trigonometric Survey of India in the 1850s confirmed Everest’s existence.


The Indian mathematician Radhanath Sickdhar was the first to put a figure on the estimated the mountain reached 29,002 feet (now adjusted to 29,035 feet), the highest point ever recorded on earth.


The first flight over Everest took place in April 1933. Douglas Douglas-Hamilton and fellow pilot David Fowler MacIntyre flew a Westland PV-3 biplane over the summit.


Eighty years later, Douglas’s grandson Charles Douglas-Hamilton flew to the peak as a passenger in a Jetstream 41 Turboprop.


The mountain has even been skied down. On October 7, 2000, a 38-year-old Slovenian Davorin Karnicar skied 12,000 feet back to the south-side Base Camp.


The first two men to snowboard down Everest were the Frenchman Marco Siffredi and Austrian Stefan Gatt in May 2001


In May 2005 Didier Delsalle claimed to be the first helicopter pilot to land on the summit of Everest. Delsalle’s unmodified helicopter hovered whilst making contact with the summit for just over two minutes.


The worst year on Everest, in terms of deaths was 1996 when 15 climbers died. A close second was as recently as 2012, when 11 climbers lost their lives. Hundreds of corpses are thought to be still on the mountain.


The most dangerous area of the mountain is the Khumbu Ice Fall, with particular danger from unpredictable movement of the icefall.


The oldest person to climb Everest is 80 year-old Yuichiro Miura of Japan, which he did earlier this month.


Yiuchio Miura also successfully skied down nearly 4,200 vertical feet of the mountain (although not the whole way) from the South Col. A documentary, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, was the first sports film to win an Academy Award for best documentary in 1975.


The mountain has many names. In Nepal the mountain is known as Sagarmatha, meaning “forehead of the sky” and in Tibet the mountain “Chomolangma” or ‘mother of the universe.’


The youngest person to reach the summit is 13 year old Jordan Romero. In May 2010, the young American broke the record previously held by 15 year old Ming Kipa of Nepal.


In 2010, Dubai broke the record for both the world’s tallest building and tallest man-made structure of any kind with the Burj Khalifa at 829m high. Everest is more than ten times its height.


The world’s second highest building, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which held the record between 2004 and 2010 at 509 metres, would need to be stacked up on itself over 17 times to reach the peak of Everest.


It normally takes around 12 hours to climb the final mile from the highest Base Camp to the summit.


Lhakpa Tenzing Sherpa currently holds the record for the highest number of successful ascents, climbing Everest 21 times since 1990.


The British record is held by Kenton Cool who has now climbed to the summit of Everest 11 times.


The temperature at the summit never rises above freezing, averaging -32F (-36C) in winter and -2F (-19C) in summer.


Last May 2012, a local Nepalese woman, Churim Sherpa was the first to complete back-to-back climbs to the summit in the same climbing season.


The first tweet from the summit was sent by Kenton Cool in 2011. On one of his many trips to the top, he tweeted: "Everest summit no 9! 1st tweet from the top of the world thanks to a weak 3G signal”


Leanna Shuttleworth became the youngest British woman to scale the heights of Everest when she climbed to the summit aged 19 in 2012.


Every year the mountain grows taller by 4mm as a result of the upward thrust generated by two opposing tectonic plates.


The rock at the summit of Everest is marine limestone and would have been deposited on the seafloor approximately 450 million years ago.


Even after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit, Everest’s West Ridge widely thought to be unclimbable.


Unsurprisingly, some of the highest ever mountain rescues have taken place on Everest. Perhaps most notable was a 2001 rescue, when a guide and another climber were rescued after spending the night at 28,500 feet.


In 2006, Sir Edmund Hillary criticised climbers who failed to rescue a Briton, David Sharp. Mr Sharp, a 34-year-old, died on the mountain.


George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were known to have carried Kodak camera with them on their ill-fated attempt on the mountain in 1924. Some believe that they reached the summit. The only way that could be proved would be if the camera were ever found...although recent attempts to find Irvine's body have been criticised by his relatives.


Towards the top of Everest, people take in approximately a third of the amount of oxygen that they do at sea level. It’s not that the composition of the air changes - it’s just that the air pressure reduces significantly, meaning less can be absorbed into the system.


In a recent interview Reinhold Messner caused controversy when he said that up to 90 per cent of those passing through Everest base camp could be using chemical assistance to climb the world's highest peak.


News of the first Everest ascent reached Britain on the eve of the Coronation.


An Indian woman who lost her leg after she was thrown from a moving train two years ago has become the first female amputee to climb Everest.


Everest has now even been mapped by Google, although it did not get to the summit. In 2011, a team spent 12 days, walking more than 70 miles to reach Everest base camp to capture images for Google maps. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Edmund Hillary escaped the media attention at a house in Norfolk after his successful climb of the mountain. He stayed at his sister’s house in Norwich in July 1953 after his descent.


Both the oldest man and woman to climb the mountain are Japanese. A 73-year-old Japanese woman Tamae Watanabe become the oldest female to scale Mount Everest, breaking the record she set a decade ago.


Eight tonnes of rubbish collected from the slopes of Everest - including the remains of a helicopter - were turned into works of art and sculpture to highlight the issue of littering on its slopes.


Josh Lewsey, who was in England’s World Cup winning rugby squad narrowly failed to climb the world's highest mountain, after faulty oxygen equipment http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Hillary reached the summit first, as Tenzing admitted in an autobiography as early as 1955. But since Hillary insisted that the matter was of no importance, and that the achievement belonged equally to them both


In 1987 Hillary was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, and in 1995 invested as a Knight of the Garter - on the same day as Lady Thatcher.


Tim Macartney-Snape, an Australian adventurer, was the first to trek from sea level to summit, in May 1990. It was a feat he managed without the use of supplementary oxygen.


Tenzing Norgay’s son has also climbed Everest, adding to a very short list of fathers and sons to have conquered the mountain. Jamling Tenzing Norgay followed in his father's footsteps in 1996.


The summit of Mount Everest is only just lower than the cruising altitude of a jumbo jet. Most commercial aircraft tend to fly at between 30,000 and 36,000 feet.


A recent study, led by a Nepalese scientist suggested that glaciers around Mount Everest have shrunk by 13 per cent in the last 50 years. The snow line is also thought to be 180 metres higher than it was in 1963. The study was conducted through the University of Milan


A Swiss attempt to climb Everest in 1952 failed by just 250 metres, hampered by malfunctioning oxygen canisters. The British expedition the following year learned from their experience, in particular changing the route for their later attempt. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

During the British 1953 attempt on Everest, two sherpas agreed to try the amphetamine-based drug Benzedrine, as there were reportedly concerns about the sherpas ability to travel between camps. However, after one reported that it made him sleepy.


An image of Everest, thought to be the highest ever resolution image of the mountain, went viral last year. It was made up of 477 individual photographs taken during the climbing season in spring 2012.

George Lowe was the last surviving member of the 1953 expedition team. He passed away earlier this year. Read his full obituary here. His film of the ascent, The Conquest of Everest, was itself a great success, and nominated for an Oscar.


Sir Edmund Hillary was also a highly successful explorer of the Poles, leading expeditions there in the late 1950s. He also went to the North Pole in 1985, making him the first person to have reached both poles and climbed Everest.


A phonecall took place on the summit earlier this month, the first ever. However, Nepalese officials took a dim view of it, describing the conversation as illegal.

Bear Grylls, who at 23 became the youngest British climber to Everest in 1998, was also the first man to fly higher than the top of the world in a powered paraglider, a feat he achieved in 2007.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The fastest ascent from Everest base camp to the summit is officially eight hours 10 minutes, done by Pemba Dorje Sherpa. Several people have queried his record however.


Sherpa also has the record for the longest stay on the summit, a frostbite-inducing 21 hours, which was achieved by Babu Chiri Sherpa in 1999.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The notorious Everest "traffic jams" picture were in May last year, when around 200 people attempted to scale the summit in one weekend.


There has even been a wedding on the summit. Moni Mule Pati and Pem Dorjee Sherpa, both from Nepal, were part of the Rotary Centennial Everest Expedition in 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Ranulph Fiennes was the first man to cross both polar ice-caps and climb to the world's highest peak. The renowned British explorer reached the summit of Everest on his third attempt in 2009.


The first winter ascent of Everest was in May 1980 by two Polish climbers, Leszka Cichy and Krzysztof Wielicki.


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