Legends of Everest

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The most legendary persons who summited Mt Everest are often seen as the best climbers ever, the best mountaineers of the world.

This is a set of twelve portraits of persons that I consider as Legends of Everest.

The order in above overview was chosen for design reasons. Here is another one:

• Sherpa: Ang Rita, Long Dorje Sherpa, Phurba Tashi
• Women: Junko Tabei, Lhakpa Sherpa
• Guides: Rob Hall, Russel Brice
• Fun-Guys: Jean-Marc Boivin, Marco Siffredi
• First Ones: Reinhold Messner, Sir Edmund Hillary, Georg Mallory

This selection is of course exemplary and could be expanded any time.

For more information on Mt Everest see my sets on “thin air” (incidents like Everest 1996), the 360° panorama from the top or more landmarks of this mountain.

Phurba Tashi

Phurba Tashi climbed Mt Everest 21 times between 1999 and 2013, as often as Apa Sherpa, the first human to reach this many summits. Since 2018 the climber wit the most summit of Everest is Kami Rita Sherpa. Phurba Tashi held another world record: according to Russell Brice he summited 38 eight-thousanders.

The most successful climber of Mt Everest is a Sherpa.

Phurba Tashi Sherpa Mendewa, the „Everest Yak“, was born in 1971 and lives in Khumjung, Nepal. Most of his expeditions, he was doing as Sirdar, the head Sherpa, for Russell Brice and his Himex guide company. That brought him to the top of Mt. Everest, Cho Oyo, Manaslu, Ama Dablam, Lhotse and Shishapangma – and probably many more. He did crazy things for his „clients“: in 2002 he brought Marco Siffredi to the top before the snowboarder vanished, in 2006 he carried double-amputee Mark Inglis down a from Mt Everest on his back, in 2007 he climbed Mt Everest three times and much more.

His mountaineering activity made him a movie star: he was featured in the Discovery Channel series about Everest: „Beyond the Limit “, and he is the central figure in the 2015 documentary „Sherpa“ which recounts events surrounding the 2014 Mount Everest ice avalanche. Phurba Tashi retired soon thereafter in order to help in base camps.

Most likely his record will not last very long, since younger Sherpa are about to overtake him.

Lhakpa Sherpa

Lhakpa Sherpa is the women with the most ascends of Mt Everest. She was climbing Mount Everest nine times in total from 2000 thru 2006 and in 2016 thru 2018. She intended to climb the mountain in 2015, but after the massive earthquakes she was helping others a lot.

Female climbers and Sherpa are still very rare – Lhakpa Sherpa is followed by Melissa Arnot from the United States with six summits. Kydia Bradey, the first women to summit Mt Everest without supplementary oxygen from New Zealand, climbed the mountain three times.

Lhakpa Sherpa grew up in Makalu, Nepal as one of eleven children – at least two of her siblings also climbed Mt Everest. She was married for 12 years and has three young children.

Today, the most successful female Everest climber today lives in the US, Connecticut.

Marco Siffredi – the disappearance

Marco Siffredi is the worlds first to descend Mount Everest on a snowboard, In 2001 he chose the Norton Couloir at the left side of the north face. He disappeared in 2002 after making his second successful Everest summit– accompanied by the three Sherpa among them Phutba Tashi – while attempting to snowboard the Hornbein Couloir, at the right face of the north face. He is one of the dead bodies on Everest.

Marco Siffredi was only 22 when he died, but he was already the most famous free rider of his time. He lived in Chamonix in France which means that he was used to snow and ice. He rode his snowboard down the steepest and highest faces all over the world. At up to 60-degrees incline. With super high speed.

Marco was not the first to dare such an adventure. But he was the coolest.

• People say, that the Japanses Yuichiro Miura skied down Mt Everest first in 1970 when he started from South Col– almost 900 meters below the summit. But Yuichiro Miura basically has done this like a skydiver using a parachute to slow down his fall.
• Also, Davorin Karnicar is seen as the first men skiing down from the top. That may be.
• Stefan Gantt sees himself as the first to use a Snowboard from the top. But he walked for several hundred meters.

Russell Brice

Russell Brice is probably the best known mountain guide in the world. He has reinvented the way mountain guides work at Mt Everest, he is a successful mountaineer for himself and he is a movie star.

Russell was in 1952 in New Zealand, as many other famous climbers, and he was always fascinated from ice and snow.

As early as 1974 he went to Mount Everest and started his guiding business Himex no later than 1979. Since then he guided at Mount Everest every spring season.

After the death of Rob Hall in 1996, another New Zealand mountaineer and by that time the most famous Mt Everest guide of the world, Russell Brice decided to change the way mountain guides work. His premise #1 is that no one should die during his expeditions – neither clients nor Sherpa:

• A fixed rope is mounted every season from base camp to the summit
• Every client gets an own Sherpa and an own radio
• He stays in base camp makes intensive use of weather reports and supervises the crews on the mountain

Russell Brice is best known by the the death of David Sharp in 2006. His team bypassed David Sharp, sitting in the green boot cave, on the way up and only tried to help David on its way down. Ordered by Russell they left David to die, as he believed it was impossible to help.

Russell Brice now has a regular team of Sherpas who are the most respected in Nepal. This enables him to take unpopular decisions such as to pull all his guides, client and Sherpa off Mount Everest in 2012 due to his concerns about dangerous conditions. During the 2013 season, Brice was involved in brokering an agreement between Sherpas and western climbers after disputes broke out on the mountain.

He also is a cameraman and location manager, a producer and a movie star for himself. He worked with the Discovery Channel, the BBC, National Geographic and Tigress Production

If that was not enough, Russel Brice, still being an active mountaineer, holds some records personally: he was fastest to climb solo without oxygen on both Cho Oyo and of Ama Dablam. And he was the first climber to cross the infamous Pinnacles on the Mt Everest NE ridge close to the hardly climbed Kangshung face of Mt. Everest with Harry Taylor. He has summited eight-thousanders like Cho Oyu, Mount Everest, Manaslu 14 times.

Long Dorje Sherpa

Long Dorje is not a record holder, but he managed climbing Mount Everest well over 10 times. He is among the first to have reached this number of summits.

Born around 1969 he is one of the countless Sherpa who care for clients all day without earning media coverage or appropriate compensation.

Rob Hall

Robert Edwin “Rob” Hall (1961 – 1996) was a famous Mt Everest head guide in the 1990s. He is best known for his tragic death in 1996 in a cold and stormy night in which he died along with seven other people.

Rob Hall was a New Zealand mountain guide and organized guided tours to Mount Everest with the guide agency Adventure Consultants yearly. By 1996, Rob Hall had completed four summits of Everest, more than any other non-Sherpa mountaineer and he had successfully guided thirty-nine climbers up to the top of Mt Everest. Hall’s reputation for reliability and safety attracted clients from all over the world. Rob Hall was well known in the mountaineering world as the “mountain goat” or the “show.”

In spring 1996 he also organized a tour with several clients. On the day of summit however, he made several mistakes and was still high up on the mountain when a storm arose. These events have been well described in countless books. Among them Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” – the journalist John Krakauer was a member of Rob Hall’s team – and Göran Kropp’s “Ultimate High: My Everest Odyssey”. The death of Rob Hall was dramatized in the 2015 film Everest, including his call to his wife Jan Arnold and his rivalry to the mountain guide Scott Fisher and his expedition. Other teams, Göran Kropp or the circumstances on the North Side with an Indian dying – Green Boots – have not been reflected appropriately and are less known.

Hall grew up in New Zealand where he climbed extensively in the Southern Alps. In 1988, Rob Hall met Gary Ball, with whom he climbed the Seven Summits in seven months. After that success they founded Adventure Consultants in 1992.

Rob Halls body remains on the mountain close to the place where he died, just below the south summit.

Ang Rita

Ang Rita, the snow leopard, is the first climber who reached the summit of Mt Everest ten times without supplementary oxygen in 1996 – almost 20 years after Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler proofed this possible. He climbed the mountain first in 1983 and needed only 13 years to do so.

Ang Rita Sherpa was born in 1948 and died in 2020. Little would be known about him if there was not Göran Kropp reporting about his insane journey. The “Crazy Swede” managed to ride his bicycle from Sweden all the way to Khumbu and back, carrying 80 kilos of equipment. He climbed Mt Everest alone, by fair means, using only equipment he brought with him, and eating only food he carried. Göran Kropp almost climbed the mountain three times in those days, as he failed the first time, helped the teams of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and dared to try it a third time after the disaster.

Ang Rita was the best known Sherpa by that time, and he was able to shoot a video to proof Göran Kropp reached the summit. Göran wrote about Ang Rita that “he received almost all awards existing and he earned a lot of money.” Why did I select Ang Rita and not Göran Kropp to paint? Ang Rita was up there ten times.

Jean-Marc Boivin

Jean-Marc Boivin (1951 – 1990) was a French mountaineer, extreme skier, hang glider and paraglider pilot, BASE jumper, award-winning film maker, and author. Boivin was the first person to paraglide down from Everest in twelve minutes.

Jean-Marc Boivin was born in Dijon, France. He grew up there and started to intensively climb and ski when he was 14. After brief studies of mechanical manufacturing Boivin focused on the mountains and described himself as an all-round professional adventurer.

Boivin was one of the leading alpinists of his era, making free solo ascents of some of the hardest routes in the Alps during the 1970s. In that time he was already speed-climbing, although the word did not exist yet.

In order to descend as quickly as possible from a summit, hi developed extreme skiing and made the first ski descents of many mountains on which he skied slopes of more than 60 degrees, which is unbelievable steep! Also he became a professional parachutist flying down from very high altitudes like K2, Aconcagua or Gasherbrum II He broke the record for distance travelled by paraglider, flying over 30 km.

Therefore, he was well known for being one of the leading practitioners of enchaînement, in which several difficult climbs are undertaken in one day with descends by paraglider or ski.

In the fall of 1988 he broke several records on Mount Everest after having climbed without supplementary oxygen: Boivin made the first paraglider descent of Mount Everest, in the process creating the record for the fastest descent of the mountain and the highest paraglider flight!

He died from injuries incurred after BASE jumping off Angel Falls in Venezuela, the highest waterfall in the world.

Junko Tabei

Junko Tabei (1939 –2016) was a Japanese mountaineer. She was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, and the first woman to ascend all Seven Summits by climbing the highest peak on every continent.

Tabei made only a few climbs during her high school years because the family did not have enough money.

She founded the first Ladies Climbing Club (LCC) during her studies in 1969. The club’s slogan was “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves”. Tabei later stated that she founded the club as a result of how she was treated by male mountaineers. After graduating from university, Tabei was a recognized climber in Japan.

Tabei’s LCC contained a team known as the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition (JWEE) to attempt to summit Mount Everest. JWEE had 15 members, mostly working women, some mothers. This female team got considerable less funding than male teams. So the women made its own waterproof pouches, over-gloves and sleeping bags. Junko Tabei was the strongest women of the team and made it to the summit although she was hit by an avalanche shortly before.

After this achievement Junko Tabei got well-known. She used her fame to work on ecological concerns. And she led and participated in “clean-up” climbs in Japan and the Himalayas.

Tabei was married and had two children.

Reinhold Messner

Reinhold Messner, along with Peter Habeler, made the first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1978 and he was first to climb the mountain free solo in 1980. Messner was also the first climber to ascend all fourteen peaks over 8,000 meters (26,000 ft).

Messner was born in 1944 and grew up in the Dolomites, South Tirol, Italy. He mastered his first summit at the age of five. Reinhold had eight brothers and one sister; he later climbed with his brother Günther and made Arctic crossings with his brother Hubert. By the time Reinhold and Günther were in their early twenties, they were among Europe’s best climbers. Mainly Reinhard broke several records and climbed many dangerous faces the first time.

Messner’s first major Himalayan expedition brought him to the summit of Nanga Parbat in 1970. Together with Günther he reached the summit via the unclimbed Rupal face, but he lost his brother and seven toes on descend.

After this event he turned to use the alpine style mountaineering also in the Himalayas with light equipment and a minimum of external help. This way he was much faster than other expedition and was able to climb the highest mountains on earth without supplementary oxygen. Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner proved leading physicists wrong, who thought no men could survive without it at 8.000 meters.

Also, Reinhold Messner is one of the view adventurers of this time, who survived. This was not only luck, in fact he was able to walk through snow-storms, he was very robust and reacted quickly. But most of all, Messner was able to give up when weather conditions did not allow to continue climbing. Almost 50% of his expeditions ended unsuccessfully.

Being alive he could strive for new adventures after having finished with the Himalayas. He finished the Seven Summits as second person, reached both, the south and the north pole crossing Antarctica and Arctica on skies, together with fellow explorer Arved Fuchs, and he walked 2,000 km through the Gobi desert.

In order to finance his expeditions, he has written countless books about his experiences and spoken on many keynotes. As if that was not enough: After having finished his career as climber he was an Italian politician, and he also built six museums for mountain paintings. The painting “Second Step” of Juergen Staeudtner can be seen in his last one at Kronplatz, Italy.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Edmund Hillary (1919 –2008) was first to summit Mount Everest in 1953 with Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. They took a southern route passing the Khumbu Icefall and the South Col before they reached and mastered a steep step – today called the Hillary Step.

The New Zealander became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939 – at a time in which climbing high mountains was mainly seen as maniac.

However, he had good luck to be selected for the ninth British expedition to Everest. England had tried to repeat the success on Mont Blanc a century before and conquer Mt Everest in the 1920s with high effort – George Mallory was a leading climber in this time from the north side. After World War II England started again to conquer the top of the world, but failed. Until John Hunt took over from Shipton as leader of the expedition. He recognized that England was in fact Common Wealth and picked the best climbers. The time of Edmund Hillary came, since New Zealand is part of Common Wealth.

The north-route to Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet, but Nepal accepted the expedition in 1953.

The expedition had 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, more than 20 English climbers and five tons of baggage. It was a team effort to prepare everything and set up a camp at the South Col. Hillary had luck a second time as the first team failed. Hillary and Tenzing were selected to go for the summit. With three supporters the two established a last camp at 8,500 meters before the reached the summit the next day.

Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary founded the Himalayan Trust and leaped to build many schools and hospitals in Nepal. In addition, he reached both poles, the south and the north pole making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest.

George Mallory

George Herbert Leigh Mallory (1886 – 1924) is the first “super hero” of Mt Everest. He was part of three British expeditions and eventually died high up on the mountain, below Second Step.

By this time only the north side of the mountain through China was accessible. During the first expeditions the climbers discovered the way to the north col, but only in the third, 1924, the English climbers were really able to go for the summit.

Norton and Somervell almost made it, climbing the couloir named Norton Couloir since. Mallory, and the Oxford student Irvine tried it thereafter, but Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew “Sandy” Irvine both died only about 800 vertical feet from the summit. The Mallory expedition found Georg Mallory’s body, another of the bodies on Everest

Mallory and Irvine are better known than Norton and Somervell because they might have reached the summit. They are not the first Mount Everest deaths – some Sherpa died in the years before..