History of Mountaineering in Nepal

In 1950, the year after Nepal opened to foreigners, W. H. Tilman and C. Houston made the first ascent from the south and became the first people to see into the Khumbu cirque (a steep basin at the head of a mountain valley). A number of attempts to reach the mountain’s summit followed in the early 1950s. In 1952 the Swiss almost succeeded in climbing the mountain from the South Col, which is a major pass between the Everest and Lhotse peaks and is now the most popular climbing route to the summit. On May 29, 1953, under the tenth British expedition flag and the leadership of John Hunt, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay of Nepal successfully completed the first ascent of Mount Everest via the South Col. Several expeditions have since followed. In 1975 Junko Tabei of Japan became the first woman to summit Mount Everest. Later, in 1978, Austrians Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler established a new and rigorous standard by climbing to the summit without the use of supplemental oxygen, which, because of the thin air at Everest’s high altitude, is important for the energy, health, and thinking skills of the climbers. In 1991 Sherpas, who had carried the supplies for so many foreigners up Mount Everest, completed their own successful expedition to the summit. By the mid-1990s, 4,000 people had attempted to climb Everest—660 of them successfully reached the summit and more than 140 of them died trying.