Would it be possible to climb Mount Everest via the southwest face in the winter?

 This has been achieved once, by a Japanese team back in 1993.

Arriving at Base Camp on 13 November 1993, the Japanese team set about reaching the summit of Everest via the treacherous Southwest Face. Porters and yaks had lugged 13 tons of equipment to Base camp to support 50 people. The team was composed of:

• 7 Japanese climbers
• 2 Japanese support staff at Base Camp
• 28 high altitude Sherpas
• 2 head Sherpas (1 BC, 1 C2)
• 3 cooks (2 BC, 1 C2)
• 5 kitchen boys at BC
• 3 mail runners

A team of Sherpas helped lay a route through the Icefall, deploying 50 ladders and 2,000m of rope. They then carried equipment, supplies and oxygen tanks up to the Cwm Valley. As the Japanese and Sherpas climbed higher, they established two camps up on the Face. They followed the Bonnington Route (as pioneered by Chris Bonnington’s UK team in 1975).

The highest Japanese camp (Camp 4) was pitched at 8,350m on December 13, one month after their arrival at Base Camp. The team was able to make such quick progress as they had pre-acclimatised on Cho Oyu and Pokalde, and they also knew the route, having failed on a previous attempt in the winter of 1991.

Photo: The steep Southwest Face of Everest (photo credit: R Devany)

Ten Sherpas carried necessary equipment up to Camp 4. Temperatures as low as -36C were recorded at that camp. The Sherpas then descended, fearing the biting cold and extreme risk of a fall. From there, the Japanese fixed 24 x 50m fixed rope to the South Summit at 8,750m. It was in that section that the climbers had to overcome the most technical climbing pitches. Above that point, they re-used old rope from previous expeditions along the Kangshung Ridge to the summit.

Ordinarily, winter winds on Everest are calamitous. But surprisingly, the team experienced relatively benign winds and almost no snowfall on the Face in mid-December. In the team notes they wrote:

… we had good weather on the face almost every day, which is convex and not exposed to stronger winds of West Ridge, N Ridge and SE Ridge. In winter, face is very easy after route making, although summit parties had strong winds above South Summit.

By “very easy,” I suspect that could be translated for most of us as meaning “barely survivable.”

Photo: The 1975 Bonnington Route up the Southwest Face, which the Japanese followed (diagram credit: Thincat via Wikimedia Commons).

While climbing, the team used 65 oxygen bottles, switching them on at 7,600m. Six of the Japanese (aged 26 – 45) reached the summit, in three two-man teams on Dec 18, 20, and 22. The men who reached the top were:

• Fumiaki Goto and Hideji Nazuka
• Shinsuki Ezuka and Osamu Tanabe
• Ryushi Hoshino and Yoshio Ogata

They observed:

… we could not climb Everest in winter without oxygen because of cold; would lose all fingers and toes.

Their achievement has never been repeated.

What are some interesting facts about Mount Everest climbers?

 Mount Everest climbers spend up to $100,000 expecting a solitary battle against nature. The reality is often a deadly high-altitude traffic jam where people literally die while waiting in line.

Because there are only a few days a year when the jet stream shifts enough to allow a summit push, hundreds of climbers attempt the peak simultaneously. This creates severe bottlenecks on the narrow ridges leading to the summit. Above 8,000 meters (26,000 feet), climbers enter the "Death Zone," an altitude where the human body cannot acclimatize and begins to slowly shut down. During peak season, mountaineers sometimes spend hours waiting in sub-zero temperatures just to safely pass a single technical section, burning through their severely limited supplemental oxygen.

Climbers navigate a narrow, exposed ridge near the summit of Mount Everest. - Photo by Debasish biswas kolkata (Wikimedia Commons) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Beyond the crowds, the people climbing the mountain consistently defy conventional logic.

Sherpas possess unique evolutionary adaptations. Many assume the local Sherpa guides are simply extremely fit, but their physiology has evolved over thousands of years to thrive in thin air. Surprisingly, acclimatized Sherpas have lower concentrations of red blood cells than visiting climbers. While a typical climber's body goes into overdrive producing red blood cells to capture oxygen—making their blood thick and sluggish—Sherpa cells are simply much more efficient at metabolizing the oxygen they do have.

Age limits are routinely shattered. The mountain has been conquered by a 13-year-old boy (American Jordan Romero) and an 80-year-old man (Japanese mountaineer Yuichiro Miura). Miura's achievement is particularly baffling to medical science: he underwent two heart surgeries for cardiac arrhythmia before his record-breaking 2013 ascent.

The route is marked by the fallen. Due to the extreme danger and physical impossibility of carrying dead weight down from the Death Zone, the bodies of most who perish on Everest remain on the mountain. Over time, some of these well-preserved bodies have inadvertently become macabre navigational landmarks for climbers passing through the snow.

While visiting mountaineers spend years training for a single, once-in-a-lifetime attempt, one man treats the summit almost like a regular commute. Kami Rita Sherpa has stood at the top of the world more times than anyone else in history. As of May 2024, he has successfully summited Mount Everest a record 30 times.

There are so many mountains higher than 8000 m, why isn't there any higher than 9000 m?

 Earth has never had much higher mountains than the highest now existing. The reason is that when the mountains get high enough they start to crumble because the rock at the base is not strong enough to take the pressure, and they start to flatten.

In addition, the crust "floats" on the mantle, and a massive mountain pushes the crust down, causing it to sink, limiting its maximum height.

The theoretical max height of a mountain on Earth is around 10-14 kilometers (6-9 miles) above the surrounding plain, limited by rock strength, gravity, and isostasy (crust sinking under weight).

But since erosion works away at the mountains as they are formed, Most mountains never reach the theoretical maximum. The tallest on Earth now is Mount Mauna Kea (over 10 km base-to-peak), close to the theoretical max

[1]

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Footnotes

[1] https://www.geologyin.com/2017/07/mount-everest-is-not-tallest-mountain.html

Is it hard to climb down from Mount Everest?

 Climbing down from Everest is relatively easy compared to the ascent; however, as of December 2024, ninety-seven people who made it to the summit of Mount Everest died during the subsequent descent. That might seem like an oxymoron, so let me explain the reasoning below:

Of the 97 deaths, the causes of death while descending were as follows:

• Falls: 31
• Exhaustion: 23
• Altitude sickness: 18
• Exposure/Frostbite: 14
• Disappearance: 3
• Crevasse: 3
• Falling Rock / Ice: 2 (ground beneath them gave way)
• Other Illness: 2
• Avalanche: 1

But the crucial point to note is that all but eight of those deaths occurred above 7,900m, i.e. in the death-zone. Being in the death-zone is exceptionally dangerous, regardless of whether a climber is ascending or descending. The longer a person is in the death zone, the more likely they are to fall into harm’s way. Stay there long enough, and it is certain that a climber will die. By definition, since a person descends after they have ascended, people are at their most exposed during their descent, as they have been in the death-zone longer by that stage.

Photo: A descending climber in the death-zone aims for Everest Camp 4 . Climbers are visible on the route to Camp 3, over the Geneva Spur, to the right of photo. (credit: Greg Jack)

Many climbers have correctly aborted their ascent a few hundred metres from the summit due to exhaustion or coldness. They turned around and started to descend. Several then died before reaching the relative safety of Camp 4. As such, it was the demands of the low-oxygen, sub-zero environment that caused their death, not the climbing down itself. The critical and catastrophic sequence of events had already begun before they started their descent.

Photo: Me (blue) and Greg Jack descending from Everest Camp 4 to Camp 3.

My own experience on Everest might better illustrate the answer:

(Please note that many other climbers will have had a different encounter)

1. It took me 6 weeks to get from Base Camp to the summit; it took 2.5 days to descend.
2. It took me 12 hours to climb from Camp 4 to the summit; it took 3 hours to descend.
3. Ascending was gut-wrenching, with as much as 10 stationary seconds between each pace at times. Descending was with a constant, wide gait.
4. Climbing up a near vertical wall with a heavy pack while in oxygen debt is devastating. It’s much, much easier on descending to rappel down a rope, letting gravity do the work.
5. While ascending, I was venturing into lesser oxygen, and experiencing the deteriorating mental and physical effects of same. As I was gasping for air, my body was busting itself to create additional red blood cells. While descending I grew stronger (once below Camp 4), as I’d achieved maximum acclimatisation and was now reaching farther into denser air that contained increasing amounts of oxygen.
6. At its most basic level, it’s much easier to walk downhill rather than uphill. Below Camp 4 on the descent, my breathing was rarely raised.

Photo: Descending climbers within an hour of Base Camp. The red arrow marks another pair of climbers. (credit: Greg Jack)

Did I make the descent sound too easy?

The oxygen deprivation in the death-zone delivers a level of exhaustion that is quite simply beyond description. For the full 3-hour descent from the summit until a few metres above Camp 4, I was certain I would not reach the tents.