I’ve just been reading an article called The 5 Greatest Mount Everest Climbers. It was probably quite an easy one to write, as four of the climbers pretty much pick themselves. Everest without George Mallory would be like Popeye without Bluto – the fate of both is inextricably linked. Not only was he the first to explore the mountain, but he was the most determined and best-known of the early climbers, and his disappearance on the Northeast Ridge in 1924 is an important part of Everest history and continues to fascinate to this day. As the first two men to climb the mountain and return alive in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's names are equally linked with Everest and deserve their place on the list. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler became the first people to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen in 1978, but Reinhold Messner’s solo ascent by the North Face in 1980 broke the mould in three ways. Not only was it oxygenless, but it was by a new route and the first time anyone had climbed the world’s highest mountain solo and completely unsupported. If Mallory, Hillary and Tenzing were the early pioneers who broke new ground, Messner more than anyone else took climbing Everest to a new level by doing things nobody had believed possible. Once he even spotted a yeti, and ended up writing a book about it.
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