Climbing Without Oxygen: Two Indian Mountaineers Test Their Limits

Everesters Arjun Vajpai and Parth Upadhyaya recently attempted one of the holy grails of classic mountaineering — climbing an 8,000-metre peak without oxygen. This is their story

- Shail Desai

“When I think of mountaineering with four cylinders of oxygen on one’s back and a mask over one’s face, well, it loses its charm” — George Mallory.

The legendary British mountaineer made three attempts on Everest in the early 1920s. It was when the world of mountaineering was still coming to terms with the use of supplementary oxygen while climbing. Mallory had always been averse to using oxygen. But he was also aware that a lot was at stake when it came to the first ascent of Everest.

He had been part of two unsuccessful expeditions in the past. As a result, on his final attempt in 1924, Mallory decided to climb with ‘English air’. He famously never returned. His remains were discovered 700 metres from the summit by a BBC sponsored search party in 1999. Whether Mallory died on his way up to the summit, or on his descent after becoming the first one to climb Everest, is one of the everlasting mysteries of modern mountaineering.

It is known that Mallory did use some oxygen on the final attempt of that fateful expedition, though he had always believed in climbing without it. Scientific wisdom at that time, and for several decades subsequently, was that it wasn’t humanly possible to climb an 8,000-metre mountain (8,000er) without oxygen. The Italian-Austrian duo of Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler proved that wrong when they summited Everest without oxygen in 1978.

Since then, many purists have attempted to follow in their path. But it has not been easy. According to Eberhard Jurgalski, a chronicler of high altitude climbing, of the 34 mountaineers who have climbed all 14 8,000-metre mountains globally, only 15 have managed to do so without oxygen.