🏔️The Greats

Almer entered history as a gatecrasher: in 1854 he and Ulrich Kaufmann chased Alfred Wills' party up the Wetterhorn carrying a young fir tree to plant on the summit, were nearly taken for hostile rivals, and finished the climb alongside them. Forty-two years later, in June 1896, he returned to the same summit with his wife Margaritha to mark their golden wedding anniversary — he was 70, she 71, and the climb was celebrated across Europe as the couple's fifty-year love letter to the mountain that made his name.

Anderegg guided Lucy Walker of Liverpool for over two decades, including her 1871 Matterhorn climb — the first by a woman. Walker never married, and late in life, asked why, she is said to have answered that she loved mountains and Melchior, and Melchior already had a wife. The Alpine Club brought him to London as a celebrity; his portrait hung in its rooms, and English climbers booked his seasons years ahead. He kept living in Meiringen, carving wood in winter, guiding in summer, to the end.

On 14 July 1865 Croz led Whymper's party up the Matterhorn, first to the summit of the last great unclimbed Alpine peak. On the descent, the novice Douglas Hadow slipped and knocked Croz from his stance; the rope snapped behind them, and Croz, Hadow, Hudson and Douglas fell some 1,200 m down the north face. The broken rope is still displayed in Zermatt's Matterhorn Museum, and a pointed summit of the Grandes Jorasses he had climbed a year earlier carries his name — Pointe Croz.

On the summit, Hillary photographed Tenzing holding his ice axe aloft with the flags of Nepal, the United Nations, Britain and India — but there is no summit photograph of Hillary, because Tenzing had never used a camera and, as Hillary later wrote, the top of Everest was no place to teach him. Tenzing buried sweets and a pencil his daughter Nima had given him in the snow as a Buddhist offering. Hounded afterward by the question of who stepped up first, he finally answered in his autobiography: Hillary — ending the speculation with characteristic grace.

Her greatest climb was doubted for years. Bradey's teammates — Rob Hall among them — had already left base camp, and her route was not covered by the expedition's permit, so the team publicly cast doubt on her claim, partly to protect itself from Nepali sanctions. She had climbed without a summit photograph that could settle it. The Himalayan Database and the climbing world eventually accepted the ascent, and she told the full story in her 2015 memoir Going Up Is Easy — by then a veteran guide whose word was her profession.

In May 2024 he summited Everest twice within ten days — his 29th and 30th ascents — not as a stunt but as a work schedule, guiding one rotation and then going back up with the next. Interviewers keep asking about the record; he keeps giving the same answer, that he climbs for a living and the number simply accumulated. His father was among the first generation of professional Sherpa guides after the 1950s expeditions; the son turned the family trade into the most repeated act of high-altitude work in history.

On 26 July 2014, Dawa Yangzum, Maya Sherpa and Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita became the first Nepali women's team to summit K2 — on the 60th anniversary of its first ascent, on the mountain where Nepali men had long worked and died as staff. She had left home in her mid-teens against her family's wishes to work on expeditions. The K2 climb silenced the argument that Sherpa women belonged below base camp; the IFMGA carnet she finished three years later made the point in paperwork no employer could dispute.