Elevation: 29,035 feet (8,850 meters)
Location: Nepal/Tibet, Asia
First Ascent: Sir Edmund Hillary (New Zealand) and Tenzing Norgay (Nepal), May 29, 1953
Fast Facts
- Mount Everest is also called Chomolangma, meaning “Goddess Mother of Snows” in Tibetan and Sagarmatha, meaning "Mother of the Universe" in Nepalese. The mountain is sacred to the native people.
- British surveyors named the peak for George Everest (properly pronounced “I-ver-ist”) a Surveyor General of India in the mid-nineteenth century.
- Everest's current elevation is based on a GPS device implanted on the highest rock point under ice and snow in 1999 by an American expedition.
- Mount Everest was once surveyed at exactly 29,000 feet but the surveyors didn't think people would believe that so they added two feet to its elevation, making it 29,002 feet.
- Mount Everest is rising from 3 to 6 millimeters a year.
- The best time to climb Everest is in early May before the monsoon season.
- The Southeast Ridge from Nepal, called the South Col Route, and the Northeast Ridge or the North Col Route from Tibet are the usual climbing routes.
- In 1978 Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler were the first to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. In 1980 Messner made the first solo ascent, which was via a new route on the mountain's north side.
- The largest expedition to climb Mount Everest was a 410-climber Chinese team in 1975.
- The most climbers to reach the summit in a single day was 40 on May 10, 1993.
- The safest year on Mount Everest was 1993 when 129 climbers reached the summit and only 8 died.
- The least safe year on Mount Everest was 1996 when 98 climbers summitted and 15 died. That season was the "Into Thin Air" fiasco documented by author Jon Krakauer
- Sherpa Babu Chiri stayed on the summit of Everest for 21 hours and 30 minutes.
- Stacey Allison from Portland, Oregon made the first ascent by an American woman on September 29, 1988.
- The country with the most deaths on Mount Everest is Nepal with 47 (as of 2009).
- Jean-Marc Boivin of France made the fastest descent from the summit of Mount Everest to the base by swiftly paragliding down in 11 minutes.
- Davo Kamicar of Slovenia made the first ski descent of Mount Everest on October 10, 2000.
- Over 150 bodies of dead climbers are on the peak.
- A jumping spider lives up to 22,000 feet on Mount Everest.
- A helicopter piloted by a Frenchman supposedly made a hover landing on the summit in 2005.
