![]() In the press release, Arnot continued, “When you succeed at reaching your goal, it makes you reflect on the hard days, the work, and lessons I’ve learned along the way. Sherpa, who summited last week, has now climbed Everest seven times. ![]() In fact, only one other woman has stood on Everest’s summit more than Arnot, and that is Lakhpa Sherpa, a 42-year-old Nepalese woman who reportedly works at a 7-Eleven in Connecticut. While this may be Arnot’s first oxygen-less ascent of Everest, it is actually her sixth time successfully climbing the mountain, which is a record for American women. ![]() Arnot, considered America’s best high-altitude female climber, has added her name to that elite list, which makes her the seventh woman ever to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen. Since then, six other women have achieved this feat, including Carla Perez, of Ecuador, who summited sans Os this week. Lydia Bradley, of New Zealand, became the first woman to climb Everest without oxygen in 1988. This week, America’s best high-altitude female climber added her name to that elite list. Today, Everest has been climbed by more than 4,000 people, but fewer than 200 have done it without oxygen. Either way, choosing to abandon the crutch of supplemental oxygen never really caught on with the Everest crowd. Messner and Habeler, however, proved everyone wrong, and some climbing purists have even gone so far as to argue that, in a sense, theirs is the first true ascent of the mountain. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler became the first people to climb Everest without oxygen in 1978, a year in which doctors all but unanimously believed that it would be physically impossible for a human body to function at Everest’s upper altitudes. More than a third of all deaths on Everest can be linked to people trying to climb without oxygen. However, without oxygen, Everest becomes much more dangerous. Using supplemental Os effectively makes climbers feel as if they’re 3,000 feet lower than they actually are, which is why many climbers consider using supplemental oxygen to be cheating. Thankfully, as Arnot is currently safe and sound back in a lower camp, she is the first American woman to climb Everest without oxygen and survive the descent-which, statistically, is when most Everest climbers die.Ĭlimbing Everest without supplemental oxygen is more difficult than climbing with canisters of “Os,” as they’re called. And the complete climb of a mountain is reaching the summit and getting safely to the bottom again.” When asked about this issue sometime in the mid 1980s, Hillary reportedly stated, “If you climb a mountain for the first time and die on the descent, is it really a complete first ascent of the mountain? I’m rather inclined to think, personally, that maybe it’s quite important, the getting down. And if indeed they did summit, shouldn’t they be credited with the mountain’s first ascent-not Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who are, of course, officially considered to be the first men to succeed in standing atop Everest? For a number of years, climbers speculated on whether or not, in 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine had actually reached the summit of Everest before their ultimate disappearance from high on the Himalayan giant. This debate-about whether or not one must survive the descent for their achievement to “count”-has a precedent in Everest’s storied history. To others, the fact that she didn’t make it down alive negates her achievement. To some in the climbing world, Francys is the first American woman to climb Everest without oxygen. In 1998, a Hawaiian-born woman named Francys Arsentiev, 40, successfully climbed Everest without oxygen alongside her husband Sergei Arsentiev however, on the descent, both climbers died in separate events. Whether Arnot is the first, or second, American woman to successfully climb Everest without oxygen, however, is a debatable point. “Climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen has been a goal of mine for a long time.” “This has been an emotional journey, to say the least,” said Arnot, according to a press release issued by one of her sponsors. And if that’s the case, it’s possible that Melissa Arnot just became the first American woman to climb Mount Everest without using supplemental oxygen.Īrnot reached the summit of the 29,029-foot (8,848-meter) mountain on May 23, achieving a dream that, for her, has been years in the making. They say that reaching the summit is only half the climb.
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