Without really trying, Australian polar explorer and mountaineer Damien Gildea has become the world’s foremost bearer of bad news for ambitious adventurers. Two years ago he blew the whistle on Colin O’Brady’s “Impossible First” crossing of the Antarctic land mass, piling context on top of history to galvanize a consensus among polar explorers that the expedition—and several that preceded it—had not lived up to its billing.
Now the Australian has lobbed a quiet bombshell into the highest echelons of the mountaineering world, penning a meticulously detailed piece in the American Alpine Journal late last year revealing that for decades, climbers have routinely stopped short of the summit on three of the world’s highest mountains.
The story draws on years of sleuthing by an international team of amateur investigators led by Eberhard Jurgalski of the website 8000ers.com. As such the allegations aren’t new, but Gildea’s story, titled “The 8000-er Mess,” places them in an esteemed climbing publication, in clear English, with illustrations and ample context.
Through painstaking analysis of summit photos, satellite imagery and other data, the researchers determined that only about half the climbers claiming a summit of Annapurna (8,091 meters) had actually reached the highest point, and almost all climbers on Manaslu (8,163 meters) had not continued to the summit. And whether by confusion or expediency, many have also missed the higher of the twin tops on Dhaulagiri (8,167 meters).
The peaks in question are among the world’s 14 tallest, a pantheon of Himalayan and Karakoram giants known collectively as the eight-thousanders because each rises above 8,000 meters (26,267 feet). Climbing all of them has been the foundation of some of mountaineering’s most illustrious careers.
Without naming names (more on that later), Gildea notes that the research “has led to the remarkable situation where it is possible that no one has stood on the true highest point of all the 8,000-meter peaks.” While the implications are clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of high-altitude climbing lore, Gildea is less interested in rewriting history than establishing a new baseline. He and his fellow researchers suggest as-yet undefined “tolerance zones” should apply to past climbs, but that going forward all mountaineers should be held to a simple standard: “The summit is the summit.”
AJ: You’ve lit the fuse on quite a bombshell. What has the reaction been in the climbing community?
Damien Gildea: It’s been fairly quiet so far, but I think that’s partly because of Covid. There hasn’t been a lot of climbing activity since the piece came out, so people haven’t had to deal with it.
I wouldn’t take the lack of publicity as a lack of interest, though. A lot of people don’t understand how professional and competitive the European mountaineering scene is. They take a lot of this shit really seriously, and there are some reputations to protect. At the moment they haven’t publicly reacted, but they’re certainly aware of it.
Almost there: A Manaslu summit selfie posted on Instagram by Spanish climber Stefi Troguet (left).
You and the other researchers made the decision not to call out anyone by name, but in the very first paragraph you say it’s quite possible that nobody has actually reached all 14 of the world’s highest summits.
We debated this long and hard, and Dougald MacDonald, the editor of the American Alpine Journal, took a lot of interest and was very helpful. We really debated this a lot because we have a lot of names. The researchers—Rodolphe Popier, Tobias Pantel, and Eberhard Jurgalski—they’ve got all the names and the photos and the numbers. We included the names in the early drafts, and then we took them all out. We took every single name out.
How did you come to that decision?
We felt it was the only way we could be fair. You can muck around in the middle and name a few names and leave some people out, but that becomes unfair and inaccurate. So in the end it was just more elegant and more fair to take everybody out.
You write also that most of these missed summits were honest mistakes, and that the earlier climbers didn’t have access to the technology that’s available today. Should those folks get the benefit of the doubt?
Yes, that’s what the tolerance zones are for—just to say that in the past we didn’t have GPS and satellite imagery and photos taken from a helicopter. So you allow for that.
As a climber myself, I know that it’s really hard to tell some of these things when you’re up there. A caveat to all that is that on Manaslu, on the first ascent in 1956, they did go to the main top. They didn’t have any of this tech and they went to the main top.
If we set aside the professional climbers for a moment, the majority of the people that are claiming these false summits today, often unknowingly, are guided clients. Is there an argument not to press those folks to climb the last few meters and expose them to added risk?
I think that that may be practical, and certainly on Manaslu.
Is that because it’s a non-technical climb right up to 8000 meters, where you need to tackle a very sketchy snow ridge to get to the true summit?
Yeah, we don’t want to encourage dozens of people to crowd onto that little summit ridge to get to the top during a very narrow time window. But to me, the better answer is actually not to go to Manaslu at all. It’s not a good mountain for aspiring or training climbers to go to en masse. It was never a good mountain, because of the serac fall, the avalanche danger, getting lost on a big plateau, crevasses. It was only when the Chinese started to limit access to Cho Oyu that commercial groups needed an easy eight-thousander, and so they went to Manaslu.
So to your question, yeah. For Manaslu, put principles aside and just be practical. But if you want to go to the top, then you’ve got to go to the top.
In your research you learned that one of the climbers you most admire did not reach the true summit of Dhaulagiri, but you say it didn’t diminish your respect for him.
Yeah, that’s because of the way he climbed. He was an admirable climber, quite regardless of the last 20 meters on Dhaulagiri. They climbed the East Face of Dhaulagiri, pretty much in winter, and if you have any perspective, particularly if you’re a climber, then you understand that the way you do things matters.
That was a bit gutting because he’s a climber I really admired, and to have to include him because the facts are irrefutable that he didn’t go to the summit of Dhaulagiri was pretty hard to take. But to me, that doesn’t make him any less inspiring as a climber. It was an honest mistake.
You’ve fallen into this position as a truth-teller in the world of high-altitude mountaineering and polar travel, and yet you don’t seem to be as concerned personally with that sort of objective scorekeeping as you are with the more basic questions of how it was done—how good was the line, how imaginative the route, how creative the climb.
That’s essentially what I say in the article. What is climbing? What are you doing it for, and what is best? The goal of climbing all the eight-thousanders is good and interesting and worthy. But we’re now up to like 30-something people claiming all 14 eight-thousanders, and they’re doing them by the normal routes with Sherpa help. So what? There’s no quality in that.
It’s very subjective. I mean, people recognize that Børge Ousland’s crossing of Antarctica was good because it was 25 years ago, he was alone, no one had done anything like it and it was incredibly bold. So it has style and quality and an element of grace and all these other good things beyond just being first.
I get the sense you felt this story, and also your critique of Colin O’Brady’s 2018 Antarctic crossing, was important to write, but that you didn’t particularly relish the task.
I do think it’s important. With both this and the Antarctic piece, these stories built up over years. The Antarctic crossing one, that knowledge and perspective built up over nearly 20 years since I first skied to the South Pole in 2000-2001, and I’ve been climbing for nearly 30 years. I’m the only one of the research group that’s actually been on an eight-thousander, having attempted Gasherbrum I in 2007.
I wasn’t going to write anything on Colin O’Brady and Antarctica, and it probably seems like I’m some really worked up crank who had a thing against O’Brady and a burning desire to expose that stuff. But actually I had no intention of writing that thing. It was only other people’s prompting, and then him using the road was just a step too far. [Ed note: For about a third of his crossing, O’Brady travelled on the South Pole Overland Traverse, a flagged and graded route used by snow tractors that supply McMurdo station at the South Pole.]
Tracks from a tractor are visible in this press photo of O’Brady during his “Impossible First” expedition. Photo Colin O’Brady
I’d taken so little interest in those guys—Lou Rudd and Colin O’Brady—because I thought that whole thing had become so compromised and so boring that I couldn’t give a shit. And so I didn’t actually pay that much attention. I knew the road was there obviously, but I’d taken so little interest that I didn’t put it together that they were skiing on the road. Then I saw it written, whether it was Peter Winsor’s article or somewhere else, and I just said, ‘Oh fuck, this has [become] ridiculous.’
You didn’t waste much time. Your piece deconstructing O’Brady’s crossing ran to about 4,000 words and was published just a couple of weeks after he finished the trip.
All that information was in my head because I spent 10 years pretty much going to Antarctica every summer, mostly climbing, but also twice to the South Pole. So it was easy for me to corral all that information and put it out there.
You chose not to name the climbers, but you did call out O’Brady and quite a few others in your Antarctica piece, including Lou Rudd who travelled the same route that season. Is that a double standard?
I don’t want people to think that because I did something on Colin O’Brady and I’ve done something on the eight-thousanders that I’ve put them in the same category. They’re poles apart.
But to be fair to Colin O’Brady, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s not his fault, but shorter crossings were accepted by so many other people for so long that he was kind of led to believe that it was okay. That doesn’t mean it was okay. It was never okay. But when I said it wasn’t okay five years earlier, no one cared. I’ve been banging on about this stuff for years and no one paid any attention.
I think one of the reasons it got traction and a lot of people supported it was that they don’t like Colin. All these people are saying what an asshole he is, but I’ve never said anything like that, not in public or private, because I don’t care. I’ve never met the guy, and it’s nothing to me personally. I’m about the information and the getting the history as straight as you can.
You mention O’Brady’s use of the SPOT road. He’s said he used it because his logistics company, ALE [Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions] would only support that route.
Is that the essence of exploration? To do what you’re told?
I probably wasn’t cognizant of the degree to which they advise and recommend people like that, but I can tell you that if Børge Ousland or Mike Horn went down, ALE would not be telling them where to go. No one’s going to tell Børge Ousland what route to ski because he knows better than anyone.
I have this conversation with people, usually about climbing—the idea that even if you’re a big time professional adventurer it’s sensible to do what your guide says. That seems to be okay now. This idea that guided adventures are the peak of achievement has become accepted by the people who just seem to have less agency to organize and do this stuff themselves.
Let’s come back to that, because the majority of climbers on these peaks, particularly Manaslu, are paying clients who rely on their guides not just to fix ropes and carry gear, but also to tell them when they’ve reached the summit. That raises the question: how hard is it to know when you’re actually on top of these mountains?
The thing that alerted me to the problem on Annapurna was the Sherpa companies, because the Sherpas don’t care about most of this stuff, they get people up high, say ‘this is the summit,’ and everyone’s happy—get the summit bonus, take selfies, come again next year.
There’s a well-known saying, I think it was Carlos Carsolio who said, ‘The summit is the highest point and there’s only one.’ And we all sort of go along with that, but actually Annapurna is so close, these two tops, that it can be really hard to pick visually which is the highest. So I’m pretty sympathetic to that.
On Dhaulagiri there are two rocky points that are very close in height, just a couple of meters vertically. The difference is very, very small and you get people saying ‘I didn’t walk the extra 10 meters because it didn’t look higher.’ So I’m not too worried about that.
But in the case of Manaslu, people are not going to the summit because it’s too hard. And for climbers, that’s not a good excuse.
Top Image: Manaslu at dawn
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I love all you at AJ and everything you do, but am baffled why you covered this story or the one about Colin. All it does is create controversy over absolutely nothing. 99.9% of people do not care about this. Also, I read AJ to get away from this type of journalism. The climb is the adventure not the arbitrary point.
Thanks Dan, point taken, but you don’t think this: “it’s quite possible that nobody has actually reached all 14 of the world’s highest summits,” is a story worth covering? I’m not particularly concerned with records or FKTs either, but this idea that Damien is getting at strikes me as fascinating.
To offer a different perspective, I found this kind of earth-shattering. Yes, the whole journey matters, but if my years-long goal had been to reach the summit and it turns out I didn’t actually do that, what does that do to me? Do I care? Do I go back and climb it again? Does it make me pause and assess what’s actually important to me? And does this now open the gates to “first”-driven climbers who thought the history books had been written but turns out they’re not?
Dan, you’re probably still right about 99.9% of people not caring about this, but for this story, I guess count me in the 0.1%.
Exactly my sentiment.
99% of people can’t name the eight-thousanders, so whether or not lots of people care seems irrelevant. It absolutely matters a great deal to the people who DO care.
Calling out false or debatable claims of exploration, and subjecting those claims to rigour, is absolutely a necessary – and always present – aspect of this world.
The summit is not an “arbitrary point” and Colin’s claims of solo unsupported crossing to sell books while using a graded, flagged road isn’t “absolutely nothing.”
Actually, Dan, when adventurers and explorers make a claim, it speaks to the very essence and core of exploration and adventures. As to the importance of covering such claims, for the people making the claims, the claims are obviously important, so they should be reviewed and critiqued. Yes, the adventure is important, but if the person making the claim is ALSO important, then the coverage of the claim, not just the climb, is imperative. Finally, the top of mountains, the source of rivers, the width and depth of oceans is certainly NOT arbitrary. Such a believe leaves the claim subjective.
It would be good to make a clearer distinction between Sherpas and porters. One is an ethnicity, one is a job. Not all Sherpas are porters and not all porters are Sherpas.
As a now retired climber, I can say that I never recorded a climb as completed unless I stood on the highest point of the particular mountain. Someone else is perfectly welcome to climb to whatever point they like and say they have climbed the mountain, so long and they don’t claim such in the climbing community. Climbing is the most ethical activity I have ever known. You either do it, or you don’t. Reaching the summit is doing it. Not reaching the summit isn’t. It is just that simple. Don’t create a resumé filled with BS.
Twelve feet?
I think Dan is spot on.
Not only do most folks not know enough to care, now that we know enough to care, all we know is there’s a controversy of an insignificant quibble.
Seriously, this matters?
I guess this is what happens when adventurers run out of new challenges, they climb all the tallest peaks in the cold of winter (and die), they argue over who stood where on what mountain.
This climbing stuff has jumped the shark, you know it, we know it, it’s time to call it what it is.
If twelve ft doesn’t matter, does twenty? How about fifty? A hundred?
Either you have reached the top or you have not. It is a binary, absolute state.
This absolutely matters.
And debate like this has ALWAYS been part of these “sports”. People have always subjected others climbs to scrutiny. True feats withstand that scrutiny and that’s why that scrutiny is important.
I think it’s very important to bring this kind of stuff to surface. Here is why- today, adventure sports is very accessible. Anyone with internet, a zealous attitude and money can attempt a fairly difficult outdoor adventure, take a selfie, post it and claim it. This ease of access has led to exploitation of some pretty sacred spots and reduced the efforts of the dedicated hard core. We need to keep the public honest to honor those before us and retain the spirit of adventure.
Interesting article. I think that the idea of using open source info ala Bellingcat will play a part in whether future summit pics are accepted as evidence of a summit.
So pleased to read this article. Integrity has fallen out of so many aspects of life, it’s wonderful to see a moral compass (GPS?) being employed. If I read “person X summited mountain Y” I want to know that it is reliable. If a person has an epic, doesn’t reach the summit, has the presence of mind (luck?) to turn back and get down alive…well I’m still interested in that story too. An honest representation is all that I want. If your foot is over the line in tennis it’s not an Ace that you served it’s a fault; if your foot is over the line in basketball it’s not a 3 you just shot it’s 2 points; if you pull on a QuickDraw on that 5.14c just once it’s not a free ascent – lower off and keep trying. Plenty of ascents are newsworthy whether the true summit is reached or not…I just want to read Trip reports with true integrity.
Loved this article. I think this is holds very true to Adventure Journals ethos. Bringing light to complacency in the outdoor community is one of the reasons I read AJ.
I do not share Dan’s perspective. I read Adventure Journal to catch up on the news of the day in Adventure sports and recreation. This article is one of the reasons I still visit the site at least once a day. I’m not here for the gear reviews, or the backpacking stories. It may not be Rock and Ice, but I do get information here that I don’t always see on Alpinist or Rock and Ice.
Why do I think it’s poignant? Many of those adventures are paid for by sponsors and speaking tours. I’m pretty sure the sponsors want to know and so do others like me who follow the news of the people pushing the boundaries.
Controversy is not new to adventures. Claims of reaching summits and the poles have been engulfed in fraud and controversy since the beginning. The characters involved in these are colorful and engaging. Controversy sells.
Please keep them coming.
And by the way, it’s time for some more book recommendation. The Disappearances was excellent.
Thanks for covering this.
The world of ‘Adventure’, whether summits, first descents or treacherous crossings we are often left at the mercy of someones word, good faith or even the amount of research the claimer has done prior to their trip for evidence of their feat.
If nothing is questioned or controlled, then nothing matters.
@Dan climbing around on K2, then skiing down from your high point does not mean you have ‘skied K2’. Ask folks like Hans Kammerlander, Dave Watson or Andrej Bargiel if you dont believe me.
Consider,
I can climb 5.12d!
Sure I didn’t actually make the crux, but I did most of it so telling people I’m a 5.12d climber is all good….
Manaslu may be an exception, but it’s rare that the last 5 mtr of a mountain is the crux.
A better analogy would be to climb the 5.12d (crux and all) except you didn’t notice the last 5.7 move, and rapped down off a feature 18” below the ‘true top’.
The more pertinent question to me is: did you climb that 5.12d after someone else placed all the pro (turning it into a sport climb)… or worse still, were you just aid climbing on top-rope?
That’s more important to me than whether Messner stood on the exact highest pebble on K2.
Ahh, the games people play. This goes back to the age old idea of just being honest about your exploits. Remember that Voytek Kurtyka and Robert Schauer didn’t summit GIV after climbing the Shining Wall.
I really enjoyed reading about the difficulty of determining and reaching the summits of Manaslu, Annapurna, and Dhaulagiri. Thanks for a most informative article.
So did Messner miss Manaslu? Maybe he can chime in;)
I think this is a good piece and I’m glad you covered the controversy. My concern with this effort is that, barring irrefutable proof in the form of a clear, mask-less selfie embedded with geo coordinates, all summit claims – past, present and future – will be suspect. What I appreciate most about mountaineering is the almost pointless, yet often unbelievably intense effort to do something really hard. But the pointlessness is a critical component…if one were doing it for money or fame, then of course some would take these risks; but that almost all who do it do it for the personal satisfaction makes it much, much more impressive and honest and true, if that makes any sense. But if we turn it all into a Boston Marathon-type event, with meticulous records and scads of folks scanning photos and time records and splits looking for cheaters, then mountaineering all becomes something less true and honest. If you’re not doing it for the money, and you’re really just trying to prove to yourself that you’re one badass climber, then I’d hate to see people being publicly shamed if they don’t have proof they didn’t make it up the last 10 feet.
Now do ski mountaineering.
Perhaps climbing to “the highest point of not crazy risk” could be the definition of having climbed a mountain. I mean, IMO Stefi Troguet and her partner climbed Manaslu. I have two reacitons to the video of the two guys who went up on that little ridge to get higher. 1) It seems unnecessarily risky for 5 extra feet. 2) Even they didn’t go to the ultimate highest point visible on the ridge. I mean, one risks one’s life anyway climbing such high mountains. Should it really be necessary to push the risk to the max to get to the absolute highest point?
Rick, those are good points and Damien addressed them to some extent in the interview, when he said the practical thing on Manaslu (for the majority of climbers) is not to go those few extra meters, but that if you want to make a career of it you really should go to the top.
It’s really interesting to read these comments because it sounds a lot like my internal dialog when getting ready for the interview, and tracks a lot of what Damien and I talked about. An important point that came up many times–and maybe it doesn’t come across strongly enough in the edited interview–is that these were mostly honest mistakes (in the case of elite climbers) or people stopping when their guides said they were at the top. It’s not a gotcha project. It’s more about setting parameters going forward.
If there’s one thing I took away from this interview it’s Damien saying that in climbing the way you do things matters . . . a perfect example (among several) that Damien brought up in the interview (and Bard mentioned above) is Voytek and Schauer putting up that epic line on Gasherbrum IV and not bothering to tag the summit. In that case, the summit was beside the point.
Interesting article and I would separate the Colin O’Brady crossing from unsummited summits: different claims & narratives. For regular climbers / mountaineers, operating under their own steam, I think a balance needs to be achieved though I am not one for living that balance. I have returned to mountains to stand on the absolute summit days after being on what I considered the summit (Scottish mountains so much smaller than those in the article!) but, on reflection, decided it wasn’t! Yet I don’t consider this healthy: it’s an obsession and one that I want to replace with simply the well-being that comes from the outdoors, physical effort and nature. The difference between some of these summiting corrections was only a matter of a metre or less in height, no addtional effort or skill required but the resummit was driven by a need to shut down the internal voice! That is a voice I would gladly kill. For example, I still dwell on returning to Aonach Beag as when I summited it, the summit area was covered in deep snow with a cornice. I knew the absolute summit was at the edge of the east face but not where, under all that snow, the east face drop off began and where the precise highest point would be. Likely a search would have resulted in death!
The authors reason for covering it is more noble than commenters are giving him credit for.
He’s basically saying: Don’t brag about being a client who got guided up some mountain! You probably didn’t even go to the top because you weren’t self sufficient enough to know the difference!
Bahahahaha. Climbers full of shit about reaching the summit? No way. They would never lie. That first photo is pretty damn funny though. I guess when you are “feeling so insignificant” those last 12 feet look a lot further away than 12 feet.