A chronological list of the 10 highest confirmed mountain summits ever climbed

Some of you may have clicked through to this blog post because the title intrigued or (perhaps more accurately) confused you. There are a lot of adjectives in it. What the heck does it mean, precisely?

The title needs all of those adjectives, for if I dropped any one of them, it would mean a different list.

A list of the 10 highest mountains ever climbed would simply be a list of the world’s 10 highest mountains because – yes – all 10 of them have been climbed.

What about a chronological list of the 10 highest mountains ever climbed? Well, there was a time in history when none of the world’s top 10 mountains had been climbed. What was the highest mountain ever climbed back in those days? And what was the one before that? If you’re intrigued to find out then read on. I’m actually going to make this list reverse chronological. The more you read of it, the further back in time we will go.

The further back in time that we go, however, the less that we know. There was a time in the dim and distant past when people climbed mountains and didn’t make a big song and dance about it. They reached a summit and didn’t appreciate the significance; it was just a point on their walk with a nice view; they didn’t know just how high they were; or their ascent was disputed, they claimed a summit but we can’t be sure. And further back in time, people simply didn’t write about or record their ascents – we simply have no way of knowing which summits were reached and when. By the time I get to the last mountain on this list, I have to confess, we can’t know for sure that at the time its summit was reached, it was the highest mountain ever climbed. Hence the qualifying adjective, highest confirmed mountain ever climbed.

The final adjective in the title, mountain, is more usually a noun, but here I’m using it as an adjective – mountain (adj.) summit (n.) – to make one final subtle distinction. In the 1920s and 1930s, British climbers such as Edward Norton and Frank Smythe were beavering about very high on the slopes of Everest without actually reaching the summit. In 1909 the Duke of Abruzzi and his party got to within touching distance of the top of Chogolisa in the Karakoram without stepping on the very top. All of these people were likely standing on points on the earth’s surface higher than anyone had ever stood before. But this post is about highest summits, so they are excluded from this list.

Clear as the sky on top of Ben Nevis? Splendid. So let’s get on with the list.

1 Everest, Nepal/Tibet (8,848m)

First ascent: 1953

It took eight British expeditions spanning the 1920s, 1930s and early 1950s, and one Swiss near-miss in 1952 before Tenzing Norgay of India and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand stood atop the highest point on earth on 29 May 1953.

Tenzing personally had been on seven Everest expeditions and no one was more deserving of being the first than he. All of the attempts in the 1920s and 1930s had been via the North Ridge on the Tibetan side. It wasn’t until Nepal opened its borders to tourism in 1950 that a key was found to a route up from the south via the Southeast Ridge. It was along this route that Tenzing and Hillary finally strode to the top.

2 Annapurna, Nepal (8,091m)

First ascent: 1950

The opening of Nepal in 1950 had also been the key to the first ever ascent of an 8,000m peak. With Nepal closed, countless expeditions had been launched to K2, Nanga Parbat and Kangchenjunga in what was then British India, all without success.

The French team that arrived in Nepal in 1950, didn’t even know which peak they were going to climb, let alone by which route. They explored Dhaulagiri and then the northwest spur of Annapurna before deciding to concentrate on the technically easier but more dangerous north face.

Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the summit on 3 June 1950. Their frostbitten, snowblind descent has become the stuff of legend.

3 Nanda Devi, India (7,816m)

First ascent: 1936

India’s second highest mountain, Nanda Devi, was considered to be one of the most inaccessible mountains in the world. Surrounded by a ring of towering peaks, just finding a way to its base had eluded explorers for decades. The secret was unlocked in 1934 when the British mountaineers Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton discovered a route into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary by the precipitous Rishi Ganga gorge.

When a team of young American climbers invited Tilman to join them on an expedition to climb the peak two years later, he jumped at the chance. He led them into the sanctuary and reached the summit on 29 August 1936 with fellow Briton Noel Odell, who was better known as the man who watched George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappear into the mist on Everest’s Northeast Ridge in 1924.

Tilman’s book about the expedition is believed to be the inspiration for The Ascent of Rum Doodle.

4 Kamet, India (7,756m)

First ascent: 1931

The British team who made the first ascent of Kamet in 1931 included the very same Eric Shipton who had discovered the route into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary with Bill Tilman in 1934.

Kamet lies just north of Nanda Devi, close to the Chinese border in the Garhwal region of northern India. The team was led by Frank Smythe. They followed a route from the south up the East Kamet Glacier, reconnoitred by Charles Meade in 1913.

Shipton, Smythe, R.L. Holdsworth and expedition sirdar Lewa Sherpa reached the summit on 21 June 1931. They were followed two days later by Raymond Greene (brother of the novelist Graham Greene), local porter Kesar Singh, and the delightfully named Capt. Eugene St. John Birnie.

5 Jongsong Peak, Nepal/India/Tibet (7,462m)

First ascent: 1930

Jongsong Peak has the rare distinction of being a mountain on a tripoint, or border of three countries. Its first ascent was the consolation prize of German Gunther Dyhrenfurth’s international expedition to climb Kangchenjunga, after their main objective was abandoned when one of their porters was killed in an avalanche.

Camped within Nepal on the north side of Kangchenjunga, Dyhrenfurth decided that his party would cross the border into Sikkim, northern India. From their base on the Jonsong La, the Austrian Erwin Schneider and German Hermann Hoerlin reached the summit on 3 June 1930. They were followed five days later by Dyhrenfurth, the German Uli Wieland, Swiss Marcel Kurz and the very same Frank Smythe that we met on Kamet (you will notice a pattern emerging).

6 Pik Lenin, Kyrgyzstan (7,132m)

First ascent: 1928

Prior to making the first ascent of Jongsong Peak, Erwin Schneider was just a 22-year-old student when he joined an German-Austrian expedition to the Soviet Pamirs, where he climbed eight peaks over 6,000m

He reached the summit of Pik Lenin with the Germans Karl Wien and Eugene Allwein on 25 September 1928. Nowadays, the standard route up Pik Lenin is from the northern Krygyz side. Although this route is technically easy, it is long and dangerous, and crosses a notorious snow slope that has been the site of many tragedies.

Schneider and co. started from the south side in Tajikistan. They climbed a more challenging route via the Greater Saukdara Glacier, Krylenko Pass, and the northeast ridge.

7 Pauhunri, India/Tibet (7,128m)

First ascent: 1911

When the Scottish physiologist Alexander Kellas reached the summit of Pauhunri on 14 June 1911, accompanied by two Sherpas known only as Sony and ‘Tuny’s brother’, he had no idea he was standing on the highest summit that had ever been climbed. Moreover, he remained ignorant of the fact for the rest of his life.

In fact, the whole world remained ignorant of the fact until historian Ian Mitchell started researching a biography of Kellas nearly 100 years later. When Kellas climbed Pauhunri, its height was believed to be 7,065m. It wasn’t until years later that the mountain was properly surveyed, and its true height measured at 7,128m.

8 Trisul, India (7,120m)

First ascent: 1907

Trisul, in the Garhwal region of northwest India, is one of the ring of peaks that circle Nanda Devi. It is actually a ridge of three peaks that is believed to resemble a trident, hence its name.

Its first ascent on 12 June 1907 by British doctor Tom Longstaff, Italian mountain guides Henri and Alexis Brocherel, and the Gurkha Karbir Burathoki, was notable not only because it was the highest summit that had ever been reached, but because of the speed of their ascent.

Starting out at 5.30am from 17,450 feet (or 5,319m) above the Trisul Glacier on the northeast flank of the mountain, they climbed roped for most of the ascent. They reached the summit at 4pm, having climbed 1,800 vertical metres of virgin snow slopes in a little over 10 hours, at an altitude that no one had ever climbed before.

Alexis Brocherel had led for most of the ascent, and Longstaff, at the back of the rope, had doubted whether he would be able to keep up. But Henri, in front of him, had offered to pull on the rope as much as he needed. If anyone considered this cheating, however, Longstaff made up for it by cutting steps up the final summit snow slopes, being the only member of the party who was wearing crampons.

9 Aconcagua, Argentina (6,959m)

First ascent: 1897

When the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen stood on the highest point in South America on 14 January 1897, having climbed the mountain via what is now the standard route up the Canaleta from the Horcones Valley, he stood there alone.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. His British expedition leader Edward Fitzgerald had been the driving force and the expedition’s main financier. But Fitzgerald had a peculiar problem.

The expedition had been epic. The team had spent weeks at high altitude, and made numerous attempts to get higher still before retreating to the Horcones Valley and trying again. But every time the team climbed higher than 6,000m, Fitzgerald broke down. In despair, as leader of the expedition, he ordered Zurbriggen to continue to the summit without him. When team members Stuart Vines and Nicola Lanti repeated the ascent on 13 February, Fitzgerald was left behind again.

10 Chimborazo, Ecuador (6,310m)

First ascent: 1880

This is where things start to get hazy. Before Zurbriggen climbed Aconcagua, the highest summit that had ever been reached might well be Chimborazo, but we will never know for sure.

We do know for sure that British mountaineer Edward Whymper made the first ascent of Chimborazo on 4 January 1880 with the Italian guides Jean-Antoine and Louis Carrel. It’s something I’ve written a lot about in this blog and in my book Feet and Wheels to Chimborazo.

Despite taking a 10ft flag pole with them to plant on the summit, locals questioned their ascent. And so, to silence the doubters, the three men returned with local Ecuadorians David Beltrán and Francisco Campaña, and reached the summit for a second time on 3 July. They collected ash that had drifted to Chimborazo from the summit of nearby Cotopaxi, which happened to be erupting as they climbed.

So they definitely reached the summit, but was it the highest mountain ever climbed?

Other potential highest mountains ever climbed

We can keep going back in time, to 1872, when Wilhelm Reiss and Angel Escobar made the first ascent of 5,897m Cotopaxi, or to 1848, when an American team made the first recorded ascent of 5,611m Pico de Orizaba in Mexico.

But there are other possibilities…

In 1892, the British explorer Martin Conway, leader of an international expedition to the Karakoram, claimed to have made the first ascent of 6,888m Pioneer Peak, which would have made it the highest mountain ever climbed. But Pioneer Peak turned out to be merely a shoulder of 7,312m Baltoro Kangri (then known as Golden Throne). Even more disappointingly, a later survey of Pioneer Peak measured it at a comparatively flaccid 6,499m.

More impressively, Englishman William Graham, and Swiss Emil Boss and Ulrich Kauffman claimed to have climbed to within an ice axe of the summit of 7,338m Kabru East in the Indian Himalaya in 1883. But how far from the summit was that? Their ascent was disputed and dismissed by the mountaineering community, though it has been reassessed by modern historians, and in the course of their expedition they may well have climbed other summits that were higher than Chimborazo.

Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is Llullaillaco (6,739m), a dormant volcano in the Puna de Atacama, a desert region on the northern borderlands of Argentina and Chile. Its first recorded ascent took place in 1952, but in 1999 a team of archaeologists discovered the mummified remains of three Inca children close to the summit.

It is likely, therefore, that the summit of Llullaillaco was reached as early as the 15th century, when the Incas expanded their empire until it covered a 4,000km length from Colombia to Chile. But, alas, the Incas left no written record.

And if Llullaillaco then as we go further back into the mists of time, what other high mountains had been climbed?