Everest Without Oxygen: Messner and Habeler, 1978
1978 · event
On 8 May 1978 Reinhold Messner from South Tyrol and Peter Habeler from Austria reached the summit of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen. Doctors had argued for years that the human body could not function at eight thousand eight hundred metres on the air that is actually there, where each breath holds roughly a third of the oxygen available at sea level. The pair climbed the last stretch a few steps at a time, spent a short while on the summit, and came down.
Messner described the state near the top as an emptying of the mind, in which the effort of moving crowded out everything else. Both men had prepared for years by climbing high peaks without support, and they went up the standard route from the Nepalese side while a larger Austrian expedition, using oxygen, worked on the same mountain.
Their success was doubted, then confirmed, and it reset the sport. Two years later Messner climbed Everest again, this time alone, without oxygen and during the monsoon period, starting from the Tibetan side. He went on to become the first person to climb all fourteen peaks above eight thousand metres, again without supplementary oxygen, and to argue publicly for a style of mountaineering that carries less and takes more risk on the climber's own account.
The 1978 ascent is now the reference for what is called climbing by fair means. Only a small minority of the many who reach the summit of Everest each year do so without oxygen, and every one of them is measured against the two men who proved on that May morning that it could be done at all.