Going back? Why mountain climbers are returning to the ‘death zone’ to correct mistakes

Lights from Everest Base Camp, bottom left, cast a glow across the Khumbu Glacier as the lower flanks of Mount Everest, center, and neighboring mountain Nuptse, right, are seen under a starry sky in Nepal on Monday, April 25, 2022. | Spenser Heaps, Deseret News In 2020, a major brouhaha erupted in the mountaineering community when the foremost chronicler of high-alpine pursuits published evidence that many climbers had not reached the “true summits” of several of the world’s tallest mountains. According to the research of Eberhard Jurgalski, the founder of 8000er.

com and the Guinness World Records expert on mountaineering, what was assumed to be the very top of Manaslu, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna — three giant Himalayan mountains in Nepal — was incorrect. While some did make the true summits of those mountains, there were thousands of folks who thought they’d reached the peaks but had missed them by a matter of meters. Eberhard Jurgalski stands in the shade of a tree in L'rrach on Aug.

5, 2022. A peak is the highest point of a mountain that can be reached. But finding it was not so easy before the widespread availability of GPS devices.

Who has really been to the summits of all 14 eight-thousanders? A man from L'rrach is causing a stir in the mountaineering world because he denies that you have actually reached the summit. | Philipp von Ditfurth Within the trove of Jurgalski’s research, however, there was one particular result that was especially polarizing.