Oxygen For Success

Sun., Sept. 3, 2000

Staff

Mount Everest

The death rate for people who climbed Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen over the past 21 years is nearly triple the rate for climbers who did, a University of Washington researcher says.

Of the 1,173 people who scaled the world’s highest mountain from 1978-1999, supplemental oxygen was used by 1,077 climbers while approaching the 29,035-foot summit, said zoology professor Raymond Huey. Thirty-two (3 percent) of these climbers died before they could return to safety.

Eight (8.3 percent) of the 96 climbers who did not use supplemental oxygen perished on the way down.

On the steeper, more rugged K2, the world’s second highest mountain, none of the 47 successful climbers who used supplemental oxygen died during descent. Of the 117 who did not use bottled oxygen, 22 (18.8 percent) died after reaching the summit. Many of the deaths occurred during two violent storms in 1986 and 1995.

The report by Huey and Xavier Eguskitza, a Himalaya mountaineering historian, was published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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